Deadhead (original) (raw)

For years, there’d been clamor from fans, and talk in the band, about liberating some vault contents. The idea had always foundered on concerns about quality control and economics. But in 1991 they released “One from the Vault,” a concert from 1975. The next year brought “Two from the Vault,” from 1968. Then Lesh, chiefly, scuttled further releases, because he and the band, to their credit, perhaps, were pickier than most of their fans. As Garcia once told Latvala, “I don’t ever want to hear any of that shit. All it does is remind me of what I was trying to do.”

Instead, Latvala, with a couple of others in the organization, began selecting two-track concert recordings in the vault and releasing them, at a rate of about three a year, as “Dick’s Picks.” The first one, a show from 1973, sold well. Early on, everyone agreed that band members would stay out of the process. To the extent that Latvala was the Deadheads’ infiltrator and proxy, it became a kind of enthusiasts’ enterprise. The Dead don’t usually even listen to the choices, before or after they’re released. Eventually, they released thirty-six Dick’s Picks multi-CD sets. Out of sheer enthusiasm, Latvala surreptitiously slipped digital copies of other vault recordings to his taper friends. He died, of a heart attack, in 1999, and after that his friends felt free to pass the copies around. Before long, almost everything in the vault was in circulation. And then came the Internet.

“Screw this–I’m going to work for the tabloids.”

The Internet Archive (which is also known by its Web address, Archive.org) is a nonprofit digital library founded by Brewster Kahle, in 1996. You can find old speeches, comedy routines, TV ads, government documents, academic treatises, entire books. Nearly seven hundred thousand people have downloaded “Beeton’s Book of Needlework.” Its live-music archive is home to 8,976 Grateful Dead recordings—over six thousand more than any other band. You can browse the recordings by year, so if you click on, say, 1973 you will see links to two hundred and ninety-four recordings, beginning with four versions of a February 9th concert at Stanford and ending with several versions of December 19th in Tampa. Most users merely stream the music; it’s a hundred cassette trays, in the Cloud. But you can download some of it, too. Some have been downloaded so often they’d be gold albums, were someone paying for them. (Anything the Dead release commercially gets removed from the Archive.) A mediocre recording of an unremarkable 1979 gig at Madison Square Garden has been downloaded almost seven hundred thousand times.

Suddenly, a fan who may have once had a degraded and haphazard collection had access to thousands of gigs. You could spend a week listening to a year. You could begin to delineate eras and tours and get to know the tapers’ quirks, in the company of a virtual community of anonymous cranks who contribute reviews of each show. (You could say there are two kinds of Deadheads: those who discriminate and those who think it is sacrilegious to do so.) You will generally see three kinds of comments. One is an evaluation of the performance. Another is an assessment of the recording. The third is a personal firsthand recollection of the night itself. Such chronicles are as tedious as recounted dreams. One starts to seek out certain commenters. There’s capn doubledose, a connoisseur of “Let It Grow”; clementinescaboose, who has detected, in Bill Kreutzmann’s drum work on Santa Rosa 6/27/69, the roots of hip-hop; and then there’s Crazycatpeekin, whose gushing five-star review of one oft-neglected favorite of mine—“a six-headed Beethoven . . . unbelievable energy, synchronicity, groupmind, sheer genius in the transition”—had me giddy with the thought that the universe might contain another listener who held it in the same high regard. It turned out that Crazycatpeekin was one of my closest old friends, just repeating our youthful effusions.

In 2006, Rhino Entertainment, a division of Warner Music Group, bought the licensing rights to the Grateful Dead catalogue. Soon afterward, Rhino moved the vault, in four tractor-trailers, to Warner’s giant warehouse, near Burbank. Several months ago, I paid a visit, in the company of the Dead’s current archivist, David Lemieux.

