{"id":919,"date":"2010-03-14T21:30:24","date_gmt":"2010-03-15T04:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.burningoak.com\/?p=919"},"modified":"2015-08-20T22:37:03","modified_gmt":"2015-08-21T05:37:03","slug":"grateful-dead-at-the-new-york-historical-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/grateful-dead-at-the-new-york-historical-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Grateful Dead at The New York Historical Society"},"content":{"rendered":"

“The Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New York Historical Society” is being presented between now and July 4th in NYC.\u00a0 If you have the chance to visit be sure to check it out, it looks fascinating.\u00a0 From the New York Times<\/a>, by Larry Rohter:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New-York Historical Society,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The items on display include instruments, letters from Deadheads, memos from the band\u2019s business meetings, newsletters, concert programs and T-shirt designs. There is also a rare original poster from one of Ken Kesey\u2019s mid-1960s Acid Tests, and even the 1968 letter in which Warner Brothers Records renewed the band\u2019s recording contract, with a paltry 8 percent royalty rate for domestic releases (and 5 percent abroad).<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cgreat New York pedigree.\u201d 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 \u201cthe band\u2019s home away from home.\u201d<\/p>\n

The larger archive at the university, which has received a $615,000 grant from the federal government\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re ecstatic with anticipation,\u201d said Nicholas Meriwether, editor of \u201cAll Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead Phenomenon<\/a>\u201d and a historian at the University of South Carolina. \u201cThat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThe Taoist Perspective in \u2018Weather Report Suite,\u2019\u00a0\u201d and \u201cHow the Music Played the Band: Grateful Dead Improvisation and Merleau-Ponty.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I were starting out, I\u2019d find the archive to be amazing as a way to bring a fresh eye and new perspective to what happened,\u201d 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. \u201cThere are millions of projects people could do.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition business scholars and executives are starting to regard the Dead\u2019s business model as worthy of examination. This month\u2019s issue of The Atlantic includes an article called \u201cManagement Secrets of the Grateful Dead<\/a>,\u201d and band members have recently appeared on cable television business channels to discuss their consensus-based management style.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey had a brilliant business acumen without being business people, and may have been the most egalitarian business organization ever,\u201d said Barry Barnes, a Deadhead and professor at Nova Southeastern University\u2019s school of business and entrepreneurship in Fort Lauderdale, FL. \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cEileen saved everything and was extremely methodical,\u201d said Dennis McNally, author \u201cA Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead<\/a>\u201d and the band\u2019s longtime publicist. \u201cShe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u2014 if it could be preserved.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt 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,\u201d Mr. Lieberman said. \u201cI basically said that I didn\u2019t care where the archive went so long as it was maintained and not dispersed. Mickey thought first of the Library of Congress, since he\u2019s on the board there, but given all the other things they have to do, their budget didn\u2019t seem conducive to the kind of cataloging that was going to be required.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cwanted to go to a public institution because the whole idea of it being public and free was important to them,\u201d said Christine Bunting, the director of special collections and archives at the Santa Cruz university\u2019s library.<\/p>\n

What remains unclear, however, is to what extent, the archive will be able to make available what is probably the band\u2019s most valuable asset: its own recordings of three decades of live shows.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to be doing anything that people haven\u2019t heard anywhere else,\u201d Ms. Bunting said. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t mean people can\u2019t come here and listen, because we will have music playing. But we\u2019re not competing with their business.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always knew what this was worth \u2014 the artwork, the guest lists and all the other things the crew brought back from the road,\u201d Ms. Law said in a telephone interview. \u201cIt was just something that came naturally to me. People in the office would say, \u2018We don\u2019t need this stuff, get rid of it,\u2019 and instead I would hide it all. So I\u2019m just so happy that it has found a home, the right home.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“The Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New York Historical Society” is being presented between now and July 4th in NYC.\u00a0 If you have the chance to visit be sure to check it out, it looks fascinating.\u00a0 From the New York Times, by Larry Rohter: The Grateful Dead performed the last of their more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kanejamison.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}