In Archive and Exhibit, the Dead Live On
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/11/arts/music/11grateful.html
By LARRY ROHTER
Published: March 10, 2010
The Grateful Dead performed the last of their more than 2,300
concerts in 1995 and thus belong increasingly to history, not the
present. Two related events make that reality clear: a new exhibition
about the band that has just opened at the New-York Historical
Society and the recent creation of the much larger archive, housed at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, from which it is drawn.
"The Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New-York Historical Society,"
which continues through July 4, includes only a tiny part of the
material that the band donated to the university in 2008. But as the
first large-scale public showing of artifacts from the collection, it
offers a tantalizing glimpse of material that is stirring the
interest not just of hard-core Deadheads but also of scholars.
The items on display include instruments, letters from Deadheads,
memos from the band's business meetings, newsletters, concert
programs and T-shirt designs. There is also a rare original poster
from one of Ken Kesey's mid-1960s Acid Tests, and even the 1968
letter in which Warner Brothers Records renewed the band's recording
contract, with a paltry 8 percent royalty rate for domestic releases
(and 5 percent abroad).
Though the Grateful Dead were based in the San Francisco Bay area and
were closely identified with the psychedelic movement that emerged in
the mid-1960s there, Louise Mirrer, president of the historical
society, justified the exhibition by referring to the band's "great
New York pedigree." The Dead first played New York City in June 1967
and went on to perform here more than 150 times, including many shows
at the Fillmore East, which Ms. Mirrer called "the band's home away
from home."
The larger archive at the university, which has received a $615,000
grant from the federal government's Institute of Museum and Library
Services but is looking for additional financing, will have both a
physical and an online presence. But even before the archive is fully
mounted, the historians, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians,
musicologists and other academic researchers who make up the growing
field known as Grateful Dead Studies are eager to plunge in.
"We're ecstatic with anticipation," said Nicholas Meriwether, editor
of "All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead
Phenomenon" and a historian at the University of South Carolina.
"That archive is a remarkable window not just into Haight-Ashbury and
the dawn of the modern rock theater, but to all the documentary
evidence and heritage of the counterculture and all the issues
historians are concerned about in discussing the 1960s."
The archive was one of the subjects talked about last month when the
Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus convened in Albuquerque for its 13th
annual meeting. In a journal called Dead Letters some of the
researchers have also published essays with titles like "The Taoist
Perspective in 'Weather Report Suite,' " and "How the Music Played
the Band: Grateful Dead Improvisation and Merleau-Ponty."
"If I were starting out, I'd find the archive to be amazing as a way
to bring a fresh eye and new perspective to what happened," said
Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro who has been researching the Deadhead phenomenon for
more than two decades. "There are millions of projects people could do."
In addition business scholars and executives are starting to regard
the Dead's business model as worthy of examination. This month's
issue of The Atlantic includes an article called "Management Secrets
of the Grateful Dead," and band members have recently appeared on
cable television business channels to discuss their consensus-based
management style.
"They had a brilliant business acumen without being business people,
and may have been the most egalitarian business organization ever,"
said Barry Barnes, a Deadhead and professor at Nova Southeastern
University's school of business and entrepreneurship in Fort
Lauderdale, Fla. "They are credited with inventing viral marketing,
and with their emphasis on superior customer value and use of
technology, long before the Internet, they were in tune with a lot of
practices we see now."
Like so many other things related to the Grateful Dead, though, the
archive is largely the product of happenstance, not design. Early on,
the band hired a veteran of the Acid Tests, Eileen Law, as a liaison
to its fans, and she made a point of preserving what other musical
groups of the era would have considered ephemera.
"Eileen saved everything and was extremely methodical," said Dennis
McNally, author "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the
Grateful Dead" and the band's longtime publicist. "She began as the
ministering mother to all Deadheads, the voice on the answering
machine, but she became the keeper of stuff, and that all this
marvelous material is there is to her credit."
After Jerry Garcia, a founder of the band and its lead guitarist,
died in 1995, the group gradually wound down its business affairs, a
process that lasted well into the next decade. Fredric Lieberman,
chairman of the music department at the Santa Cruz campus, had
traveled with the band and worked with Mickey Hart, one of the band's
drummers, on some projects, including a pair of books. He was aware
of the extent of the material Ms. Law had collected and thought that
scholars would find it useful if it could be preserved.
"It was taking up a lot of space in a storage area in Marin, and it
looked like they were just going to throw it away," Mr. Lieberman
said. "I basically said that I didn't care where the archive went so
long as it was maintained and not dispersed. Mickey thought first of
the Library of Congress, since he's on the board there, but given all
the other things they have to do, their budget didn't seem conducive
to the kind of cataloging that was going to be required."
Other universities besides Santa Cruz were also contacted and
expressed interest in the archive, among them Stanford. But in the
end band members decided they "wanted to go to a public institution
because the whole idea of it being public and free was important to
them," said Christine Bunting, the director of special collections
and archives at the Santa Cruz university's library.
What remains unclear, however, is to what extent, the archive will be
able to make available what is probably the band's most valuable
asset: its own recordings of three decades of live shows.
"We're not going to be doing anything that people haven't heard
anywhere else," Ms. Bunting said. "That doesn't mean people can't
come here and listen, because we will have music playing. But we're
not competing with their business."
The university is now engaged, though, in digitizing much of the
other material, including documents and photographs. The plan is to
make as much as possible available online through what is being
called Virtual Terrapin Station, a name taken from a 1977 album,
where Deadheads past and future not only can come to look but also
can donate items and ideas of their own.
"I always knew what this was worth the artwork, the guest lists and
all the other things the crew brought back from the road," Ms. Law
said in a telephone interview. "It was just something that came
naturally to me. People in the office would say, 'We don't need this
stuff, get rid of it,' and instead I would hide it all. So I'm just
so happy that it has found a home, the right home."
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