The Best Rock N Roll Memoirs & Biographies

January 30, 2017By Taylor Swope

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

Jerry Garcia’s Harrington Street Outtake

May 6, 2015By LITTLE HIPPIE

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

May 5, 2015By LITTLE HIPPIE

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’

May 4, 2015By LITTLE HIPPIE

“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

May 1, 2015By LITTLE HIPPIE

“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

April 30, 2015By LITTLE HIPPIE

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

April 29, 2015By LITTLE HIPPIE

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

April 28, 2015By LITTLE HIPPIE

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