#GRATEFUL DEAD ARCHIVE#

The roots of the Grateful Dead go back to 1964, when lead guitarist/vocalist Jerry Garcia, keyboard player Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan, and guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir formed Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions, an acoustic band playing mostly Blues and Folk music in the San Francisco Bay Area. Hugely popular as a touring act, the band was singular in a number of aspects, including the way it combined Blues, Country, and Folk influences with a devotion to psychedelia-drenched improvisation, the way it achieved large-scale popularity without radio hits, and the rabid intensity of its itinerant army of fans, called Deadheads. It was a big tent - it was an open tent.Perhaps more then any other band, the Grateful Dead helped develop and propagate the 1960s San Francisco hippie image, and it’s an image they unwaveringly maintained throughout their 30-year career. Why did 'The Iliad' and 'The Oydssey' survive? Why did the Old Testament survive? Because people could see their place in these things. “Why did Bach survive? There were a lot of composers when Bach and Mozart were around. “That’s one of the reasons this culture, this music, this band, these songs have such longevity,” Agelasto said. More: Grateful Dead: Music never stops for Dead and Co., Phil Lesh, GarciaLive, tribute bands

#GRATEFUL DEAD ARCHIVE#

On the “Workingman’s Dead” opener “Uncle John’s Band,” Garcia and lyricist Robert Hunter famously extended an invitation – “Won’t you come with me?” – and the archive is just the latest way fans can join Jerry on the long, strange trip. Garcia’s work has been constantly inspirational for generations – one only needs to stroll the Shakedown Street vendor villages that pop up in the parking lots of Dead family shows, with independent artisans plying their Dead-inspired wares. Utilizing a cloud-based storage system similar to Google Drive or Dropbox, Starchive allows contributors to share digital files and record audio or video directly into the archive. “The lane that we’re opening up is the one that hasn’t really been captured yet: It’s all of your stories,” he said. Agelasto explained where the Jerry Garcia Archive falls in all of this. Rhino Entertainment has done a stellar job managing the Grateful Dead’s back catalogue, while Round Records has been releasing Jerry’s non-Dead work under the “GarciaLive” banner. “What a great idea to get all the stuff together – the memorabilia and stuff like that, to have it all in one place.” “This is the first I’ve even heard of such a thing, but it sounds great,” said Nelson. It’s perfectly fitting, then, that the archive bearing his name is inviting the input of Garcia fans from around the world. Meaning that long before he was a world-renowned artist in his own right, Garcia was, first and foremost, a fan himself. More: Your guide to things to do all summer at the Jersey Shore It wasn’t calculated or anything, (it) sort of organically it came about.” So that’s when we thought of the idea of having a band, starting a band. “Every time I’d go to the record store and look for a Folkways record or something new to relate to that, and so did all of us, so did most of us who were into music. I was just so enthralled and excited about that,” he said. “That (music) was the thing that really just slayed me. Keelin is the co-founder of the Jerry Garcia Foundation alongside her mother, Jerry’s former wife and Englishtown native Manasha Garcia.

“This creative integration will provide the community with a uniquely interactive and joyful experience of archival resources,” said Keelin Garcia, Jerry’s daughter, in a statement. And most of us still kind of kept our stuff.” … When you think about it, that kind of body of work from the fans, from all of us, is a huge, massive body of work. ”I used to draw tape covers and spend lots of time curating my own little archive. I did some original artwork,” said Peter Agelasto, the endeavor’s lead archivist. “This archive is really going to put into the hands of us fans the ability to go to the front door of the archive and say, ‘You know what? I took some really interesting pictures on tour. The Jerry Garcia Archive, a collaborative venture between the Jerry Garcia Foundation and online storage platform Starchive, will serve as an online resource, a digital library of Garcia information and fan submissions. Just in time for what would have been his 80 th birthday, Jerry Garcia is set to be celebrated with the launch of a new online archive honoring the iconic Grateful Dead singer and guitarist.

Grateful dead