The Grateful Dead and the University of California Santa Cruz announced Thursday that the Grateful Dead archives would be permanently housed at the University's McHenry Library. The archive consists of artifacts collected over more than forty years of the band's career, including the original artwork that created the Dead's visual iconography; stage sets and props such as the life-size skeleton marionettes used in the 1987 music video for "Touch of Grey"; and correspondence between band members and other entities (for example, letters to and from Warner Brothers honcho Joe Smith, which the band graded for grammar); as well as letters from fans, press clippings, films, recordings of shows, and interviews.

Guitarist Bob Weir, drummer Mickey Hart, and Dead Office goddess Eileen Law joined University officials - including UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal, Chronicle Books CEO (and UCSC Foundation member) and Deadhead Nion McAvoy, University Librarian Ginnie Steel, and Head of Special Collection and Archives, Christine Bunting - for a lively press conference in the poster room at the hallowed Fillmore in San Francisco. The room was filled with journalists, camera crews from television news, and Dead world intellectual luminaries, such as lyricist John Perry Barlow and Grateful Dead Historian Dennis McNally.

Surrounded by rock posters documenting the San Francisco history that runs through the Dead, (Stanford and UC Berkeley had also been courted), Chancellor Blumenthal drew intellectual parallels between the psychedelic rock band and the University.

"The Grateful Dead and UC Santa Cruz share a common history," he explained, in prepared statements that drew sometimes awkward references to Dead culture. 

"Both were founded the same year, 1965, and grew up together. Both evolved from the rich intellectual, social, and cultural atmosphere that blossomed in Bay Area in the 1960s. Both are innovators. ... The Grateful Dead and UC Santa Cruz share freely with their followers, and are truly open-source. The Dead began with free concerts and are famous for encouraging fans to record shows, allowing them to plug directly into the soundboard. The Dead showed that by sharing music freely, the music would spread. And it really did. UC Santa Cruz will share the archive freely, using a state-of-the art archiving program, to make it accesssible to researchers and the public worldwide."

In addition, he noted, Santa Cruz's servers have long been home to David Dodd's Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, and the University features courses in Grateful Dead taught by Fred Lieberman.

Asked if the band was "disappointed" that the archive would not be housed closer to home, within San Francisco, Weir explained that Santa Cruz was actually physically closer to the Dead's roots, in Palo Alto. 

And reminder comes from Merry Prankster Ken Babbs, via spokesprankster Freddy "Are We Really?" Hahne that the very first Acid Test, the 1960s party-experiments featuring both LSD and rock and roll, was held in 1965 at Babbs' ranch, The Spread, in Santa Cruz - and featured the Warlocks, who would become the Grateful Dead, as well as Beat literature icons Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady.

(Perhaps ironically, the University closed the campus to vehicular traffic on April 20, the "420" stoner's holiday, to stave off what had become a potsmoking festival with a wide draw. Asked after the conference about the apparent discrepancy, Blumenthal explained that while the University was eager to embrace Grateful Dead culture, it was not eager to become a magnet for illegal activity.)

Both Weir and Hart said they looked forward to being able to research their own history in the archives - Weir noting more than once that he planned to write a book, and would likely need the archive to jog his memory.

"I can just go down there, spend a couple of days, leaf through the stuff ... oh yeah! So this is an invaluable facility for me."

Hart said he wanted to look up a particularly "seething" review that had once greeted the band in New York, describing them as mad surgeons operating on the fragile minds of the youth, with rusty scalpels.

But central to the collection will be the treasures of the Deadheads.

Eileen Law, who ran the Dead Office's correspondence with Deadheads for many years, included a note on the liner notes for the 1971 live album Grateful Dead (aka Skull and Roses, aka Skullfuck):

"The collection I have came from many sources," the soft-spoken Law said. "I just ended up being the keeper, and really starting this. When the Dead put out their live album in the fall of 71, their live album said, 'Dead Freaks Unite. Who are you, how are you, where are you. Send us your name and address and we'll keep you informed ... you opened up the door to many letters, art, gifts, and that was all kept in a little closet at our Victorian house in San Rafael."

All that material, which Law explained would have found a home in the Dead's once-planned Terrapin Station museum, will be housed at the McHenry library at Santa Cruz - along with taped phone messages that once greeted Deadheads calling in with detailed instructions on how to order tickets by mail; and, presumably, the daily phone messages fans could summon in those far-gone days, to hear daily-updated setlists ... read ... very ... slowly ...

One element sure to be a draw for Deadheads and scholars will be the collection of mail order envelopes, often laden with intricate artwork, drawn onto the envelopes by fans writing in to purchase mail order tickets.

"The feedback we got back from out there, it informed us as to the relevance, and how relevant we were at the time," Hart said, expressing a surprising degree of awe.

"Just the kind of spiritual feedback that you'd get through these really ornate, very, very fine drawings - The love that went into one letter, you could see how ornate it was, it was gorgeous. This mattered - they were chasing the feeling, just like we were. And this is that representation in the visual world. The ticket envelopes, they were fantastic. Just to get the ticket, they would make these little masterpieces out of these letters. Some of them were just brilliant. And I loved to look at them. We used to put them on the board."

"Thousands of them," Law added.

Asked if fans would be able to visit the archive to look up and locate their old mail order envelopes, University Librarian Ginnie Steel seemed delighted.

"I don't suggest you lick any of those letters," Hart quipped. "Or touch them without gloves."

Steel and Bunting explained that most of the contents of the archive, now filling a warehouse, will be housed "upstairs" in the University's Special Collections facility. But the librarians are aiming for a very visual presence. Right within the McHenry Library's main entrance, and adjecent to a cafe, will be a room, Grateful Dead Central, where selected artifacts will be on display, and where scholars will be able to access a directory and, it seems, electronic images, of the material in the collection.

Then they will be able to request material from the full-time Grateful Dead archivist (a position the University is looking to raise one million dollars to endow). The archivist will pull the selected material from within the Special Collection, for scholars' perusal.

The collection will move to Santa Cruz for archiving over the summer, though it may be a while longer before it is catalogued and displayed at Dead Central, and throughout the library.

In the meantime, the University will continue to acquire new material for the archive. And other Institutions - the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, among them - are already inquiring about borrowing from the collection. Santa Cruz is also looking forward to hosting a West Coast Grateful Dead symposium, in the vein of the one held last Fall at the University of Massachusetts.

Weir noted that the Archives will be an ongoing project for Deadheads, as well.

"This is not to be frozen in time, either, it occurs to me," he said. "This is still an open and vital thing. There's a new address. You'll no longer send it to Grateful Dead Office. If you have correspndences, love lettters, advice, you no longer send it to the Grateful Dead Office in San Rafael, but you'll send it to UC Santa Cruz."

But Law knows just as well.

"We still have that old mailbox," she said quietly.

"Really?" said Hart.

Dead Freaks Unite

Who Are You?

Where Are You?

How Are You?

Dead Heads

P.O. Box 1065

San Rafael, CA 94915