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.

Slide 20: Everett 1

Slide 21: Everett 2

This often breath-taking fan art also makes for a wonderful connection with that original Haight-Ashbury

fascination with lost or hidden wisdom, for nothing else could so clearly give the lie to the mainstream

dismissal of Deadheads as illiterate, undisciplined hippies - - well, that and perhaps Nobel laureate Owen

Chamberlain’s comment that he liked to sit on stage between the Dead’s drummers because it gave him

“interesting ideas.”

Slide 22: stage shot of drummers

Clearly, it is a complex archive; mammoth, labyrinthine, complicated by its high profile and its roots in

the Haight-Ashbury; and its complexity extends further, into ongoing commitments to the band’s record

label and the surviving musicians.

Slide 22: Phil

Nor is it complete: we are targeting dozens of ancillary collections to flesh out sections and themes; part

of that effort requires rethinking traditional collection development and processing, putting our work in

the forefront of the latest thinking in archival theory and practice; indeed, we’re pushing the envelope in

each of these arenas—as is appropriate; the Dead’s celebrated commitment to innovation is now imbued

in their Archive as well.

The Archive is much more than those broad divisions and the wealth of materials they

encompass, however. One of its central strengths is the degree to which those materials, and the rich

variety of media formats they illustrate, all outline the labyrinthine interconnections between the band and

the broader contexts they illuminate, including the counterculture, the sixties, the music industry, sound

technology and engineering, and so many others. The density and complexity of those interconnections

reflects the extraordinary creative ferment that characterized the place and time they emerged, the Bay

Area in the sixties, where the boundaries between genres and art forms and media were all up for

reconsideration, along with the rules that once cordoned off human creativity according to those

divisions. The band absorbed and reflected that restless push towards experimentation and it became a

defining aspect of their music; to archivists and researchers, what is remarkable is how that quality is

reflected in the Archive as well. Indeed, you could say that the Archive as a whole represents the band’s

philosophy, played out the way one of their signature jams unfolded, a wonderful conversation between

band, fans, and colleagues, now recorded and fixed in time, frozen in the archival amber of paper and

magnetic tape and a dozen other media.

* * *

So what does all this have to do with risk management and security? It’s more than just factoring Special

Collections into your thinking about disaster planning: it’s about the way that the idea of public

perception underlies that mission and that of the Archive itself - - not as propaganda or spin, but as

merely the ancient human desire to have our side heard; that instinct is what impels us to keep archives,

and it is also what makes that practice a thoughtful one; when we realize that archives are accountability,

then there is the flip side: for they are also posterity.

It means that the records we keep reflect who we are; how sensitive we are to the culturally evanescent,

how ethical an interpreter we are of marginalized, unfairly stigmatized subcultures - - [click slide] who

knew themselves to be a valid and vital part of the culture and heritage they were wrongly accused of

despising.

Slide 23: Jerry and flag

The equivalent charge for archivists is building collections that are truly representative, portraying all

sides, but most especially those who most need a hearing: giving voice to the voiceless, documenting the

undocumented;

Or curating the controversial. And that is the risk to manage: to ensure that our commitment to fairness,

democracy, and truth -- despite appearances, despite public perception, despite bad PR - - is not only

what guides us, but what the public sees.

That, ultimately, is what we can control. It is naïve to imagine that the Dead Archive - - or any archive - -

can control bad PR or offset a stigma. But as one historian pointed out recently:

“What happened in San Francisco, and throughout much of youth culture in that time [the

1960s], is still with us, whether we like it or not ... [it] formed the central dynamic of a

war of values that became the story of America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. …. The

resonance of that disruption still informs almost every major political dispute and cultural

rupture of our times. In one way or another, the arguments of San Francisco in 1967 will

never end.” (Gilmore 103)

That is why what we do by preserving this Archive is so important—and why our custody of it is

an expression of not just our founding values as a University, but our sustaining virtues today.

And it is especially appropriate for this collection: though the Dead have never fully escaped the

stigma surrounding their genesis, their archives document the cooperation, commitment, and

tradition that informed and defined the Dead phenomenon, and we should be proud that our

stewardship of those Archives here is an extension and expression of those ideals as well.

I began this talk by focusing on negativity: the disasters of Alexandria and Baghdad. But as the

Dead’s art made clear, dark and light are inextricably intertwined, and instead of focusing on

avoiding disaster, we can instead note the positive: the fact that at heart, our mission is not just

shared, it is the same: to preserve our past so that we may understand it, so that our children may

understand; so that the future is not divorced from the past, adrift without the anchor that

provides continuity, perspective, and ultimately meaning.

It means that security is not just a barrier, a fence surrounding but at some remove from the

structures it seeks to protect; security is not the walls of a fortress, nor even the fortress itself,

looming above its catacombs of treasure; no, security is an inextricable part of, and expression

of, the ideals and values that drive us to collect and preserve and bequeath the past to the future.

All of those activities reveal something about ourselves: what we hold dear; what we agree is

important. That agreement, that cooperation, goes to the heart of why the Dead phenomenon

happened, and why it remains meaningful today; it is why it endures, and why this archive and

this institution’s commitment to it are so important.

Most of all, these behaviors, these obligations and our response to them, demonstrate the

universality of the ideals that tie together an Archive that to some represents a rejection of

mainstream mores—of even the notion of cultural heritage—with that bastion of cultural

heritage, a modern university archive; an act that is in itself an expression of our commitment to

open-minded inquiry, to being ethical readers of cultural phenomena often misunderstood,

marginalized, and stigmatized. Because we know that often, we can quickly discern a common

core of timeless values that have informed human history and the West for centuries, even

millennia; that those who have been branded outcasts are, in fact, our sisters, our brothers; and

that shared humanity is the core value of the Dead phenomenon, of cultural heritage institutions,

and of our commitment to making them secure. [last slide]

It is a perfect manifestation of the ancient ideal of honoring the dead—the past—with no thought

of immediate reward; the obligation of the living to the dead, the powerful to the powerless—that

most primal and ancient metric by which we judge societies—for what is the obligation of

maintaining the records of the past but an expression of that ancient ideal? It is why what we do

today, here, is itself an expression of the ancient folktale whose definition Jerry Garcia stumbled

across when he and his bandmates were sitting around, trying to think of band names, and he

opened a dictionary to the entry, “Grateful Dead.”