Reared in Ottawa, Lemieux didn’t see the Dead perform until 1987—post-coma, as they say. Lemieux was sixteen, and he attended the show in Hartford. (His mother drove him there.) He became a taper for a while, but later moved on to other music (he likes Pearl Jam, Wilco, David Bowie, and Blur) and an academic career as a film archivist. In 1998, while working for the British Columbia provincial archives, he wrote the Dead offices a letter requesting a photograph, and Latvala asked him to help catalogue their video and film holdings. He spent a summer in the vault, and when Latvala died the band invited Lemieux to take his place. “They hadn’t realized I was a Deadhead,” he told me. Now he works both for Rhino, as a producer of the vault releases, and for Grateful Dead Productions, as the “legacy manager.” (G.D.P. is a lean operation these days, consisting of the surviving band members, a business manager, a lawyer, and Lemieux.) He is not a creature of the vault, as Latvala was. He lives on Vancouver Island but travels to Burbank every few months. “I still pinch myself,” he told me. “I still keep my pay stubs.”

On one occasion a few years ago, the Edge, the U2 guitarist, came to visit the vault, because, as Lemieux told me, “the Dead are famous in the business for surviving and thriving.” Lemieux showed them around. “Man, we’ve got a shitload of tape,” the Edge said. “We could really use you.” Bob Weir, who’d just walked in, said, “He’s ours. Get one of your own.”

Earlier this year, Lemieux flew down to retrieve some video in preparation for a theatrical concert screening. He wanted to pull some audiotape as well, to cull candidates for his new vault series, called “Dave’s Picks” (he’s released four so far). He invited me to tag along.

I met him at the Tangerine Hotel. Lemieux, who had on jeans, a fleece, and a ball cap that read “Vermont Public Television,” is a trim and clean-cut Canadian. He says that he doesn’t smoke pot: “I find that it clouds my judgment about the music.” We drove out to an industrial park by the Burbank airport and were greeted at the loading dock by one of six archivists overseeing the combined assets of Warner Music Group, of which the Dead are a tiny part. The archivist, with an Abbey Road coffee mug and a David Crosby physique, led us into the warehouse, where we came upon another building, made of reinforced concrete. It is the size of a city block and has a rubber-covered roof, to repel leaking water.

“Are you ready to enter the holy portal?” he asked. We passed through a door into a vast climate-controlled hangar of shelves loaded with boxes containing the reel-to-reel multitrack recordings of studio sessions and concerts of hundreds of artists. There was a smell of vinegar—the disintegration of old magnetic audiotape. We wandered the aisles, tunnelling through music. Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Gene Autry, Yes, Coolio, Jean-Luc Ponty, Teddy Pendergrass, Winger. “Three-quarters of this place is unissued,” he said. He pointed to a rack of reel-to-reels: Otis Redding, live, 1967, never circulated. Another set of shelves contained hours and hours of Aretha Franklin songs that have never been released.

“Drool,” Lemieux said.

The Dead’s section was toward the back, surrounded by a chain-link fence. It was a vault within a vault—a Holy of Holies. The funny thing was that the Dead’s stash, sealed off from the rest, had long been by far the most porous of all. Every year, new old music gushes forth. “That’s what makes the Grateful Dead unique within this building,” the archivist said. “David is using it all.”

He opened a padlock. We stepped inside. There were two long aisles, with a line of bays on either side. There were fifty-four bays. Each bay was about four feet wide and nine shelves high, with as many as a hundred tapes per shelf. There were big reels and small ones, cassettes and digital audiotapes. The arrangement wasn’t strictly chronological. The system was arcane. Certain dates summoned sounds, configurations, set lists. 5/25/77: that sick solo before “Wharf Rat.” Others provoked curiosity, such as a tape labelled “Phil Lesh at College of San Mateo 1956-1960.” “Historically significant,” Lemieux said. (Lemieux estimates that of the five thousand or so e-mails he’s received in his role as archivist, only five have been from women.)

Lemieux pointed out the so-called houseboat tapes: five concerts from the summer of 1971 that were salvaged a few years ago from a houseboat belonging to one of the band’s dead keyboardists’ parents. A whole section of the vault housed the sixteen-track fourteen-inch reels from the Dead’s tour of Europe in 1972. Last year, the Dead released the entire tour: a seventy-three-disk boxed set containing all twenty-two concerts and more than seventy hours of music. It came in a small steamer trunk and cost four hundred and fifty dollars. A run of twelve thousand two hundred sold out in four days. It is a pinnacle of completism, by the standards of any genre, and even a diehard might find it a test of patience to work through twenty-one versions of “Sugar Magnolia.” I got bogged down somewhere around Luxembourg.

