Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 4, Bonus 2
INSIDE THE VAULT
Archival interviews:
- Owsley Stanley, by David Gans, Conversations With the Dead, 1/13/91.
- Dick Latvala, by George Jodaitis, “Grateful Radio,” WCUW, 3/20/99.
JESSE: In November 1965, the band formerly known as the Warlocks, then calling themselves the Emergency Crew, recorded a demo for Autumn Records, now on Birth of the Dead, their first known recording.
AUDIO: “Can’t Come Down” [Birth of the Dead] (0:26-0:39) - [YouTube]
JESSE: A few weeks later, the Emergency Crew became the Grateful Dead. And the first circulating live Dead tape was made by the Merry Pranksters at the Fillmore Acid Test in January 1966.
KEN BABBS [1/8/66]: Now just reach down, everybody —
PIGPEN [1/8/66]: Hey man, stop your babbling and fix these microphones! We need some power, power! Power!
JESSE: But the very first Grateful Dead tapes were made soon after that by LSD chemist and budding sound engineer Owsley Stanley with a lot of help from assistant Tim Scully. We’ve done episodes this year on both those topics. By the late spring of 1966, after the band’s sojourn in LA, it could be said that the Grateful Dead tape archive existed, an accumulation of reels carted back to the Bay Area by Owsley and Tim with the LSD lab supplies. This is Owsley’s son, Starfinder Stanley, from our first bonus Bear Drop last summer.
STARFINDER STANLEY: When he started doing the recordings of the band, his Sonic Journals, it was his own project. The band didn’t say, “Hey, you should tape us” — it was his thing. He bought the tape. Sometimes he didn’t have tape, so he would tape over other stuff. Sometimes he didn't have tape, so some shows weren't recorded. Sometimes he had to choose between: do I spend the money buying tape, or do I spend the money buying food? Sometimes you bought tape. [laughs]
AUDIO: “Standing on the Corner” [Rare Cuts & Oddities, 1966] (0:16-0:39) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was Jerry Garcia singing the early Dead original “Standing on the Corner,” from Rare Cuts & Oddities, one of the places where Bear’s first recordings can be heard. The story of the Grateful Dead’s tapes is also the story of the Grateful Dead, or at least another lens for it. The accidental result of the work tapes Bear began to make in 1966 is one of the most fascinating archives in the history of popular music — an accident in some ways, each recording a documentation of an ever-flowing set of circumstances. Or perhaps, to use Owsley’s favorite imagery — a byproduct of an alchemical process. While the Dead’s live recordings are famous for their jams, that’s only one part of the flow they capture. It’s possible to hear the Dead morph tape by tape from Bear’s earliest recordings through the band’s final shows in 1995, to witness new songs arrive and old ones disappear, to observe evolving arrangements, and experience the sound of the band changing over three decades as they improved their instruments, amplifiers, PA systems, and recording gear. The band had many different official recordists over the years. Here to guide us through the tapes and their engineers is Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Bear’s recording was very unique. The earliest stuff, ‘66, is definitely very keyboard heavy, it's very Pigpen-centric on the sound. Weir’s guitar isn't heard that well in the mix. But it's a very clean sound — I love the sound of those early ‘66 tapes. He was big on vocals on one side and instruments on the other. Very big in Bear’s world, Beatles-esque as he said. He didn’t like that stuff being messed with either, in mastering. He was very distinct with making sure it was that way for a reason. So as much as the mastering engineers might have been interested in maybe blending the two sides, to make it a little more of a pleasant listening experience, Bear was pretty definite on how he wanted these things to sound. He did the early ‘66 stuff, from February [and] March through July ‘66. There's quite a bit of that in the Vault. Then he kind of did his other things.
AUDIO: “Empty Heart” [Rare Cuts & Oddities, 1966] (1:06-1:32) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was “Empty Heart,” recorded at an unknown location sometime during the band’s LA trip in February and March 1966 — one of the tapes Owsley made to help both himself and the Dead get better at their jobs. Preserving the music for posterity was secondary, or perhaps even tertiary. The tapes also served another important purpose for Owsley in regards to those other things. Here to tell us about it is Rhoney Stanley. Welcome back to the Deadcast, Rhoney.
RHONEY STANLEY: Making LSD for Bear was really serious, a strong ritual. It wasn't just something he did lightly; he looked at the date and he looked at the astrological sign, the moon aspects and the planet aspects. And he selected the music that we listen to very carefully. Making LSD was a sacrament, and what music you played while you were doing the procedure was important. I think that's significant. To help the LSD get the right vibe when he was manufacturing it, synthesizing it. When he synthesized the LSD, playing Grateful Dead music infused the LSD with more meaning, for sure. The Grateful Dead, Bear felt, were part of the equation — the alchemical equation of turning lead into gold.
JESSE: The Dead weren’t the only band on the lab soundtrack.
RHONEY STANLEY: In our lab, we had some scientific equipment that made lots of noise and was unpleasant: compressors, loud pounding. There was a band at the time called Blue Cheer, and they played very loud music. They made a special tape for Bear to play while he was in the lab making LSD that was even louder than their usual music. When we had to use the compressors that made this pounding noise, we would put on that Blue Cheer tape.
AUDIO: “Summertime Blues” [Blue Cheer, Vincebus Eruptum] (1:43-2:13) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was Blue Cheer’s hit version of “Summertime Blues,” probably not what they were jamming in the lab, but you can get some idea. You can read more about Rhoney’s adventures in her memoir, Owsley and Me: My LSD Family. After Owsley moved back to his day job making LSD in mid-1966, live recording went by the wayside. There’s a lot missing from the historical record in these years.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Nobody was recording in ‘67, which is too bad. I'd like to have a better feel of what ‘67 and the development of ‘67 [were like]. There's a few pieces — very little in the Vault, but there are a few pieces. And I would like to hear that development right up until Mickey joined and then beyond that. We do have a few pieces: we've got some October ‘67, and then of course November at the Shrine.
AUDIO: “Viola Lee Blues” [30 Trips Around The Sun, 11/10/67] (10:59-11:29) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the Dead playing a classic “Viola Lee Blues” at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, November 10th, 1967, released on the 30 Trips Around The Sun box set and as a standalone show. The engineer was Dan Healy, who would help the Dead capture the live tapes that fed into Anthem of the Sun throughout early 1968. Healy acted as front of house engineer in this era, too, often serving double duty with Quicksilver Messenger Service, the band he would primarily work for from 1968 to 1972, when he returned to work with the Dead until the ‘90s. Besides friends like Dan Healy, shows were also captured by engineers at venues including the Fillmores East and West, the Matrix, and the Avalon Ballroom. It wasn’t until Owsley Stanley returned to duty with the Dead in late 1968 that a band engineer began to capture nearly every night.
DAVID LEMIEUX: When he came back late ‘68, really early ‘69 through really mid ‘70, when he went away, that's kind of the second distinct era of Bear recordings. A very different sound: I find them very pure. The drums sound great — they’re stereo drums. The two guitars, the bass sounds incredible. TC [Tom Constanten] and, later, Pigpen on the organ sounds exactly where it should be in the mix. And the vocal blends… I'm always amazed with how good those recordings are. Now remember, Bear was not only doing front of house sound; he was also mixing for tape at the same time. First priority was always the crowd mixing board. But he did put a lot of effort into those live recordings, and it shows. I feel that, when you put a Bear tape on—and I think this will be a running theme of all of the Dead’s recordists—you know who you're listening to.
