Archives baby. On display at the New York Historical Society. They’re from the research library at the University of Southern California, Santa Cruz, which opens to the public next year. Me and my old lady checked it out. It’s got the vibe. Some would call it junk. Most of the stuff came from Eileen Law who started working for the Dead in 1972. She kept everything everybody else was throwing out. Posters, tickets, pictures, band contracts, set lists and a lot more. The Garcia doll is cute and all warm and fuzzy. It’s really a hodge podge most people in their right minds would agree is just stuff but they’re not Deadheads.
The Dead are having another resurgence in the scholarly publication The Atlantic March 2010 vol. 305 no. 2. The article is ” Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead ”. It’s not a joke. Author Joshua Green says the Archives ” will be a Mecca for academics…but the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists who are discovering that the Dead were visionary GENIUSES in the wat they created customer value, promoted social networking and did strategic business planning ”. Wow ! All that from a bunch of guys who were high all the time. Green admits this theory ” tends to elicit grinning disbelief ”. Somewhere Jerry is smiling ear to ear.
While the internet is causing tsunamis in advertising by giving everything away for free the Dead were doing it decades ago. You didn’t have to steal their music at a live concert. Just plug into the mote box for a clean sound. Visionary ? The Dead were just giving it away because they believed music was free. So was love. I’m sure the rest of the band is smiling too. I think it was Bob Weir who said every time we planned something it bombed big time, like the concert at the Sphinx and pyramids in Egypt.
Can the VIBE be harnessed and studied in a serious way ? They’re already doing it man. Barry Barnes, a business professor at Nova Southeastern University in Florida says, ” The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior customer value ”. Don’t bogart that joint my friend pass it all around. Another scholar quoted in Green’s article, Steve Gimbel, a philosophy professor at Gettysburg College who edited a work titled ” The Grateful Dead and Philosophy ” says ” Revolutionaries get vilified, and then, once they get older they just become cute ”. ( you gotta check out the Garcia doll ) Gimbel ads ” Once their not dangerous anymore it’s okay to discuss them in serious ways ”. Far out.
The Grateful Dead were ahead of their time and probably everybody else’s. What is now the subject of scholarly research was just a band that did things their own way. Things that hadn’t been done before. It was done because they believed in freedom and they acted on their beliefs. There was a lot of that going on in the 60′s when the Dead started playing their music. They left us a legacy besides their music. Others are just discovering it.
Jerry would probably smile and say something scholarly like ” That’s cool ”.