But one can luxuriate in a library of new liner notes, which are full of revelations about the difficulty of capturing it all on tape. Sometimes things get a little technical. Here’s the crewman Dennis (Wiz) Leonard, recalling a mechanical epiphany: “We drove a McIntosh 275 vacuum-tube amplifier and picked off a tap on the output transformer, which would give us 120 volts with enough current to run the capstan motor at our precise 60Hz/15ips, also now immune to line-frequency fluctuation.” This may well have been as ingenious as the music itself. We’d not have one without the other.

On one shelf, I found a bunch of hand-labelled cassettes arrayed chronologically on a Stroh’s beer flat, as in the back seat of a Deadhead’s Datsun. One of them was dated November 30, 1980, from the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Among my school cohort, a tape of the second set of this show, recorded from the audience, had been a sacred object. Everyone had copies, but a master got handed down, every year, to an ordained devotee, who became the keeper of what was known as the Fox’s Den. In the Den, you had to follow the Four Commandments, which were inscribed on a board. One read, “Thou shalt not press pause, stop, fast-forward, or rewind during the transition”—the transition being an improvisation stitching together two songs, in this case “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain” (Scar->Fire, in the vulgate). None of us had attended the concert, but the performance, to our ears, was an idiosyncratic marvel. Through repeated listenings, in various states of mind, we imbued the Fox with the eminence and the depth of nuance that others reserve for the “Goldberg Variations” or “Kind of Blue.” You’d think we’d scoff now at our younger selves—our wives do—but I’m afraid I still know every note of the Fox, and each time I listen, even now, I find myself thinking, or even saying aloud, “Sorry, this is a masterpiece.” We like what we like.

“Oh, what those are for!”

In the wider world of tape collectors, the Fox had no profile at all and remains, for the most part, just one among multitudes. The Scar->Fire in particular doesn’t seem to rate with the experts. Two years ago, on the Fox’s thirtieth anniversary, a couple of dozen adherents gathered in a Manhattan apartment for a kind of symposium. Over roast beef, attendees took turns delivering prepared remarks on such topics as the Fox Theatre’s beginnings as a Shriners’ mosque, the possible effect of the hall’s acoustics on tempo, and, to quote from the program notes, “the little spirally, zippery, escaping-worm synth sound in the Playin’ Jam that signals the end of the meltdown madness and the beginning of the dreamier, noodley bit.” None of us were musicologists.

The Fox in the vault was not ours, exactly. It was a soundboard recording. I knew this version, too. Many of us had found it sterile. Without the reverberations of the hall, the music lost its grandeur and chime. A guy I know had produced what’s called a matrix, a hybrid of a board recording and an aud, and had posted it on the Archive.

The prized aud was made by a taper named Bob Wagner. Wagner is now a doctor who specializes in occupational medicine. When I called him, at his home in the East Bay, to ask about the Fox, he stepped out for a long walk, so as not to subject his wife to Dead talk. “Of the hundreds or up to a thousand tapes that I’ve made, this one is clearly dearest to me,” he told me. “It’s the best-sounding audience tape I’ve made, and if there’s a better tape out there I’d love to hear it.”

Wagner estimates that he attended four hundred Dead shows. He started taping in 1977, in order to listen back to what he’d experienced live.

“Taping is a creative art,” Wagner told me. “It’s analogous to writing nonfiction. It appealed to me in the way it gave me some participation in the music. The decisions you make: the microphone, the tape deck, your levels, the editing, where you position your microphones, how high. It’s a science as well as an art.”

In November, 1980, the Dead did a swing though Florida and Georgia. Wagner, then a medical student at Chapel Hill, packed up his taping gear and drove down to Lakeland, Florida, in his 1969 Mercury Cougar. He did not have especially long hair. He wasn’t into drugs. He liked to be alert while taping, to keep an eye on his levels. The night of the concert at the Fox, he discovered that he had just about the worst seat in the house—the second-to-last row of the balcony, in the corner. He recorded the first set there, but afterward made his way down to the third row of the balcony, just right of center, and set up his deck in the aisle. He sat throughout the set, holding a microphone in his hand. “I remember it being quite a pain. I can see the band and the house in my mind’s eye, from that spot,” he said. “The sound was so unique and wonderful. There was such wide stereo range on the P.A. It translated to the tape. You don’t usually get that on audience tapes. It’s Dan Healy who deserves the credit. Healy just went for it.” He was referring to the Dead’s soundman, and it occurred to me that his admiration for the Fox had more to do with the quality of sound than with the performance. Tapers listen differently.

