During this year's Days Between — from Aug. 1 to 9 — NPR Music is publishing a series of stories about what keeps drawing people to the Grateful Dead and how they plan to carry the band's legacy forward.
Inside a climate-controlled facility located in a redwood forest just a few miles from the picturesque Central California coast sits a visual history of the life and times of the Grateful Dead.
In 2008, a little over a decade after the formal, but by no means spiritual, end of the band, truckloads of archival materials were donated to the University of California, Santa Cruz Library's Special Collections. There are nearly a thousand boxes' worth of flyers, posters, written correspondence and even the original marionettes from the "Touch of Grey" video, displayed on a rotating basis in a big, yellow exhibition space known as Dead Central.
The Grateful Dead understood the importance of recording its legacy, and for six decades fans and other musicians have worked to carry that legacy forward, pushing it into new directions. But along the way, there have been a number of archivists, historians and members of the band's sound crew dedicated to recording and maintaining the band's immense collection of music and memorabilia for generations to come. In revisiting the band's history, you can see the group's collectivist spirit take shape.
As befitting perhaps the most famous residents of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, the Dead's visuals reflect the countercultural communication practices and psychedelic visuals of that time and neighborhood. From the skull with a lightning bolt through the middle, known as a Stealie, to the happy little dancing bears, the visuals — on T-shirts, hats, stickers and even tattoos — have become a sort of secret handshake among fans. If you know, you know.
"They're really the kind of originators of the psychedelic art movement, as we understand it, at least in the context of the States," says Sam Regal, the instruction and exhibitions librarian in Special Collections and Archives at UC Santa Cruz.
But the archive also reflects how the band built its community and fanbase from the beginning in innovative ways. In 1972, the Grateful Dead started a newsletter that would launch a deeply loyal fan club — the first edition, pulled from the archive, reads: "Deadheads Unite." (It also advises readers to "take care, have fun and stay high.") That fan club would eventually develop into ticketing hotlines: a 24-hour service, on both the East Coast and the West Coast, where fans could order concert tickets directly from the band.
The Grateful Dead put an enormous amount of effort into preserving this history, so much so that it's now a special collection at a research university. But in line with Deadheadism's welcoming approach, anyone can browse the collection.
"Collections are meant to be used and accessed," Regal says. "We make them accessible to researchers but also to just casual fans. Anyone who might have interest can just stop by any time, no appointment."
That same idea of accessibility, that a historical collection as precious as the Grateful Dead's should be available to the general public, also defines the band's approach to its music archive. Just as the Grateful Dead was collecting and preserving the physical ephemera of the band's legacy, the members were doing the same with their live performances.
In another climate-controlled warehouse storage facility in Southern California sits "The Vault," as it's known among Deadheads. It contains all the master recordings of the band's 13 studio albums, nine live albums released on vinyl, some unreleased studio tracks and, perhaps most importantly, 2,318 live recordings, from across every stage of the band's career. At the direction of engineer Owsley "Bear" Stanley, the band started recording shows in 1966, partly as a way for Stanley to hear his mixing and offer feedback on the group's performances.
Those recordings are important, because the Grateful Dead functioned like a group of jazz musicians with the energy and spirit of a rock-and-roll band. At live shows, there were no set lists, and no two shows were ever alike. The band members listened to each other intently at every moment onstage, and members would choose songs based on their interpretation of the vibe of a room or an audience — what did they feel like they wanted to hear?
The songs — the "critters" as Bob Weir once called them — have the collective nature of campfire songs. They have sprawling, character-driven meditations on things like the source of inspiration, the danger of false prophets and unabashed celebrations of living in the moment, set to sing-along melodies that are impossible to forget. It's the magic of that music that kept Deadheads going to shows, and the ethos of improvisation is still flowing to several generations of new fans through the band's massive, frequently released archive of live recordings.
The person charged with managing those recordings is an archivist and "legacy manager" named David Lemieux. "I'm very aware of how fortunate I am. And I don't take it for granted, ever," he says.
After working at the National Archives of Canada and the British Columbia Archives in his native Canada, Lemieux was tapped in early 1999 to help catalog the band's large audio and visual archive under the direction of the band's first official archivist, Dick Latvala.
It was Latvala, a fan of the band since the late 1960s, who put some order to an unwieldy collection of unlabeled boxes of reel-to-reel tapes. In 1993, he began releasing a series of commercially available archive recordings called, appropriately, Dick's Picks, later revived by Lemieux as Dave's Picks.
