Slugs and Roses: UCSC to House GD Archives

You don’t have to wait until tomorrow’s press conference to find out what the Grateful Dead will announce tomorrow. The members of the band have struck a deal with UC – Santa Cruz for the university to house 30 years worth of correspondence, business records, merchandise and memorabilia, including stage backdrops, a large Blues for Allah stained-glass artwork a fan gave the band in 1978 and some of the life-size skeletons of the band members for the 1987 Touch of Grey video shoot. No word yet on whether Jerry’s teleprompter, Bobby’s jorts or Phil’s Team USA wristband will be included in the archives.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle there wouldn’t be an archive to share if it wasn’t for GD super-employee Eileen Law. Law, who started her long tenure with the Dead organization in 1972, kept nearly everything:

She also kept press clippings dating back to the band’s inception in ’65, photographs, tickets, back stage passes, handbills, promotional materials, business records, stage backdrops, posters, T-shirts and other Grateful Dead merchandise, issues of the band’s erratically published ’70s newsletter and the more regularly published Grateful Dead Almanac that began in the ’90s, copies of all the band’s posters, vinyl albums, CDs, videos, all the awards and the books written about the band, show files, cassette tapes of the hot line messages announcing tour dates, publishing information, thousands of fan-decorated envelopes mailed to the band’s ticket office, even all the guest lists that went to the venues the band played.

After the Dead moved the vault to Rhino’s Headquarters in 2006 they needed to do something with the rest of their physical archives. The band has close ties to UCSC, so they decided to allow the school to house the archives despite bids from Cal Berkeley and Stanford. When UCSC’s new library opens in 2009 it will contain a reading room, tentatively named Dead Central, featuring exhibitions of material from the archive. So, I guess this means I shouldn’t be expecting the Terrapin Station museum to open anytime soon. For much more on the Dead’s deal with the Banana Slugs check out this article, and be sure to watch the iClips simulcast of the press conference tomorrow at 2PM. [Tip of the hat to Terry O.]

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3 Responses

  1. Will they also have the 45 minutes of my life I lost at shows where they played “Wave To The Wind”? I’d like that back.

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