JESSE: This is a little bit of “St. Stephen” from Dick’s Picks 26, recorded April 27, 1969 at the Labor Temple in Minneapolis. Check out the beautiful stereo spread on the drums.
AUDIO: “St. Stephen” [Dick’s Picks 26, 4/27/69] (1:26-1:38) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Bear’s recordings, although they were separately mixed for tape, they weren't simply a PA recording — they very much reflected the live sound. When we'd be mastering something with Bear’s collaboration in the early 2000s, Bear would be insistent on no EQ, no tweaking of anything, no compression, because his recordings were perfect. Jeffrey [Norman]’s job is to make recordings sound better, and Jeffrey would say privately, “You know what, Bear’s right. These things sound great. There’s not really much to improve on.”
JESSE: These were Sonic Journals, intended by their maker to listen back and improve. Here’s Owsley Stanley himself talking about his taping practices, from David Gans’s essential interview collection Conversations with the Dead, available through David’s online bookstore. Incredible next-level thanks to David for this audio.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: After every show, we gathered in the hotel and played back the night’s gig. That's why I was recording all the time. That’s how Bear’s Choice got made — it got made because we were always taping. There was always a tape. If it wasn’t a reel to reel, it was a cassette. There was alway a tape being made: something to be played back, something that could be listened to. That was how I was learning — they would tell me when the balance was right, when the balance was wrong, when this didn’t sound right, when that didn’t sound right. They were critiquing their own performances, so forth and so on. They would find a weakness and we’d try to correct it. On and on and on and on. They taught me, I taught them, they taught themselves. We all learned. It was a learning matrix in which everything was a constant flow of ideas, and so forth. And there was no isolation — everybody was involved.
JESSE: The government forced Bear into retirement from LSD production in late 1967. His Sonic Journals were very much his personal tape collection, spinning down cassettes from his master reels.
RHONEY STANLEY: There was always music going in Bear’s house. Always. And he has the best sound systems too. That house [in Berkeley] had fabulous acoustics, because it had high ceilings with wooden beams and stained glass windows. We put up a lot of tapestries and Bear always had a lot of Oriental rugs. Persian rugs. There was hardly any furniture. There was a huge fireplace, and only one couch. The rest were Oriental rugs on the floor and everywhere else was hi-fi equipment, big speakers. He had cabinets for storing CDs, cassettes and vinyl. We had a huge collection of vinyl, because I was a compulsive buyer too. And so we played Grateful Dead from all the tapes he recorded.
JESSE: After Bear returned to the Dead’s employ, the Dead archive got its first semi-permanent home outside Bear’s living room, when the band established a rehearsal hall at the Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato. It was there that Owsley established a tech workshop that became known as Alembic. Probably sometime around then, the tapes migrated into the accumulation of Dead gear. For the first time, the Dead possessed their own tape vault.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The tapes ended up being stored at the Alembic facilities. That became the first Grateful Dead vault where anybody who had tapes—which was most of the crew and band—brought them back in and brought them in, so there'd be one central repository. When they’d come back from tour, and they had a box of tapes from that tour, the shows [would] go to this Alembic facility. It wasn't huge, there wasn't a lot.
JESSE: It was during this period—from the beginning of 1969 through mid-1970, when Bear went to prison—that he began to develop the ideas that evolved into the Wall of Sound. And it all grew from the Sonic Journals that made the core of the Dead archive. Bear’s recordings were both research and development, a seed that sprouted into the Wall of Sound.
OWSLEY STANLEY [1/13/91]: My idea about the sound man is that he has to become transparent. He should make himself so transparent as [to] not be there. My way of doing that was constantly playing the tapes back and making the tapes as exactly like the house [as I could]. I’d listen to the house, listen to the tape; listen to the house, adjust; listen to the tape, listen to the house, and get the earphone sound just like the house. Walk around the house, walk all over and walk up on stage, make the sound in the headphones like what I experienced, as close as possible to what I was experiencing in the hall. So you’d play the tape back to the band, and they would tell you whether you’re right or not, whether — that’s what they would do.
So then an extension of that is having such a way that the band is standing in front of — it was [a] constant idea that was thrown around before I've disappeared, which was: why not make it so the musicians have control of everything?
So I’d become as transparent as possible. Bear’s Choice is an example of the tapes where I was trying to make myself as transparent as possible.
AUDIO: “Hard to Handle” [Bear’s Choice, 2/14/70] (0:00-0:24) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Released in 1973, History of the Grateful Dead, Volume 1 (Bear’s Choice) represented the first fully official Grateful Dead vault recording, originally recorded with no intent for official release. That year, the band also rented out the Front Street warehouse in San Rafael that became the band’s Club Front rehearsal hall. It became the home of the tapes for the next 20 years.
DAVID LEMIEUX: When the Grateful Dead took over and rented the club front space, in San Rafael, California, that's when it was decided to have a proper, formal tape vault — a somewhat secure facility. It wasn't secure in the sense that it had a lock with only one key; anybody in the band or crew could go and take tapes out, just to go home and listen to them and whatever. It was very loose.
JESSE: By then, it wasn’t just Bear’s tapes in the Vault. After Bear went to prison in 1970, it took a little bit of time for the band to reinstitute in-house taping. But by the end of the year, they’d gotten back on their game.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The [El Monte] Legion Stadium shows at the end of December [1970], that's when the Dead started taping again. I don't know if that was Bob Matthews, I think it was. They sound okay. They don't sound like Betty recordings, so I think Bob Matthews was recording those end of December shows. They did a three-night run in LA and El Monte.
JESSE: The recording team of Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor had taken the production lead on Aoxomoxoa, Live/Dead, and Workingman’s Dead. In early 1971, they would record the live album Skull and Roses to multi-track, which we covered extensively on the last season of the Deadcast. But the band also started to make 2-track tapes every night as well, the duty of roadie Rex Jackson.
DAVID LEMIEUX: They're very distinctly what the Grateful Dead tapes would sound like throughout 1971 into ‘72. And those are Betty’s and Rex's. I think credit on the tape boxes would be Rex, but I do think Betty was the one with so much experience, with Live/Dead and Workingman’s Dead. Her recording expertise was magnificent, but one of Rex’s new jobs on the crew in January ‘71 and onward was recording. I’ve always looked at them as Rex and Betty recordings. That goes really through all of 1971. By the fall tour though, it’s only Rex doing the recordings: all of that early Keith stuff in October and November, I don’t even know if Betty was on the road then. Those were Rex recordings with… I don’t want to say Betty’s training, I wasn’t there and don’t know how it went down. But certainly, her sonic fingerprints are on those recordings.
AUDIO: “Sugaree” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (0:23-0:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s “Sugaree” from the Fox Theatre, December 10th, 1971, from the new Listen To The River box set.
