Grateful Dead Scrapbook

Documents of a Pop Culture Phenomenon

Oct. 27, 2009

midnight

The Grateful Dead became the enduringinstitution of the 1960s San Francisco scene, much as Jerry Garcia and companymight have resisted becoming institutionalized. The Dead roadshow thatcontinued through Garcia’s death in 1995 became the object of obsessiveDeadhead devotion. For some of their tie-die followers, following the Deadbecame a way of playacting the ‘60s. The Grateful Dead left behind a pair ofgreat albums, 1970’s Workingman’sDead and American Beauty, and hundreds of bootleg concert tapes throughencouraging the transmission of their music by fans in the age before the viralemergence of the web.

The University of California Santa Cruz hasestablished a Grateful Dead archive, scheduled to open in 2010. Meanwhile,selected items from the collection are sampled in The Grateful Dead Scrapbook: A Long, Strange Trip in Stories, Photos,and Memorabilia (published by Chronicle Books). The handsomely designed,slip covered coffee table book is filled with band photos from the early daysthrough the end, along with psychedelic poster art. The text by longtime Rolling Stone editor Ben Fong-Torres,intelligently assays their long career (vocation might be a better word), findingthat in a subculture composed in part of delusions, they were “real,”preferring the spontaneous combustion of the stage to the sterility of thestudio and the idea of community between performers and audience over stardom.Grounded in ‘50s rock’n’roll and folk before emulating the early RollingStones, the Grateful Dead were inspired by jazz and LSD into the freeformimprovisation that became their signature.

For many Deadheads, their favorite group becameas much a symbol as a band, representing aspirations for the world that neverseemed to take holdat least in the way the dreamers had hoped. The Dead workedto keep their dream alive, aware that utopia had receded. As Fong-Torreswrites: “The Grateful Dead constantly seesawed between the storied, blissfuloptimism of the ‘60s and the reality of the world.”