Honoring Our Dead

Honoring Our Dead:

______

The Grateful Dead Archive,
Managing Risk, and Securing
the Past in a Postmodern Present

© Nicholas Meriwether, 2011.

[Slide 1] Greeting

Thanks for having me;

It’s an honor to be here, representing Special Collections at UCSC;

Archivists spend most of our time in the company of papers and artifacts, not people, so it is a special pleasure to be able to address this group, and at a conference devoted to the theme of Security and Managing Risk.

That’s a concept that goes to the heart of an archivist’s world, but it is one that takes on new meanings today—meanings that ultimately connect us all, and our missions, in ways that challenge us professionally and intellectually, on many levels; but with them comes the opportunity to deepen our conversations and enrich and strengthen our collaborations.

This conference is focused on practicalities: managing the risks posed by very real-world problems that threaten the security of our institutions: our colleagues, patrons, collections, and facilities.

These are archival concerns as well; everything we do is predicated on security: securing the papers and artifacts of the past, so that the future can understand. The idea of risk management is and has always been central to security; but it takes on new meanings and implications today—perhaps especially when it comes to high-profile collections whose prominence derives, in part, from their historicity—which is a kind of academic shorthand for controversy, a fancy way of sidestepping the fact that these collections tend to be the punching bags for media misunderstanding, fodder in the culture wars that have roiled America since the 1960s.

As this conference suggests, managing risk and addressing security in that context is no simple task, or set of tasks: it entails embracing a broader conception of risk, gaining a deeper understanding of its complexities—its ramifications and ripples, media-magnified and spun in ways and through technologies hard to imagine even five years ago, much less a generation ago. We are social animals: how we are perceived has always been a part of what we do; but now it is part of our job descriptions.

That’s where theory and practice take on interesting shades of each other, since public perception is an arena where ideas and reality intersect in palpable and powerful ways; a place where theory is derived entirely from practice—for practice is only another term for describing the same events as they move into memory, history, and culture.

That’s a good way of getting at the heart of the message of this conference as well: a place that offers us a chance to step back from the mechanics of security and talk about some of the broader issues it raises, in the context of managing the risks associated with one high-profile collection, the Grateful Dead Archive, here at UCSC.

If that seems odd, then that is entirely in keeping with the nature of the phenomenon the Archive documents: after all, a keen if playful appreciation for serendipity and synchronicity is a major quality of the Deadhead ethos. Or, as Robert Hunter put it in one of the Dead’s signature songs, “Scarlet Begonias”:

[Slide 2]

Once in a while

You can get shown the light

In the strangest of places

If you look at it right.

Hunter’s lyrics also express the Haight-Ashbury fascination with hidden, secret, or lost knowledge, a Romantic inclination they inherited from their bohemian forebears, the Beats; it was part of a much older theme in Western intellectual history, an orientation toward the wisdom of the margins of society, freed from socially imposed strictures that cloud our vision.

Our world is dotted with monuments to that lost knowledge:

[Slide 3]

[Slide 4] Pompey’s Pillar

But the absences that leave no physical traces seem to cast even longer shadows in our cultural memories:

[Slide 5] The Library at Alexandria

All we have of the ancient Library at Alexandria are descriptions of its treasures—like Herodotus, who praised its collections as the finest repository of human knowledge in the West; that praise makes the descriptions of its destruction even more poignant.

[Slide 6] The Library at Alexandria

Losses like that become touchstones in our cultural memory. More than a thousand years later, we still find it fascinating:

[Slide 7] McCoy Book

And we are still haunted by the specters of what we have lost, and what those losses represent: our cultural inheritance, not squandered, but disappeared; vanished.

The stories that we tell of those losses are the way that we learn: they are our mistakes writ large, imbedded in our cultural memory and defining it in the same way those ruins define our landscapes: proof that our ancestors were like us; shaped by the same values, driven by the same needs.

And vulnerable to the same weaknesses. Nearly 2,000 years after Caesar’s firing of the Library at Alexandria, another military conquest resulted in a similar tragedy in Iraq:

[Slide 8] Iraqi Museum

[Slide 9] Professional thieves targeted priceless collections and artifacts.

[Slide 10]

Some pieces were destroyed as they attempted to remove them.

[Slide 11]

The human cost is more than just a stolen past, a hijacked heritage; it is also a violated present, a culture adrift, robbed of its moorings in history. [Pause]

And in terms of risk management, the PR disaster that followed represents one of the most catastrophic indictments the U.S. has ever received: our own experts and diplomats admitted our refusal to protect the Iraq museum; as a result, one scholar sadly explained, “the Americans allowed themselves to be branded as barbarians whose troops stood by while one of the world’s most important museums was stripped of thousands of artifacts dating from the dawn of civilization.”

The tragedy of the Iraq Museum shows how tightly knit security and PR and risk management are today; they are also themes that go to the heart of the Dead phenomenon, where security was a life-and-death issue with crowd control at concerts, and risk management described the tightrope-walk they made as the only band in pop music history to lose money on albums and make money on tours; and PR explains why the Dead phenomenon remains both a lightning rod for controversy and, ironically, ample fodder for academic scrutiny.

And as we process the Archive, more and more do we realize how PR is the elusive line that connects all of these dots. [Pause]

So what is the Dead archive?