DAVID LEMIEUX: They're very clean recordings — there's not a lot of there's not a lot of EQ, there's not a lot of reverb on them. Whereas I find Betty's recordings, if I listened to, say, May ‘77, to go ahead a few years, those have a fair amount of reverb on them. They're very wet recordings. I love that sound. I find Rex’s to be a little drier, which is great; I love the sound, I love the clarity. I love the recorded tone of Phil's bass.
AUDIO: “Sugaree” [Listen To The River, 12/10/71] (0:44-1:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: The tapes that sound the most easily identifiable as her recordings are Betty's recordings of the live shows. I'm talking about the 2-track recordings. She would get a full array of inputs from each instrument and vocal and she would do a mix, live, at the show. She didn't have the benefit of being in a studio, where you can tweak everything and get it perfect. She was doing a mix, live at the show, that was specifically for listening back purposes.
JESSE: Betty was one of roughly a half-dozen crew members to make 2-track recordings over the course of the ‘70s. When Owsley returned from prison in the summer of 1972, he began another period of recording with the Dead.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The third period when Bear came back in the summer of ‘72, his front-of-house position had been given to others. Healy was working it, and Bob Matthews had a huge role in the sound. So Bear went back to recording as his only duty, really. Meanwhile, he was also developing the Wall of Sound as ‘73 wore on. But really, late July of ‘72 through the whole fall of ‘72, all those great Bear recordings, they're very consistent. They all sound the same, in a very good way. You don't think, oh, that’s an outdoor show, that’s a Philly Spectrum show, and this is a small theater. He had a consistency going of how they sound[ed].
JESSE: This is what a version of “Sugaree” recorded by Bear sounds like, from October 17th, 1972 at the Fox Theatre in St. Louis, on the new Listen To The River box set.
AUDIO: “Sugaree” [Listen To The River, 10/17/72] (1:50-2:14) - [dead.net]
DAVID LEMIEUX: He recorded right into mid-’73, and then that's when his activities were really focused on developing the Wall of Sound. And that's when Kidd [Candelario] really took over. Kidd had a whole ‘nother sound — Kidd did a lot of recordings on the ‘73 the fall tour, that's all Kidd recording stuff. Kidd’s, again, are very dry tapes. His balance I think is really wonderful.
AUDIO: “Sugaree” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] (2:24-2:54)
JESSE: That was “Sugaree” from the Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings box set, recorded November 11th.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I'll tell you an interesting, cool story. I was fascinated when I saw this, but there's some outtakes, 16-millimeter footage from The Grateful Dead Movie, October ‘74. Now remember, the band hadn't played together since September 21st; presumably, they came back on the 22nd from Paris, after the Europe ‘74 tour. As much as I'd like to think these guys were hanging out together, this wasn't the Haight anymore. They lived their own lives. So when they weren't on tour, they weren't hanging out every day together. So when they’d get together, what I saw in The Grateful Dead Movie, on the first night, the October 16th show, there's a lot of backstage footage. And these guys are all seeing each other for the first time in three weeks. And they're saying, “Hey, how's it going? How’ve you been? What have you been up to?” And so, there was this one moment where Billy, maybe Jerry, or the other guys came in, and they were talking about the Europe tour and they thought there were some great moments and “we're gonna really do well here at the Winterland shows.” Then Billy started talking about Kidd’s recordings from Europe ‘74, and he raved about them. Every time somebody came in, whether it was Phil or Bobby or whoever, he’d say, “Hey, man, have you heard Kidd’s recordings from Europe? Man, these are… they’re crackling, they’re so good. You got to hear these recordings.” So hearing a band member refer to these, and be just so excited—just like we are, we're Dead Heads— and like we hear the Kidd recordings. They sound incredible. The Europe tour, I find it to be very—and this is not a pejorative term— dry, but that allows me to hear everything a little more clearly. As opposed to a wetter mix, where everything blends together better. It might be a better listening experience, but as a Dead Head, I'm trying to pick things out. Hearing Bob and Keith in separate channels but doing similar things — hearing it like that, I really like it.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [30 Trips Around The Sun, 9/18/74] (2:53-3:23)
JESSE: That was “Eyes of the World,” recorded September 18th, 1974 in Dijon, released on the 30 Trips Around The Sun box. It was during this period that the Dead established their own label, Grateful Dead Records, and Jerry Garcia co-owned the adjacent Round Records for the band’s friends and spinoffs. There was talk, too, of a sub-imprint called Ground Records, to release archival 2-track recordings. Steve Brown was dispatched to catalog the band’s tapes, but the project never got any further than a first index of the Vault. It was an idea that would take another decade-and-a-half to come to fruition. And the Vault continued to grow with every tour. While the Dead took their time recording studio albums in the later ‘70s and ‘80s and, you know, into the ‘90s, there were also months when they recorded new albums virtually every night — though it’s taken a few decades to get them all out. It was in these years after the band’s 1975 touring hiatus that Betty Cantor Jackson recorded the majority of what are now known as the Betty Boards.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Her recordings truly sound like big bonafide studio-mixed live recordings — I mean, I can't get enough of them. I think she's a magnificent recording engineer, and the testament is how consistent the many, many shows she recorded sound, how great they really do sound. Betty started with the comeback shows in Portland. [She] started recording again right through the summer, the June shows of ‘76 at the Orpheum and the two on the East Coast.
JESSE: In the fall, Betty’s husband—tour manager Rex Jackson—was killed in a tragic car accident and Betty took a road sabbatical. In 1977 though, she was back.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Starting immediately on February 26th, of 1977, right through the end of ‘77, the New Year’s run, she recorded everything with one exception, and that is June 4th of 1977. The spring tour of ‘77 sounds very different from the June tour. The June tour was all theaters; the spring tour had some theaters, but also had some bigger arenas. But she started using DBX noise reduction on the spring tour of 1977, so there is a different sound. It's a little wetter, … which is to say, not so dry.
AUDIO: “The Wheel” [Dave’s Picks 1, 5/25/77] (1:36-2:07)
JESSE: That was Betty Cantor Jackson’s recording of the Dead at the Mosque in Richmond, Virginia, May 25th, 1977, released as Dave’s Picks 1 — recently released on vinyl to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Dave’s Picks series. Betty made 2-track tapes on and off, mostly on, then mostly off, from the band’s return to the road in 1976 through early 1979. Here, it’s important to pause and clarify some tape labeling terminology. Often, Grateful Dead tapes get labeled as being soundboards or audience tapes – that is, made by the band from the soundboard, or recorded in the audience by a Deadhead. There are different kinds of soundboard tapes, though. Many so-called Grateful Dead soundboard tapes from the 1960s and 1970s—what we’ve been almost entirely talking about so far—are 2-track recordings made by feeding inputs from the soundboard through a mixer before going to tape. When Betty stopped making tapes, the tapes that followed for most of the ‘80s—recorded by front of house engineer Dan Healy—are what can be called PA tapes. They capture exactly what the sound system was putting into the room.
