Grateful Dead

It's a tall order to take on writing up any year in Grateful Dead history, but to attempt to tell their complete story...godspeed! We called UC Santa Cruz Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas Meriwether to task for this one and the result is either the shortest book or the longest liner notes you'll find on the Dead. Here he gives us a little sneak peak at the process and a surprising discovery.

Give us a little background on how you got into the Grateful Dead and beyond that, the business of the Grateful Dead.

A college roommate (and close friend to this day) first got me interested in them by playing Skeleton and Roses (Skullf**k), and I fell in love with it. I listened to more and more Dead that year and then saw my first show in fall 1985. I walked out of that saying, "I will spend the rest of my life thinking about this" - - which is pretty much how it worked out.

What's a day in the life of an archivist?

I'm unusual among archivists in that my work is devoted to a single set of related collections, which is a rarity (and a privilege). My job is particularly unusual in that it involves significant ongoing obligations to the donor - I support the band's ongoing series of historical live releases and a host of their other projects, from Mickey Hart sending a researcher to work on the development of the Beam, for example, to the directors of the Bob Weir documentary and the band's own documentary. But what really makes it tough to answer your question is the heavy media presence that the band still has, which makes many of my days focused on outreach and administration, instead of collection development and processing, which are really the traditional archival roles I fulfill. An ideal day for me would be six hours of work on the collections and only two or three hours devoted to answering questions, handling media, addressing researchers, etc. Another huge part of my work is creating exhibits here and helping other institutions who borrow materials for their own exhibitions, like my recent work with the Field Museum in Chicago during the Fare Thee Well shows.

You've written quite a few liner notes for Grateful Dead releases and projects but probably nothing quite as large in scope as 30 Trips Around The Sun. What were your initial thoughts upon being asked to participate in the release, and how did you go about researching and writing what is essentially a book?

That was a tremendous pleasure and honor, as well as challenge. So many good books on the band's history have been published, from Dennis McNally's magisterial A Long Strange Trip to Peter Richardson's recent No Simple Highway and David Browne's So Many Roads; it's a long list, really. So figuring out a way to tell the story in the shortest book on the band's history, and do so in a way that would be sufficiently complete but still be new to well-read and knowledgeable Dead Heads - - that was the challenge. My approach was to wrap the history around the shows in the box, with nods to all of the interesting illustrations from the Archive that I had to provide. The shows that David Lemieux selected, the media accounts and supporting evidence from the Archive, and the essay all work together to tell the story.

What's something – a story or fact – that you uncovered that folks probably don't already know?

That's hard because so many good essays, stories, and accounts of the band's history have appeared, from band members' memoirs to first-rate journalism and thoughtful academic critiques. I think for me the biggest worry was how to frame the final years, which skew so heavily to negative media portrayals of the scene. What I found as I read all of that journalism and all of the letters Dead Heads sent to the band was how overwhelmingly positive the experience remained, not only for most fans but even for many journalists. It's a sobering reminder that listening to recordings can skew our perceptions of how a show could feel to a participant - - and more broadly, that even during a difficult or mediocre show, moments of magic still emerged, and for many, those moments will define their experience.That's what makes the job of historian, or archivist, both challenging and rewarding.