Management Secrets Of The Grateful Dead

[Tyler]

Interesting stuff. It is no surprise one of the (if not THE) most unique ongoing musical enterprises was also a groundbreaking business enterprise in many ways.

The short version: Give the fans what they want, make them a part of the entire experience, and don't rip them off for it!

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/grateful-dead-archives

Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead Archive, scheduled to open soon at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will be a mecca for academics of all stripes: from ethno­musicologists to philosophers, sociologists to historians. But the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists, who are discovering that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created “customer value,” promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning.

Fans of the Grateful Dead are big believers in serendipity. So a certain knowing approval greeted the news last year that the band would be donating its copious archive—four decades’ worth of commercial recordings and videotapes, press clippings, stage sets, business records, and a mountain of correspondence encompassing everything from elaborately decorated fan letters to a thank-you note for a fund-raising performance handwritten on White House stationery by President Barack Obama—to the University of California at Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz was understood to be a fitting home not only because it exemplifies the spirit of the counterculture as much as, and perhaps even more than, Berkeley and Stanford, which also bid for the archive, but because the school’s faculty includes an ethnomusicologist and composer named Fredric Lieberman, who is prominent among a curious breed in the academy: scholars who teach and study the Grateful Dead.

It’s worth noting right up front the hurdles Dead Studies faces as a field of serious inquiry. To begin with, the news that it exists at all tends to elicit grinning disbelief; a corollary challenge is the assumptions people carry about its practitioners, such as my own expectation when arranging to visit Lieberman last year that I would encounter an amiable hippie, probably of late-Boomer vintage and wearing a thinning ponytail. Rough mental image: Wavy Gravy with a Ph.D.

Lieberman is nothing of the sort. A small man with parchment skin, wisps of white hair, and large round glasses, he could have looked more professorial only by wielding a Dunhill pipe. His interest in the Grateful Dead, he explained, had arisen largely by chance. In the 1960s, he studied under the noted ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger (father of Pete Seeger) at UCLA, and came to share his mentor’s dismay at the academy’s neglect of popular and non-Western music. Lieberman went on to teach a series of classes in American vernacular music and, though he held no particular fondness for the Grateful Dead, became one of the first academics to teach the band’s music, in the early 1970s.

In 1983, the Dead’s drummer, Mickey Hart, asked Lieberman to help catalog his vast collection of instruments. When the project developed into a larger study of world percussion, Hart invited Lieberman to join him on tour. “I thought it would be interesting to treat it as an ethnomusicological field trip,” Lieberman told me. For some years, when he wasn’t teaching he traveled with the band, introducing Hart to ethnomusicologists by day and attending shows by night. If you squinted hard during any number of the Dead’s most famous shows in the 1980s and ’90s, you might have glimpsed the unlikely spectacle of an ethnomusicologist crouching in earnest concentration behind the drummer, going about his fieldwork.

Lieberman apologized for not being able to show me the archive. The whole thing was under lock and key in a Northern California warehouse whose location was a closely held secret—a precaution against overzealous fans’ plundering a hoard that many would regard as akin to Tutankhamen’s treasure. On March 5, the New York Historical Society will open the first large-scale exhibit of material from the Dead Archive. Then, if all goes as planned, the collection will become the centerpiece of a new campus library at Santa Cruz slated to open later this year. Among other things, it is hoped that the Dead Archive will galvanize a nascent group of scholars across many disciplines who, like Lieberman, study the Grateful Dead—not just musicologists but historians, sociologists, philosophers, psychologists, and even business and management theorists. Some have risked their academic standing in the belief that the band and the larger social phenomenon that surrounds it are far more significant than is commonly understood. Lately, the world has been changing in ways that make that not so hard to believe.

One of the first academic articles on the Grateful Dead appeared in the Winter 1972 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, a periodical for medical professionals, and drew on emergency-treatment records to compare drug use at a Grateful Dead concert with that at a Led Zeppelin concert. (Verdict: Deadheads favored LSD, Zeppelin fans alcohol.) The popular association between the Dead and a drug-fueled counterculture did little to encourage respectable academic endeavor.

[...] (The article goes on in more depth about the management secrets after this)

“Revolutionaries get vilified, and then, once they get older, they just become cute,” says Steve Gimbel, who is a philosophy professor at Gettysburg College and edited the recent collection The Grateful Dead and Philosophy. “Think of Oscar Wilde. Once they’re not dangerous anymore, it’s okay to discuss them in serious ways.”

Read the rest here : http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/grateful-dead-archives

[VincentPuleo]

"Some have risked their academic standing in the belief that the band and the larger social phenomenon that surrounds it are far more significant than is commonly understood."

Yes. This was so interesting and its so awesome this stuff is here to balance out the news reports talking about how "deadheads are stupid"..

"the true expertise lies with the deadheads"

yes!.. I cannot wait until the exhibit opens up in nyc..

[Sister Bluebird]

It is hoped that the Dead Archive will galvanize a nascent group of scholars across many disciplines who, like Lieberman, study the Grateful Dead

[gr8fulpair]

A lot of the GD phenomena was addressed by mythologist Joseph Campbell and John Perry along with Jerry and Mickey at a class held in Berkeley 11/1/1986 called Dionysus To the Grateful Dead... Creativity and Madness, The African Queen meets the Holy Ghost. We taped it , if anyone wants a copy of the cassettes. let me know. At that time it helped me put the scene into a somewhat more productive mode and belayed my fears that I was being absorbed by a cult. I couldn't help but see as many shows as possible and it was a hard fall in 1986 with Jerry in a coma. Caught almost every show in 1986 and 38 shows in 1987, ah to be back in college again.

ooooohhhh, so that was college from 84 - 88......... dang I thought I was on tour and the small boxy room in that building was my home base to do laundry, pick up checks from my parents, eat a few free meals and take a shower.....shoot, I had that all wrong..

[Tinkerbell]

cant wait till the beginning of march..... have to check on the date thought it opened on the 2nd