I started reading Jesse Jarnow’s book Heads early in July last summer, finishing it with remarkably appropriate timing while on the plane home from Burning Man. So obviously now, while on a plane home from California again six months later, seems like the perfect time to finally post what it meant to me. Jarnow is a guy … Read More
Book Club
The Best Rock N Roll Memoirs & Biographies
Rock N Roll memoirs are some of my favorite books to read. They’re personal, fun, full of drama and they contain lots of interesting recent history. They can make you laugh, make you cry, and make you think, meanwhile inspiring a craving for an adventure and an appreciation of home. Best of all, you get to learn … Read More
Phil Lesh Learned About Struggling for Art from Composer Charles Ives
You’ve probably heard about what it is to struggle to be an artist. Some have struggled pretty hard, including a music composer named Charles Edward Ives (left), who was largely ignored during his lifetime (1874 – 1954). This had a major impact on the Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh. “Phil was going to college of San … Read More
Jerry Garcia’s Harrington Street Outtake
The book Harrington Street was not completed before Jerry Garcia’s death, but is billed as an autobiography of the musician and author until age 10. The Grateful Dead’s current exhibition on the literary history of the band at the Archive at UC Santa Cruz features one particularly out of place primary source – a photocopy … Read More
Journalists and Primary Sources on the Grateful Dead
Did you ever want to turn into a fly on the wall, so long as it was in a room where your favorite legend was being interviewed by a great journalist? That’s what it feels like listening to Michael Lydon interview Jerry Garcia in an hour long audio clip available on Amazon. Journalists did the … Read More
Posters of Haight Ashbury are ‘Leaves in a Disbound Book’
“Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley always claimed that they photocopied that book, they didn’t, they cut it out with a pen knife. So this is not that copy,” Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas G. Meriwether told us, looking over a medieval era art book (right) on view at UC Santa Cruz, “but that’s the way they got … Read More
The Grateful Dead’s Ice Nine is a Vonnegut Reference
“Cats’s Cradle is basically nothing more than a kind of whimsical but dark vision of Pandora’s box and technology run amok,” said Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas G. Meriwether at UC Santa Cruz. “[It] gave [the Grateful Dead] the metaphor for what they wanted to do with their ideas.” Not the string game, of course but the Kurt … Read More
Reading Theodore Sturgeon, the Grateful Dead are More Than Human
The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human was a fascinating connection of perspectives in the literary tradition and timeline on exhibit at the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz. According to Wikipedia, “the novel concerns the coming together of six extraordinary people with strange powers who are able to “blesh” (a portmanteau … Read More
Jerry Garcia Learned New Realm of Improv from Lenny Bruce
On October 4, 1961, comedian Lenny Bruce was arrested at the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco on obscenity charges for saying what amounted to “two four-letter words and a preposition.” You may be wondering what this has to do with Jerry Garcia. Nicholas G Meriwether over at the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz … Read More
The Grateful Dead are Universal When it Comes to Folk Motifs
When we visited with Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas G. Meriwether at UC Santa Cruz, he was kind enough to give us a tour of their current exhibition on the literary tradition of the Grateful Dead. Nick ensured that LITTLE HIPPIE would get all the tidbits not included on the exhibit’s placards, starting at the very beginning with their official … Read More
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