DAVID LEMIEUX: They are what they are. They all sound different, and somehow I never quite understood this. Some halls sound really big. Nassau Coliseum — I only saw the Dead there three times, and I remember it sounded good then. But it comes through on the tapes. I mean, I listened to Nassau tapes from ‘79, ‘80, ‘81, the PA tapes, and they sound really good. Whereas some venues on that tour don't sound quite as good in that era in some of the PA tapes. I can only assume that the hall is reflected in the PA tape sound. So I've always found that a little interesting. Some of them do sound really good, some of the PA tapes that Jeffrey has worked with for Dick's Picks, Dave’s Picks, other releases like that, sound magnificent. The mix is very even and the sound is very full — you’ve got bottom end, the highs are where they should be. Brent is holding down the right side, mostly Brent-era. Bob will be doing his thing, you can hear him nice and prominently. Nice stereo drums. Phil. And then there are places… there’s an Alpine [Valley Music Theatre] show that was released as Dick’s Picks 32, August 7th of ‘82. I’ve seen the Dead many times at Alpine, and I never felt there was a problem there. But there’s no Phil coming through on the tape, and that does seem to be a pretty big problem. That does seem to be a pretty consistent recording manifestation for Alpine shows, that there's not a lot of bass coming through. At Alpine, [that was] just the way it was.
AUDIO: “Sugaree” [Dick’s Picks 32, 8/7/82] (0:42-1:13) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The first Vault releases didn’t begin until 1991, but music from the Vault began emerging into the world in the mid-1980s via David Gans, hero to Dead Head radio shows and podcasts everywhere and surely a voice familiar to many of our listeners. In the Bay Area, he’d gradually taken over KFOG’s Deadhead Hour, and began to receive queries from radio stations in other cities.
DAVID GANS: I got a call from WHCN in Hartford, saying, “We’d like to know if we could carry your Deadhead Hour too.” And I called Jon McIntire who was, at the time, one of the managers of the Dead, and told him this was going on. He said, “Well, let's take it to the band and see.” I also got a call from a classic rock station in San Diego. The next call I got was from WNEW-FM, which was the biggest rock radio station in the universe. They wanted to carry my show. So McIntire urged me to take it to the band, and the band was kind enough to say, “Yeah, we trust you. Go ahead.” Phil literally said, “You don't have to ask for permission to play specific stuff. We trust your judgment.” And not only that, they let me into the Vault. Willy Legate—this is before Dick Latvala had been hired as the archivist—was sort of the caretaker at Front Street. And he basically just let me in, let me copy tapes.
JESSE: Willy Legate was an old friend of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter from the Palo Alto scene. He came up in our bonus episode called “Jerry Garcia: American Folkie.” This is historian Dennis McNally, who met Willy when Dennis began working as the Dead’s publicist in the ‘80s.
DENNIS MCNALLY: He sent off for LSD at Sandoz in ‘58 or ‘59. And that was before anybody even knew about it, long before Larry had ever heard of LSD. He read about it in some fashion and managed to use college letterhead to get us free samples from Sandoz. He taught people how to think funny, that's what Jerry said. To use a current cliché: to think outside the box. He was the archivist, the Superintendent of Front Street. He kept the tape archives before Dick got the job. He studied the Bible, but I think it was almost from a numerological point of view... Whatever it was, his mind saw puzzles.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Willy was kind of in charge of Club Front. He would be the overseer and he'd make sure it was all taken care of. And he’d check on it every day; he was there all the time. But I heard wonderful things about him. And really, he was the original tape archivist — without being a tape archivist, he was the tape archivist. I’ve got a binder in my studio space downstairs, and it's the original Grateful Dead tape catalog, which is a typed up sheet that Willy put together with tabs. You know, it's a typical sheet with tabs for each year and stuff. It's nothing fancy, and it doesn't really have that much information on it, aside from formats and reels and cassettes. But it's comprehensive, and that was Willy’s work. Of all the people who I never got to work with and never got to meet, Willy is one person I really wish I had.
JESSE: The name changed from the Deadhead Hour to the Grateful Dead Hour.
AUDIO: Grateful Dead Hour #105 (0:00-0:52) - [dead.net]
DAVID GANS [9/90]: Welcome to the Grateful Dead Hour. I’m David Gans. This week’s live music is especially significant to me because this was one of the concerts that hooked me on the Dead. My first Dead concert was March 5th, 1972 at Winterland, and the next time the band played in town, I went to all four shows. I didn’t hear tapes of those until just a couple of years ago. I was delighted to learn it wasn’t a hallucination: the band played some amazing music. Here’s some of that music that made me a Dead Head, recorded at the Berkeley Community Theater on August 24th, 1972.
JESSE: In the mid-’80s, the Grateful Dead Hour became the first regular outlet for music from the Dead’s vaults, a curated tour from the ‘60s up through the most recent shows, plus breaking news from the Dead world, the latest from the band members’ projects, deep cuts and interviews. That mash-up intro was hand-cut by David, splicing together tape the old-fashioned way. We’ve posted a link to the playlists, and you can check out the craziness David was dropping on Dead Heads who didn’t have streaming access to oceans of live Dead or even the Dick’s Picks series. Like many, I taped the Dead Hour off the radio every week and those tapes became the cornerstones of my tape collection and Dead education. You can still hear it on over 100 stations nationwide, as well as online.
DAVID GANS: The Vault was fairly well-organized on shelves. By the time I got there, there was lots of stuff in boxes, too, that hadn't yet been sorted out and put in. They hired Dick Latvala to organize the Vault and start by cataloging it and figuring out what was in there.
JESSE: By the 1990s, Dick’s name would become known to Dead Heads everywhere for the Dick’s Picks series. But the late Dick Latvala was one of us. He was a head. And the story of how he landed the dream gig as the Grateful Dead’s archivist is a fascinating path through the counterculture. Here today is Carol Latvala, his former wife.
CAROL LATVALA: He started seeing them in 1966. We didn't get together ‘til 1968, which is comparatively late. Then we went to a couple of shows in ‘68, and then we started going to Hawaii. I saw one show in ‘69, the one where they did “Hey Jude” in March.
AUDIO: “Hey Jude” [Fillmore West 1969: The Complete Recordings, 3/1/69] (3:34-4:04)
CAROL LATVALA: He was a born archivist. He didn't really start until 1972. But then in ‘72, he got this book, and he wrote: “This is going to be my first entry in my diary.” Once he started there, he realized he wanted to record his experiences, in order to look at them more closely and evaluate what was going on. At that time, we had moved into the Commune.
JESSE: The Morehouse Commune was one of Berkeley’s most infamous experiments in intentional community, which we’ll set aside right now, but a fascinating story. I wrote a bit more about it in my book, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America.
CAROL LATVALA: And so things were very fast-paced and hectic, and there was a lot going on. It's amazing that he even had time to write, because we didn't sleep much in those days. I don't know where he found the time, but he did. He would sneak off in a corner or something and start to write things down. Then, as he started doing that, it became more; first, it was pretty small, and then it became more. Then he decided he would have to add on tapes, because he couldn't write that much.
JESSE: Dick was a taper, too, but in a different way. When I was working on my book, Heads, Carol dug up some of the tapes from the closet. Enormous thanks to Amir Bar-Lev and his squad for facilitating the transfer. My favorite of the recordings comes from sometime in 1975. Dick and Carol had moved to Hawaii by then — the next stop on the countercultural highway, the Fillmore West a distant memory. Dick was working part-time as a zookeeper. He’d recently discovered bootleg Dead LPs that he ordered from the mainland and had just gotten some of his first Dead tapes.