Latvala could decipher the disorganization because he was a taper: a fan who hauled high-quality recording gear from show to show to record from a special spot next to the band's front-of-house soundboard and who then traded tapes among Deadheads. Starting in 1984, the band famously encouraged the taping as a form of guerrilla marketing to attract new fans to its shows and to foster the band's appreciation of the audience as a crucial part of its existence.
But the archive that Lemieux took over after Latvala's unexpected death in 1999 didn't contain noisy audience tapes. Instead, these tapes were meticulously multitracked recordings by Grateful Dead sound engineers.
"I was always interested in the sound being more like it really sounded as opposed to a lot of sound reinforcement that was happening at the time," says Betty Cantor-Jackson, a sound engineer who traveled with the Grateful Dead from 1968 to 1981, recording hundreds of shows that became known within the Grateful Dead taper community as Betty Boards. A Bay Area resident since birth, she was drawn into the Dead world in the mid-1960s after an adolescence being intrigued by all things electronic.
Cantor-Jackson says she was trying to capture a form of musical magic that Deadheads experienced at the shows, as opposed to just the actual sound coming from the PA speakers. She took direct feeds from all the instruments onstage as well as the mics, not just recording them but doing a live mix that was distinct from what was playing from the speakers or the band's monitor mix.
"I never thought about it for [commercial] release for later or anything," she says. "It was just because it was great music and I liked doing it. It was my fun thing. It's my art form."
That art form was eventually recognized by the Library of Congress in 2013, when her Betty Board recording of the iconic 5/8/77 Cornell Barton Hall show was added to the library's National Recording Registry.
The business model that eventually changed the Grateful Dead from a living-in-the-same-house musical collective to a multimillion-dollar enterprise was not carefully calculated and planned over the years. Crucial business decisions were often based on a spirit of hippie collectivism rather than on a motivation for profit.
The infrastructure needed to run a one-of-a-kind archive like The Vault has been supplied by reissue specialist Rhino Entertainment, a division of Warner Music Group. Initially, Rhino worked with the band to produce two box sets — The Golden Road (1965-1973), released in 2001, and Beyond Description (1973-1989), released in 2004 — as a "two and done" deal. Those were so successful that the band signed a deal for Rhino to be the exclusive caretaker and curator of the archive.
"The Grateful Dead are unique in a thousand ways," says Mark Pinkus, the president of Rhino and a longtime Deadhead. "But one of the most unique ways about it is that there is this Vault. They played [over] 2,300 shows, and there are millions of fans that would love to hear all 2,300 of those shows. So it's unique to have different shows and to have these tapes and then to really be thoughtful of how you present that."
That thoughtful presentation is most evident in over 20 years' worth of elaborate multidisc box sets often focused on specific tours, venues or eras that reflect a collector's stylized obsession.
From the beginning, the vision was not to trickle out a few live performances at a time, as other bands with large archives might. Pinkus met up with Lemieux shortly after meeting with the band and says he had one question for the then newly minted "legacy manager." "Is there anything that you wanted to do that you haven't done yet?" Pinkus remembers asking. "And he goes, 'Yeah, I want to do a complete Europe '72.'"
To understand the magnitude of Lemieux's vision, you have to know about that tour. The 22-date trek across Europe between April 7 and May 26, 1972, is legendary in Grateful Dead lore. Traveling with an extended crew and various family members, the band performed a series of shows during what many Deadheads consider one of the band's creative high points. The band's musical identity was crystalized on that tour, scraped together from fragments of American musical traditions like blues, acoustic folk music, bluegrass and jazz, and cultural icons like Merle Haggard and Chuck Berry — something the band would build on for another two decades.
Europe '72 was released near the end of that year as a 17-track, three-LP collection, and it immediately became a must-have for fans. But the 2011 version that Lemieux produced included every single show performed on that tour. Considering the band's reputation for performances that lasted up to three hours at a time, the suggestion was technically daunting and an expensive undertaking that caused more than a little consternation for the Rhino higher-ups.
"I remember going back to my boss … and being like, 'We've got to do this.' He goes, 'Are people going to buy it?'" says Pinkus. "We sold it out in four days."
Since then, Rhino has been issuing an elaborate, limited-edition concert box set once a year.
Bob Weir spoke often of a 300-year legacy for the band's music. He referred to what he called a "hippie metaphysical" framework that could possibly span time and space and keep people playing and experiencing the music for centuries to come. For those of us trapped in the here and now, the Vault recordings and the UC Santa Cruz collection make that vision a possibility, for the fans, the scholars and the casually curious.
This story includes reporting by Isabella Gomez Sarmiento.
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