Articles | Little Hippie

How I came to be a Grateful Dead licensee

July 17, 2015By Taylor Swope

With the Fare Thee Well shows come and gone, I’m left reminiscing about how I got here in the first place.

In the summer of 2001, when I was wide eyed and ready to see the world, I set out on a mission to photograph music festival culture.

The previous fall I had been in Los Angeles working for a photographer where I met the people who would soon introduce me to the jamband world. That winter back at home in New York City, I went to shows at the Wetlands (RIP) every weekend, meeting lots of people and learning everything I could about festivals.

Taylor Swope’s Official Fare Thee Well Poster

June 30, 2015By LITTLE HIPPIE

As an artist and designer of one of the official Fare Thee Well posters, Little Hippie’s Chief Executive Artist Taylor Swope is among the lucky few who will be attending all of the final Grateful Dead performances – last weekend in Santa Clara, California, and this weekend in Chicago. Taylor’s official Fare Thee Well posters, previewed above, will be for … Read More

Phil Lesh Learned About Struggling for Art from Composer Charles Ives

May 7, 2015By LITTLE HIPPIE

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

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

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