DICK LATVALA [1975]: My basic flash when I took acid—and as I developed it was—is that the highest thing in life to do is take acid and listen to the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: On this particular tape, Dick has been introduced to a Deadhead visitor, possibly a hitchhiker, and he’s telling him about the all-night Dead-Ins he’s been hosting for his friends.
DICK LATVALA [1975]: That’s when you get your loving family together and you take acid and put your attention on something together. That's just how I use these tapes. It's like for us to get a roomful of my family, people like myself, get them in a room, take acid and put on some music and, you know, make it as comfortable as possible, so that you can get a good thing, a good song, like you’re there live — make it as close to that as I can afford at the time. And just tripping all night on that brings us really good. That’s the basic experience. That is the experience that welds us together.
JESSE: Yeah, man. You can tell Dick is psyched to have someone to listen to the Dead with. And it turns out the visitor is the most informed Dead Head Dick has yet encountered. But Dick and the visitor disagree on the Dead’s more contemporary directions in the mid-’70s. Probably all of us have Dead Heads friends who share the visitor’s opinions.
HITCHHIKER [1975]: They're still far out, you know, and they're still good, but they're not quite as cosmic.
JESSE: And you know, hey, I’ve probably been that guy too, but I absolutely adore Dick’s response.
DICK LATVALA [1975]: The feeling that I always had about the Grateful Dead was these guys were so special that it was on me to come to where they were, to get that mind-blowing thing. To have the attitude of “oh shit, man, they’re going downhill” — I’m gonna miss out on the love they’re sharing at that moment.
JESSE: But here’s where the tape gets a little crazier. The Dead Head they’ve met also turns out to be the most connected tape collector Dick has yet encountered.
HITCHHIKER [1975]: I mean, you can have everyone on the shelves full of reel-to-reel tapes.
JESSE: The guy tells Dick about some crazy rare tapes he’s heard.
DICK LATVALA [1975]: I just always hope that things like this was really truly —
HITCHHIKER [1975]: Yeah.
DICK LATVALA [1975]: Wow...
JESSE: In some ways, this is the exact moment that Dick Latvala became Dick Latvala: caught on tape, just like a jam. He already had some Dead tapes, but from then on his life was thoroughly transformed. If you were Dick and Carol’s visitor that day, get in touch with us.
CAROL LATVALA: He was relentless. Relix magazine was starting about that time — they had things in there about how you could trade tapes, or get tapes from other people. And at that time, you could just send blanks and people would start filling them up, and then send some more, and it wasn't that hard. But also the fact that Dick had a good connection with the local herb market made it easier for him to access the tapes much faster and expeditiously.
JESSE: Dick’s method was to send off a pile of reel-to-reels to a taper friend, and send an extra tape box filled to the brim with delicious Hawaiian cannabis. Worked pretty well for ol’ Dick, and was a fascinating economic manifestation of the counterculture — cannabis in exchange for concert recordings. But Dick didn’t just collect tapes. He became genuine lifelong friends with the people he corresponded with.
CAROL LATVALA: He wrote a lot of letters to everybody, he was on the phone with everybody, and he connected people that might not have otherwise been so connected. He brought ‘em all out to Hawaii on vacation! Even though we had no income, he just had the generous spirit that said, “Yeah, come on over! We'll have a great vacation, you could stay at my house.” So yeah, his willingness to share connect with a lot of different folks.
JESSE: Taper friends and their partners came to visit Dick and Carol in Hawaii. On one occasion, they had a massive anniversary listening party for the February 1970 Fillmore East recordings that later became Dick’s Picks 4.
JOHN ZACHERLE [2/14/70]: Well well, this is glorious Sunday morning — the Grateful goddamn Dead!
AUDIO: “Casey Jones” [Dick’s Picks 4, 2/14/70] [0:00-0:30] - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It was around this time that Dick began to keep his tape notebooks.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Dick's notes, it was a format. Setlist notes, notes on when he listened: First listen was January 12th, 1980, the second listen was… and new notes for each listen, and different colors for where there was a tape cut. I love his Cornell review, because he's reviewing an audience tape. I love Dick's notes, much more than I love my own notes. I review them as often as I can.
JESSE: Dick loved his multi-colored pens, as David Lemieux discovered years later in the Dead’s tape vault.
DAVID LEMIEUX: All the DAT tapes and the cassette tapes are in either Coca-Cola or 24-pack beer can flats — cardboard flats, those little cardboard boxes that you get two-four beer in, that have about a two-inch lip that are perfect to house, and you'd have these little labels on them and Dick had very distinct handwriting. Remember those pens we always used in the ‘80s? It was white at the top, blue on the bottom, and there were four buttons on the top — blue, red, the green one. Dick loved those. This shelf unit behind where I’m recording, that’s got DATs in it. There’s some of Dick’s old DATs, and he’d label the tape, thee song label in blue; the show information in black; tape cuts in red, or anything that was weird in red; and then green would have notes at the bottom, which would say “phenomenal version of ‘Scarlet’/’Fire,’” stuff like that. He had very specific purposes for each of his colors. I’ve got a couple of those pens somewhere.
CAROL LATVALA: I've been rereading his diaries this year. And he writes, at one point, “Someone got me a four-colored pen,” because he was using four different pens before that, to quantify things.
JESSE: In probably the most iconic photograph of Dick, he’s holding one of his taping binders full of taping notes, wearing a Skull and Roses shirt, stereo in the foreground, Dead photos on the wall in the back, lush Hawaiian greenery visible through the window. It was Dick’s tape room.
CAROL LATVALA: He was very concerned with humidity. So he got these heat bars to put in the cupboards where the tapes were kept to make sure that no mold or mildew [grew]. In Hawaii, everything is destroyed, pretty much, with mold and mildew because there's so much humidity. So he had heat bars in the cabinets where the tapes were kept. He was able to preserve them over the years that way. That was pretty good.
JESSE: In 1978, Dick befriended the Grateful Dead crew, employing the same charms he used to win over his taping buddies. In the early ‘80s, he and Carol split up, though they remained good friends, later even living in adjacent houses. Dick headed back to the Bay Area, where he remarried.
CAROL LATVALA: He was living in the Bay Area with his wife, Christie, at the time, and visiting the Grateful Dead office. He was friends with Eileen, and he would go and visit her and give her tapes: you've got to listen to this, you’ve got to listen to that. At one point, he was visiting Eileen, and he always carried around cassettes of what he thought were the best shows, and this and that and talking to her. Then Phil walked by her office, and for whatever reason, he said, “Phil, Phil, I really want you to listen to this. I hope someone's taking care of it, because this is the real stuff.” And I guess Phil did agree to listen to one of the tapes that Dick had. I don't know which one, but for a while. Eileen left, and left him with the keys. At some point, I think Phil decided maybe there was a reason to actively preserve and take care of these tapes. And Willy Legate had them all stored in a closet on Front Street.
JESSE: And so, in 1985, Dick got the gig.
CAROL LATVALA: In the first year, Dick didn’t really get to do much in the Vault. Besides organizing the tapes, they'd send him out for coffee and sandwiches. He was the last hire, so he had to work his way into the ranks.