“Do you like 1974?” Lemieux asked me. We were driving north on I-5, through the parched wastes of the San Emigdio Mountains, en route from Burbank to the Bay Area. In the trunk were some reels from 1977 and video masters of a few concerts in 1989, which he had pulled from the vault. (When we stopped for gas, Lemieux made sure one of us stayed in the car, to guard the tapes.) During the ride, Lemieux put on 7/29/74, Landover, Maryland—“Weather Report Suite,” a three-part extravaganza written by Bob Weir. This version, nearly twenty minutes long, was a candidate for inclusion on a bonus disk that would accompany the next Dave’s Picks, and he wanted my vote. I’d be honored. Crank it up. Hello, Wall of Sound. I’d probably heard this one before, on the Archive, but the clarity of the vault recording, the distinctive character of each instrument, and maybe the sight, out the window, of raw California fault land made the music seem unique, fresh, and unrepeatable. The Garcia solo in the middle of “Let It Grow,” the suite’s up-tempo finale, had an urgent and purposeful architecture—no spaghetti here. Lemieux and I bobbed our heads in unison, like Wayne and Garth. The jam finished with a piano flourish, and I gave Lemieux a look of holy smokes, which he returned with one of that’s my girl, as though the choice flattered him.

“Our philosophy used to be to find things that people haven’t heard, uncirculated things. Now that, what, ninety per cent of the vault has been circulated, it’s just about releasing good music.” He went on, “Obviously, this will end someday. There’s enough good material in the vault to go at this rate for another twenty or thirty years, or, at a slower rate, for fifty years. Whether I’m involved or not, who knows? But it’s a hard thing to walk away from!”

We sped through orange groves and then the reeking feedlots of Fresno. I’d brought along a few obscure favorites to play for Lemieux. I wanted to try the Fox on him. Knowing him to be picky about audience recordings, I’d brought the matrix. Right away, the recording sounded odd and the performance flawed. Hearing it through his ears, I tensed up. It starts slowly, I muttered. He noted an absence of Weir in the mix (a Healy tendency) and also what he called phase problems. As we were getting to the good parts, Lemieux got distracted and started talking about some old guitars that were bound for a Grateful Dead exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in Cleveland. I turned up the volume a bit. “I think transparency is a good thing,” he was saying, about the band’s affairs. He talked through the transition. Even in the company of the keeper of the vault, being a freak for the Fox was a lonely business.

Perhaps because of his musical education and his exacting mind, Phil Lesh has been the band member most concerned about how the Dead come across on their live releases. He blocked early attempts to put out old concerts in the vault. So a fan might assume he’s the one to talk to about the Dead’s transformation, over time, from living thing to library.

Last spring, while he was in town for a week’s worth of concerts at the Beacon Theatre, Lesh met me for a late lunch at the Mercer Hotel. A few years ago, Lesh and his wife, Jill, bought an apartment nearby, in part to be near the younger of their two sons, who just graduated from Princeton. Lesh walked in alone. He’s a spry seventy-two, thin as a branch of manzanita, with fierce, appraising eyes, a quiet speaking voice, and the poor hearing of a guy who’s spent half his life standing in front of a stack of amps. He got a liver transplant in 1998. He was wearing jeans and an untucked button-down. He ordered beets.

When he’s not touring or in New York, he lives in Marin County, where he has recently opened a club in an old seafood restaurant on the Bay, in San Rafael. He named it Terrapin Crossroads, after the Dead’s album and song suite “Terrapin Station,” and said it was inspired by Levon Helm’s Woodstock barn, where Helm, the drummer for the Band, held jam sessions, open to the public, called Midnight Rambles. Lesh has in recent months been hosting West Coast Rambles, with a rotating cast. “I want to bring musicians who maybe have not had a lot of contact with the Grateful Dead into a band setting and work with them and engage them. It’s not necessarily to teach, but to pull out of them that way of looking at music. So that they can then play this music not the same way but with the same spirit, with the same perspective and goals that we did.”