[Slide 12] The Dead Archive

Many of you know of the band, but you may not be aware of their significance: their 30-year history, beginning in 1965 and continuing through the death of lead guitarist Jerry Garcia in 1995, marked a number of milestones: they are icons of the 1960s and the counterculture, having performed at Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests (the subject of Tom Wolf’s famous book), the Monterey Pop Festival, Woodstock, and even at Columbia University during the 1968 strike (they were smuggled in on a bread truck). And as a result of their longevity and tireless touring, they not only endured but steadily gained in popularity, emerging as one of the top-grossing touring bands in the world by 1995.

But what endeared the Dead to their fans - - and made them so appealing to academics - - was not just their hard work as performers, it was their relentless commitment to improvisation: in the nearly 3,000 shows they gave, they never delivered the same set twice. Nor did they play any song the same way twice. And unlike a jazz band that might select from a repertoire of a dozen or so songs, the Dead could play 106 songs - - six nights’ worth - - with no repeats.

And by rock standards, the music they played was complex: no three-chord arena anthems in the key of C, the Dead played arcane time signatures—one song was even written in 11/4 time—and wrote often demanding, difficult music: one musicologist believes that they were the only band to consistently write rock songs in the key of F; another has explained how a complex piece by Bartok shaped a late-era band staple.

Most of all, the centerpiece of every show was the band’s celebrated free-form improvisatory explorations, which invited comparisons to the most adventurous jazz and the most esoteric avant-garde classical music. The band’s ability to write music of uncompromising complexity and artistic ambition, and to bring it to a mass audience, is one of the major reasons they have attracted so much academic scrutiny.

But musicologists are not the only scholars who have studied the Dead. To date, more than 60 scholarly articles, a dozen edited volumes, five PhD dissertations, 27 MA theses, and dozens of BA theses have been written on the band and phenomenon, from the perspectives of anthropology, business theory, communications theory, economics, geography, history, literary studies, philosophy, psychology, sociology, statistics, and more.

Remarkably, all of that work has been done without access to the band’s own records. With their Archive now housed at UCSC, even more work will be possible - - and already, we have had hundreds of reference questions and dozens of requests use the Archive.

Once open, some of the materials in the Archive that will support users include:

[Slide 13] Business records

We currently have 600 linear feet of records, with more promised; these contain everything from business correspondence to backstage guest lists to record contracts to [next slide] tour itineraries:

[Slide 14] Egypt program

This tour program quietly makes the point that we are not dealing with a bunch of drugged-out incompetent hippies: it took more than a year of very careful diplomacy and high-level State Department negotiation to enable the Dead to be the first rock band to ever play the Great Pyramid - - but to scholars, the interesting example of Grateful Dead synchronicity is that the Camp David Peace Accords were signed on the last day of the shows; and to fans, what adds the special Dead magic of serendipity to the event is that the third and last show happened during a total eclipse (although no one can quite remember exactly which song ended it).

The artist responsible for this image is Stanley Mouse, one of the most famous of the San Francisco poster artists known for their work for the Dead. Mouse’s work for the Dead began in 1966, when he began creating iconic imagery for the band, like this poster:

[Slide 15] [Golden Road]

Mouse is one of more than two dozen poster artists whose work is featured in the Archive, and that art, like the music it celebrates and advertises, has also made inroads into the academy: San Francisco rock poster art was showcased in high-end art gallery exhibits as early as 1967; by 1971, it had a major museum exhibition and one art history dissertation devoted to it. Since then, many of those posters, especially those promoting the Dead, have steadily increased in value, with some images fetching more than $10,000 dollars.

[Slide 16] [Philip Garris]

The Archive received more than 400 posters in the original bequest, and we just accessioned another collection, adding more than 200 additional rare and exceptional images.

[Slide 17] Photos

Posters do not account for the majority of images in the Archive: we have even more photographs, ranging from amateurs to well-known portraitists such as Herb Greene, who began photographing the band in 1965, seen here on Haight Street.

Slide 18: Egypt

Those images document far more than just the band—they capture history itself, the interaction between moment and memory that defines culture:

Slide 19: Press

And, of course, those images also illustrate one of the Archive’s major sections, publicity and press:

The band subscribed to a clipping service shortly after they formed; for a band whose notion of stage dress was sweatpants and a black T-shirt, they monitored and managed their relationship with the media carefully.

One wonders whether their experience with PR and mass media taught them something about historicity; for they certainly accumulated a wide variety of artifacts and objects, or what archivists call Realia: everything from stage props, guitars, trophies, even their 14-foot, hand-carved conference table, which is now a part of the Archive, along with a pair of chairs.

The word Realia is comforting: it sounds solid, a reminder that the past can survive and endure -- despite libraries being burned or museums being looted. But the core of the Dead Archive - - of all archives, really - - is not reflected in realia: it is the more gossamer links between papers and words and the people who created them; it is the way they add up to document the human connection, the relationships between us, that are so fragile, so ephemeral, so evanescent. And yet, so powerful:

Slide 19: fans

For that is what truly marked the Dead as unique, as so many commentators marveled over the years: the bond between band and fan was absolute, both the envy of, and mystery to, the entire pop music industry.

Fans were considered part of a Dead show, an extension of the band; that spirit of communal co-creation made fans create diaries and journals of their show experiences:

Slide 20: Latvala entry

It turned fans into amateur archivists, sometimes even professionals: the author of this entry went on to be the Dead’s first Vault archivist, taking care of the band’s enormous recording archive.

The transition that Dick Latvala made from fan to archivist also shows how porous the line between band and fan could be - - how strong that bond was, to be able to bridge that gap. But what illustrates that even more strongly is the art that fans sent, creating an enormous body of correspondence in the Archive.