JESSE: But he soon began to collaborate with David Gans, feeding him recordings for the Grateful Dead Hour. David had first heard from Dick back when writing a regular Dead column for the Bay Area Music magazine BAM.
DAVID GANS: We had been friends already. When I started doing the column for BAM, he wrote me letters. He was living in Hawaii at the time. We started this correspondence, because that's what he did — he wrote letters to Dead Heads. He was just hugely into that thing and wanted to get tapes from me, and started sending me pot from over there. He would send me bags of pot, and say, “If you want to sell some of this, just send me the money, that's fine. If you want to just smoke it, that's fine, too.” So I participated in his illegal economy a little bit. So when I was ensconced in my role as the producer of the syndicated Dead show, Dick was very, very happy to be instrumental in distributing music, getting it out there. This is before they would even think about releasing.
We settled into a habit of when the band went on the road, Dick and I would get together and spend a day. I would bring over tape recorders and various devices from home. We’d basically set up like three or four duplicating stations in the Vault, and hang out and smoke dope and listen to music and rave for hours and hours. And I'd go home with a bunch of stuff to sort out and listen to, and play on the radio.
There were reel-to-reels, there were cassettes, there were PCMs, which is a digital format using [BetaMax] videotape. They had used different formats. I couldn’t… they wouldn't let me use the multitrack.
JESSE: And fair enough, because in 1991, the Grateful Dead finally released their first archival material since Bear’s Choice — One From the Vault.
BILL GRAHAM [8/13/75]: On the piano, we have Mr. Keith Godchaux. On the drums, on stage left, Mr. Mickey Hart. On bass and vocals, Mr. Phillip Lesh. On rhythm guitar and vocals, Mr. Bob Weir. On the drums on stage right, Mr. Bill Kreutzmann. On the vocals, Mrs. Donna Jean Godchaux. On lead guitar and vocals, Mr. Jerry Garcia. Would you welcome, please, the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: Over the years, alongside the 2-track work and PA tapes, the Dead sometimes brought in serious multitrack gear for when they were working on live albums, and occasionally when they weren’t, as with One From The Vault, the Blues For Allah release party, recorded August 13th, 1975 at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. The From the Vault series was originally conceived to highlight multitrack tapes, continuing the next year with Two From The Vault, recorded at the Shrine Auditorium in August 1968. In the late ‘80s, when the Dead could afford it, John Cutler began to record multi-tracks of every show. But the From the Vault series soon met a seemingly immovable force — the editorial pickiness of the individual members of the Grateful Dead, who all had opinions about both performance and sound quality.
CAROL LATVALA: Kidd Candelario, who was one of the roadies, was [Dick’s] sponsor in saying “we could release some of these things, as tapes.” The band didn't really think much about it, and they would listen to things and they wouldn't like this or they wouldn't like that. So it was very hard initially to get them to agree to release anything. And then finally, they said they didn't care and they'd let Phil be the decider in that. So then, eventually, they got a few things released.
JESSE: The first release came out on Halloween 1993 — recorded 20 years earlier, December 19, 1973 in Tampa, Florida. It was sold by mail order and a toll-free number. Lesh made them edit out a bass solo. It was called Dick’s Picks, Volume 1.
CAROL LATVALA: I think it was Kidd’s idea.
JESSE: In 1995, just before Jerry Garcia’s death, the Vault had relocated with the band from Front Street to a new facility in a former Coca-Cola bottling plant in Bel Marin Keys, north of San Rafael.
DAVID LEMIEUX: In ‘95, when the Grateful Dead stopped touring all together as an entity, it became almost primarily a commercial archive with a massively important historical function — which is to say, it's the Grateful Dead cultural legacy on those tapes. So ‘95 it moves from San Rafael to Novato, California, to Bel Marin Keys. A very proper tape archive was built there, and that's where I worked from ‘99 to 2006. As Dick and Jeffrey [Norman] both told me, Jerry came up a few times during the construction, and he popped his head in the vault. They were assembling these wonderful shelves, and Jerry said something along the lines of “Make sure that the lowest shelf is a good 12 to 18 inches off the ground, in case it ever floods up here.” It wasn't anywhere near a floodplain, but it was very conscious of Jerry to know that water and fire are your biggest dangers when it comes to this stuff. So even Jerry, weeks before he passed, came up and checked things out. He was looking at the whole facility, and one of the things he specifically commented on, on the design side, was “make sure those tapes are kept off the ground and keep [them] away from water.”
JESSE: Though Dick’s name was on the series, he made a point to emphasize that it was a collaborative project. This is Dick speaking in 1999 on WCUW in Worcester.
DICK LATVALA [3/20/99]: I have my own knowledge [which] is through listening on my own. But everyone has an opinion. I'm in the position where I have to really try to not just have my ego stamp on it; it has to come from a general consensus almost, before I want to throw it up on the dartboard for my co-teammates to evaluate.
JESSE: It was a collaboration not only between himself and his colleagues who worked for the Dead, but as well as between himself and the community of tape collectors whose discourse Dick relentlessly surfed.
DICK LATVALA [3/20/99]: It's a group effort, and it goes from me, John Cutler and Jeffrey Norman, the two guys that I work with that have veto power, all the way down to anybody in the world that writes me, or posts on Deadnet Central or in my folders [or] areas anyway… I'm just a gathering place for information.
JESSE: He’d always been a prolific correspondent, but the real-time nature of the online world wasn’t a great medium for Dick. When we put out our call for Deadcast stories, Andy Perrine contributed this memory of Dick.
ANDY PERRINE: When the organization announced the Dick's Picks series, I was ecstatic. Joining the online chats about every next Pick, I found that many of my fellow Dead Heads were real jerks to Dick, and each other, in how they express their opinions about what show should be next, and whether complete shows should be used, and every other bit of minutia one could imagine. Poor Dick, I thought that the guy was just beleaguered. So I started writing him: just cards with funny shit on the front, and messages of appreciation and encouragement. He wrote me back every time on simple white stationery and envelopes, with that great excited handwriting that filled his notebooks, writing shows. We developed a warm and uplifting correspondence up until his sudden and untimely death.
JESSE: Dick died of a heart attack in August of 1999. Dick’s Picks 14 had just come out, November 30th and December 2nd, 1973 at Boston Music Hall. It opened and closed with “Morning Dew.”
AUDIO: “Morning Dew” [Dick’s Picks 14, 12/2/73] (13:42-14:12) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: A few months before Dick’s death, a Dead Head film student and former taper named David Lemieux arrived at the Dead’s vault on a short catalog to help catalog their video holdings.
DAVID LEMIEUX: My first day, it was a Monday morning, February 1st, 1999. Day after the Super Bowl. I was in the vault, I got there at eight in the morning, and Dick was already there feeding the cats. So I was in the Vault with Dick about 8:15, 8:30 in the morning. I've met a lot of amazing people in the Dead world, but Dick was a guy who I only worked closely with for about three or four months. But every interaction you had with him was incredibly memorable. I mentioned this about Ram Rod: he didn't say a lot, but when he did, it meant something. Dick said a lot. Dick could talk, and it also meant a lot. There are people who talk, and not a lot comes out, but Dick — I mean, he was a genuine guy. He was very authentic. He loved what he did. I think his mission in life, if you want to call it that, was to spread some joy. It was all about that. It wasn't about his ego, by any means. I wouldn't even say he never had much of one. He really just loved spreading the joy. He loved making Dead Heads happy.
