Features

Dick Latvala and The Story of the Grateful Dead Vault

What was your favorite era musically?

Every year has been unique and has different characteristics. It has good and bad shows, and great moments on different levels. Everyone else says they like the era they first heard the band, and if they first went to a show in ’77, they want to hear that kind of stuff. Or the Brent era people—a lot of pressure I’m getting is to come up with something from the ’80s. I resist it terribly because I think it should sit on itself for 15 years and let’s get to the goods in the ’60s and early ’70s.

As for my favorite era? Without a question, the fall and winter of ’68 and the spring of ’69 up to near the end of ’69, that was the most powerful time on earth to experience a Grateful Dead concert. On the other hand, there are a few exceptions—9/19/70 at the Fillmore East being one of them and 2/13-14/70.

Even though a tape is widely circulated, it seems the market will still buy the Dick’s Picks version.

Well, it’s also their knowing that it’s gonna be the best quality possible because it’s being produced by the people that are best at it—that’s Jeffrey Norman and John Cutler. They know how to make it sound as good as possible, and I’m good at absorbing where the energy is in the show. I’m into that part, and the combination makes an effective product. I don’t know how Dick’s Picks seems to people, but I think they’re great. I still can listen to them and get turned on by them, so I think it’s successful and everyone else seems to think it is. I really expected more than a million of Dicks Picks Volume 2 to sell as soon as it came out [This DP presents set two from 10/31/71 at the Ohio Theatre in Columbus, Ohio]. I thought it was the most unbelievable thing.

Well, it’s available only through mail-order.

Yeah, it’s good the way it’s being done, too. This is sort of a club, in a sense. It’s a big family of people and we’re all in it and it’s for all of us that these are being released.

You were asking about my favorite period, but there’s so many. I can live in the winter of ’73 for Dick’s Picks for the next ten releases for example. There’s so many great things that happened in that period. And the ’72 stuff is phenomenal, but we gotta move around, so [right now] I’m learning a lot about the ’80s. I didn’t keep such good records as the ’80s came on. I started doing different things. And then I got hired and I didn’t do the analysis I used to do about tapes. I had a different function. Anyway, I missed out on a lot of probably really great shows that I’m now discovering through the feedback others have given me. A lot of people don’t think 1980 was such a great year, but there are some phenomenal things in there that people have missed, and I have missed. There are discoveries to be made in each year, all the way up to the current time.

There’s a lot that goes into what a good show is, and that includes all the mistakes too. That’s the tough part. Where do you draw the line? You know the band. The people that performed it certainly want to make it sound perfect so they tend to sanitize things. So if you keep them out of the picture, we Deadheads can just grab the stuff that’s really good, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

There are times that people walk away from shows thinking they were incredible. They seek out the tape and the reality seeps in…

That happens in a lot of cases on tapes. What is represented didn’t seem to capture what you remember from being there, but sometimes they do. There’s examples that do for me and they keep hitting me, and they have lasting power. That’s the essence of it. All shows have their aspects of greatness in them, and it’s an elusive thing to judge which one to choose.

Have you been listening to the 1972 tour?

Oh boy, yeah, especially October and November.

Have you considered doing excerpts from all the New Year’s shows?

My ego resists concept releases, other than bits and pieces, or jams unto themselves.