“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
“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
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
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
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
Every now and again you meet with an object that gives you physical proximity, and makes you feel a connection to a moment that resonates deeply across time and space. In this case, THEE dictionary edition referenced by Jerry Garcia as the primary source for the band’s name, now on view at the UC Santa Cruz Grateful Dead Archive. … Read More
Little Hippie recently had the pleasure of meeting Grateful Dead Archivist Nicholas G. Meriwether while visiting the Grateful Dead Archive at University of California at Santa Cruz. The Grateful Dead Archive is located in McHenry Library on the beautiful campus. Archive materials are on display in the Brittingham Family Foundation’s Dead Central Gallery on the 2nd Floor … Read More
We’re catching up on Michael Hamad’s piece Deadhead Scholars, Fans Marking 50 Years Of Grateful Dead: On the scholarship front, several new books about the Dead, some of which draw upon records located in the Dead Archive, will hit the market in 2015, including Peter Richardson’s cultural history “No Simple Highway”; “Deal,” a memoir by Bill … Read More
Just reading Steve Harvey over at the AV Network talking about the event that kicked off modern concert sound production. While various individuals and companies were simultaneously working on developing bigger and louder speaker systems across the country, and around the world, particularly in the U.K., the birth of the modern concert production sound system can … Read More
Bob Weir’s guitar is on thousands of Grateful Dead songs over the last 50 years, and the new documentary “The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir” profiles the legend of music and psychedelia. We’re reading Frank Scheck’s Hollywood Reporter piece about the film’s debut last year. After the Tribeca Film Festival premiere Bob … Read More