With Dick, I found myself listening a lot — to the way Dick did things; to the way Dick was very meticulous with his notetaking; with the way he treated the tapes; the way that Dick was very aware of the Dead legacy. This is 1999 — Jerry [had] been gone four years. The Dead legacy was completely reliant upon what was held on these tapes. These were valuable historical documents. This is, you know, me coming in there as an archivist, as an historian, as a film archivist, as a filmmaker. But deep down, I'm—my identity—I'm a Dead Head, I’m a huge Dead Head. So I looked at tapes of just something that I love listening to. And it was at that moment, really, the first day working with Dick, that I realized what I was surrounded by was so much bigger than just a bunch of music.
I'd hang out with him at his house and [have] a couple of listening sessions. A listening session with Dick was really wonderful, because he had a couple of really great big speakers at home. He would just decide, “Okay, today I'm going to focus on the Academy of Music 1972 shows,” and he would spend three or four hours just going through them, taking notes and asking me my opinion. That was another thing: when I was there, the first month or so, he was working on some early ‘80s, spring of ‘83, some fall of ‘84 stuff. So he would come in and he’d put on the master tape to make DAT to bring home later, but he'd leave the vault for an hour while that tape ran and go visit people around the office, or feed the cats or whatever. And then he’d come back in and ask me my opinion. I'm there cataloging the videos, and he was very curious: what did I think of that? He said, “Oh, what do you think of the Syracuse? What do you think of Augusta?” He never, I don't think, thought that his opinion mattered more than anyone else's.
There were, at Bel Marin Keys, outdoor cats, feral cats. Comes and Goes — [those] were their names, Comes and Goes. And so Dick convinced the money people, the CFO, to spend quite a bit of money building these cat condos out back, these little cubbies. The cats never used them. But Dick took his responsibility very seriously: seven days a week, he came to the office, even if he didn't have to, and fed those cats. Comes and Goes… they had feline AIDS. They were there for the duration that I was there, and then after Dick passed, we all took it as our responsibility to make sure those cats were fed. Dick was the only one who could get close to them, so he’s the one who could get them in the cage to bring them to the vet and stuff like that. But yeah, there were cats out back. It was a pretty groovy spread. It was a great place actually.
JESSE: When Dick died in 1999, David Lemieux became the Dead’s archivist. A knowledgeable taper, he was well-qualified. Dick also left behind reams of notes and an incredibly organized tape vault.
DAVID LEMIEUX: The audio tapes were [in] many different formats There was live, there was studio, there was solo material. That was Dick’s domain. Dick was very proud of this, and understandably so — justifiably so. There was a database — FileMaker Pro, I don't even know if that's a thing anymore. But the FileMaker Pro database in the vault, everything was cataloged in it. It was in this old computer. It was in there and I asked [Dick], I said, “Wow, so you must use that database all the time.” He said, “Man, I haven't turned that computer on, that database on, in years. It is so organized in here.” And shortly after that, Dick passed away, and I came on full-time. And he was 100% correct. In the seven years I worked in that space, I didn't turn that computer on once: it was unnecessary, because the Vault was organized so well by format, and within each format, it was chronological. So you knew that if you were looking for 2-inch multitrack tapes of live shows, they were chronological. That would go from Live/Dead to the Skull and Roses material, Europe ‘72, all of The Grateful Dead Movie stuff. And then there were one-offs that might be recorded for The King Biscuit Flower Hour – there was an Arizona show [recorded for King Biscuit] in ‘77; there was 7/18/76 at the Orpheum, the final night at the Orpheum, ‘76. There was New Year’s ‘76 at the Cow Palace, all these multitracks. All of that, all that 2-inch material, on 2-inch large format analog tapes, they were all housed chronologically by format. Likewise, the 7-inch tapes—the stereo, the Betty boards, all that material—all chronological by format. So whenever Jeffrey [Norman] needed a tape for a project we were working on, the studio and the vault were 100 feet away from each other. When Jeffrey would be working on a “China” / “Rider” from fall of ‘73, let’s say, and there’s a big cut in it, so he needs another “China” / “Rider” to fix that cut, it literally took me 20 to 30 seconds to find three more tapes from that tour that could be checked out as possible fixes for that. So it was remarkably well-organized by Dick.
Oftentimes, a lot of the song titles on these recordings were on songs that hadn't been officially released yet. Like you'll see a song “Row Jimmy” [as] “Julie Catch A Rabbit” — it'll be labeled as a lyric from the song, but not the actual song title. So it's interesting to see those kind of things. “Must Have Been the Roses,” going way back, was always, from ‘74 on, was always “Roses, Roses,” on certain tapes through ‘74. Sometimes the songs would be labeled — those would often be labeled after the fact, many years later, by Dick in the late ‘80s. A lot of these tapes have the very rudimentary early recording information by Rex or by Kidd or by Bear, with Dick filling in. Bear actually filled in a lot of song information, as did Kidd. But Rex a little less, and Dick would fill that stuff in. Which is great, because Dick’s handwriting is very distinct, and it's very good. It's really… I find a certain comfort to Dick's handwriting on anything Grateful Dead related. I've got some notes in my desk — just some notes to live by, that are written by Dick. I just love seeing it. So Dick stuff is on it. A lot of archivists will say, Well, you don't touch the original document and mark it up; you maybe put a sticker on it, or maybe a note inside. I don't necessarily agree with that when these tapes are already 55 years old, and Dick is part of that history.
JESSE: And a complicated part of that history. Carol is speaking here of Dick’s practice of sending cannabis for tapes, but it also describes the whole of his personality.
CAROL LATVALA: He was always generous and so he just liked to share whatever he enjoyed with whoever he could, and it wasn't really… there was no exchange rate. He actually would take the shirt off his back. If you said, “I like that shirt,” he would rip it off and insist that you wear it home.
JESSE: By all accounts, Dick was the kind of person for whom the expression was invented. David Gans was a close friend.
DAVID GANS: He was impossible to not love. I mean, [he] could be a little much at times, but he was just he had the biggest heart in creation, [and] was utterly completely devoted to the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: Dick’s job working for the Grateful Dead had been way complicated from the day he started, but his enthusiasm for the Dead’s music never diminished, nor—for better or worse—his love for sharing it. For years it seemed that the band had no interest in ever releasing any of the vast collection. In the wide taping community that emerged around the Dead—and of which Dick was a part—rare tapes had long created a strange economy all their own and exerted a sometimes uncomfortable power.
DAVID GANS: I have to say Dick was susceptible to blandishments from various people. A couple of guys talked him into giving them copies of the music in the vault. He essentially gave away the contents of the vault, and he did it with the kindest of intentions. After he died, after the band ended, it felt like it seemed like that stuff became fair game. Jerry might not have cared, but everybody else who understood that it was a business I think probably cared. But now, I'm telling it to you because it's history, and it was part of the insanely complicated and often treacherous world of the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: And it’s true, it’s not too hard to hear many of the recordings in the Dead’s vault. But to hear them officially presented, picked out with deep love and knowledge, and granted full archival treatment is something else. Just like tapes have power, so do official releases, granting the music a different currency as part of the official canon. Plus, they sound awesome.
DAVID LEMIEUX: We've got a lot of tapes in the Vault. I think, legitimately, decades of material to release. What that's done is ensured that we've got decades of material to release that maintains that high quality.
JESSE: Dick’s Picks kept arriving for another half-decade after Dick’s passing, wrapping up with Volume 36 in 2005. After that came the Road Trips series, running from 2007 to 2011, presenting curated micro-windows into the Dead’s touring world. Just like the original Dick’s Picks, which often edited shows so the band was putting its best musical foot forward, Road Trips dropped listeners into thoughtful presentations of the Dead at their best. 2011 saw the launch of the complete-show Dave’s Picks series, both celebrating its 10th birthday this year as well as surpassing the total number of original Dick’s Picks with Dave’s Picks 37, recorded April 15th, 1978 in Williamsburg, Virginia.
AUDIO: “Passenger” [Dave’s Picks 37, 4/15/78] (1:04-1:34)
JESSE: In 2006, the tapes moved to a new home in southern California, nestled in their own special section deep inside the Warner vault. Since the move, Mike Johnson has been the archivist for Rhino who has tended to the tapes themselves.
MIKE JOHNSON: It's a very, very large nondescript building: loading docks, and it looks very, very blue-collar, like anything could happen there. It’s environmentally controlled inside. We have different levels of environmental control, but you just walk in and it just looks like a gigantic airplane hangar. I believe that they're 12-feet tall shelves — very, very industrial, bolted to the concrete floor. And it just goes and goes and goes and goes. Some of our former employees, and even our manager, we would all ride bikes. One of our guys, Ted, bought one of those three-wheel adult tricycles with a basket on it. We would ride around the vault and get the tapes. We segregated a section of the tape vault — this section is actually fenced off with a chain-link fence. Hence the term the Cage.
JESSE: The tapes are safe, and watched over by a familiar face.
MIKE JOHNSON: I actually have a photograph of Dick in the Cage. It's 8 ½” x 11”, framed. It’s right at the very beginning at the gate, at a place of honor. We had the owner of the company come by for a deluxe tour. It was a big deal to have this guy come by, and so I gave the nickel tour of the Cage, and he actually asked me, “Who is that?” And I said, “That’s the first librarian.”
JESSE: You can hear more of our conversation with Mike Johnson in our “Friend of the Devil” episode. When David Lemieux needs a tape, Mike is who gets the call. As with Dick, David builds on his own accumulated knowledge, but also collective Dead Head taper wisdom.
DAVID LEMIEUX: I'm as… everybody's as much of an expert as I am. I don't think I'm much of an expert — I just love the Grateful Dead music. I've developed a very critical ear about it, and I feel I can objectively listen, but so can anyone really. So I certainly don't put my ear up against anyone. That's why every suggestion I get I take seriously — I never dismiss a suggestion. I mean, the closest I'll come to dismissing a suggestion is that if I've listened to a show several times and I know it's not a very good show, I might think to myself—I won't comment and say, “Well, that's a terrible idea”—but I'll say, “Well, you know,” I say to myself, “I've listened. It's not really a feasible idea.”
JESSE: And some things just aren’t feasible. Perhaps there are only PA tapes in the vault and they’re missing instruments in the mix. Maybe there are no tapes at all, or crucial sections are missing. As with his predecessor, he also builds on lots and lots of notes.
DAVID LEMIEUX: There is no master list of future releases. There's nothing, which is to say that every release we do — we were quite a bit ahead about six or nine months ahead, sometimes as much as a year. The way it works is I always have fresh in mind: what have we done in the last 24 to 36 months? What have we... okay, we just did a ‘71, ‘72, ‘73 box set, we just did some releases from ‘78, ‘73, ‘83, and ‘90. When it comes down to choosing a show, it always starts with the era: “I think it's time to do a 1977 show.” And then there's always several shows — the last time we did a 1977 show, it always comes down to maybe two or three shows towards the end of the process. Those two or three shows get heavy rotation listening for weeks, for months. And sometimes a few others from that same era sneak into the list.
JESSE: And then it’s down into the details.
DAVID LEMIEUX: My handwriting is terrible, and I wish I could have something as aesthetically beautiful as Dick’s notes. I wish I had that. I have it in spreadsheets, in computer spreadsheets. And so where my listening notes come in, they're somewhat similar to Dick's; they're not in quite as great detail. His were very much about the recordings: Dick's notes were very much as a tape trader, whereas my notes are more as an archivist producer guy. If it's a great show and there's no Weir guitar in the mix, that goes in my notes as something that… not so much. [Whereas] Dick might say as a tape trader, mine is: well, we can't release this show, there's no Weir guitar in the mix. So I do that. But there's another good example there. [The] Chicago shows, the whole fall tour of 79 — I spent a lot of time, a year almost, working on that release. And so my notes from that entire tour are pretty extensive. It's several spreadsheet pages from just that tour.
AUDIO: “Jam” [Dave’s Picks 31, 12/4/79] (1:16-1:46)
JESSE: That was a really fantastic jam out of “Franklin’s Tower,” recorded in December 1979 at the Uptown Theatre in Chicago, now Dave’s Picks 31. In pop music, producers and musicians often test out their work in different contexts. The boombox test is one standard. Another is driving around blasting in the car. But because this is Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux, there’s a more wholesome standard to be kept.
DAVID LEMIEUX: When a show is picked, and I'm certain it's going to be the one, and yet I haven't really told the Rhinos or Jeffrey yet — because once you tell Rhino and Jeffrey, it means we're full steam ahead in production, there's no going back—I go for a three-hour walk or a hike with headphones. 95% of the time on that walk, every song I keep getting more excited, going: “Oh yeah, this is why, and this is why and this is why.” Before I know what I've got, you know, 15 or 20 things that got me really excited and reasons it was picked. And I basically say out loud: absolutely, this is the one. And then I get home from that walk, that hike, and email everybody on the team and say, “Hey, the next release will be this,” so we can start on the art and the tapes and this and that. It's a moment where I can… genuinely, almost every release we've ever done, all the Dick’s Picks and Road Trips and Dave’s Picks, I can remember the moment where I was, on a hike or a canoe outing, or whatever it was, that that moment happened — where I've already picked it, but it's that 100% certainty where I'm ready to pick up the phone and let everyone know. It can be sitting on a rock watching a sunset. I’ll be out for a walk and I'll see a rock—I'm not doing anything with music. I'll see a rock, like oh, that’s where I was sitting when—I call it “setting in stone”— where I chose, where I set in stone Dave’s Picks 14, whatever it was. On the ferry, looking at the other islands go by, or looking at killer whales or whatever it is. It’s amazing, the kind of set and setting and the moment that it occurs, and how it sticks with me.
JESSE: From jamming Dead tapes in the Hawaiian sun to watching killer whales off Vancouver Island, those Dead archivists sure do like their vibes. Don’t we all. This is Dick’s Picks 1, track 1. Crank it up.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (0:59-1:29) - [Spotify] [YouTube]