Ask Lookout: How did the Grateful Dead’s archive end up in Santa Cruz?

Earlier this year, as April bloomed across the UC Santa Cruz campus and McHenry Library buzzed with students flitting through the first week of spring quarter, a bronze bust of Jerry Garcia’s famously four-fingered right hand beckoned a trio of young people away from the library’s main entrance and into a room known as Dead Central.

A muffled, live concert recording played in the background as the group perused the curious display of Grateful Dead paraphernalia. Old concert posters sat next to creatively decorated envelopes from fans, handwritten letters asking band members for tickets, decades-old scraps of correspondence, recording equipment and photographs, all of it apparently the real deal. This room, the library’s only permanent exhibit, offered a sliver of the expansive Grateful Dead archive housed upstairs. 

After a few minutes, the group stopped before a tall glass case to study the life-sized, skeletal marionettes of Garcia, Brent Mydland and Phil Lesh, co-stars of the band’s 1987 “Touch of Grey” music video. 

“I wonder why all this stuff is here?” the young man in the group asked. As the three turned to leave, one of the young women took a guess. “They must have played a lot of shows in Santa Cruz.” 

Santa Cruz can readily claim its share of marquee faces and events from the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Early Kool-Aid acid tests took place here, and the Merry Pranksters, those roving jesters of psychedelia, called Santa Cruz County home. Huey P. Newton and bell hooks are UCSC-educated, and the region is nothing without its self-mythology as a particularly open and free-loving bohemian enclave. 

However, Santa Cruz cannot claim any prominent place in the Grateful Dead’s history. Despite what you might presume by the weekly cover band performances, Jerry Garcia lookalikes and seemingly endless stream of knockoff band merch drifting through the streets, the Grateful Dead played only a single show here: Sept. 24, 1983, at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds, near Watsonville (an infamous show, in fact – a toddler died). The band did not form in Santa Cruz and none of the members are from the county. Aside from Garcia having his right middle finger chopped off in Lompico when he was 4 (allegedly), the connection to Santa Cruz is tangential at best.

So why, when it came time for the remaining members of this counterculture pantheon to find a home for their official archive — arguably one of the great pop culture collections of the 20th century, priceless in value — did the band choose Santa Cruz? 

American vanity

Coaxing the band’s physical history out of the Bay Area and down to Santa Cruz took some convincing, and even a little politicking. 

In the politics of power, “follow the money” is sage advice. When it comes to the politics of celebrity, vanity may prove the stronger invisible hand, even for a band who worked to transcend such earthly trappings. 

Former county supervisor John Leopold may have never heard the call to Santa Cruz County without the 20-minute, braided improvisations of Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir. And Garcia and Weir’s broad cultural imprints may have never ended up preserved inside McHenry Library without the help of Leopold.

Before he went on to serve three terms representing Live Oak and Soquel from 2008-20, Leopold was a bona fide Deadhead. He lost count of his Grateful Dead concert tally after 250 shows. 

“To attend that many shows, you have to either be a trust-fund kid, have a really good-paying job that gives you vacation, or sell drugs,” Leopold said. But he and his twin brother found a fourth route. They set up shop outside concerts, along that chaotic bazaar known to Deadheads as Shakedown Street, and slung homemade merch. At the Leopolds’ booth, $1 would get you a high-quality print of the band, backed with full setlists from every show from the previous year. They’d easily sell 300 per show, which in 1983 was enough to continue riding the band’s wake across the country. 

In 1984, Leopold made his maiden voyage to the Golden State, traveling to the Bay Area to see Garcia and Weir play three nights at UC Berkeley’s Greek Theatre and two nights in Ventura, with a trip to San Francisco in between to attend the Democratic National Convention. As follows many first glimpses of California, Leopold the sojourner soon became Leopold the resident. He resolved to leave his hometown in Pittsburgh and finish out his remaining college years at UC Santa Cruz. He’s not left since. 

Forty years later, Leopold sat on his shaded patio in Live Oak, a version of the Dead’s “China Cat Sunflower” from an early 1970s live album playing from surround sound speakers overhead. He recounted how his fandom eventually evolved into an active role close to the band.

In 1999, four years after Garcia’s death, the band faced an uncertain future, but its charity arm, the Rex Foundation, decided it would continue awarding small grants to programs in the arts, sciences and education. However, the foundation’s leadership needed a refresh, and Leopold was asked to join by a friend on the board. 

Leopold would go on to serve a decade on the Rex Foundation board, half of that time leading it as chairman. All the while, he was also employed on campus as a development director in UCSC’s division of social sciences, “raising money for things I cared about,” as he put it. 

Around 2007, murmurs began to spread around the UCSC campus that the Grateful Dead had decided to shutter its headquarters in San Rafael. The band wasn’t going away, but it had been 12 years since Garcia died and, Leopold guessed, the surviving members wanted to shed some old skin. 

However, they were surprised to learn that old skin included a 2,000-square-foot warehouse brimming with organized files, recordings, correspondence, business documents, artwork and other artifacts. Eileen Law — the Grateful Dead’s long-time employee who acted as liaison between the band and its Deadheads fan club — had been coyly storing away pieces of their history, slowly building an expansive archive. She once referred to herself as “the person that never shredded.” The band decided to try to find it a proper home.

“The band members and management were discussing what to do with the archives,” Law said in a 2019 impact report on the archive put together by the university’s special collections department. “They understood the value and wanted to make sure it went to the right place that would take good care of it.” 

According to Leopold, the band first approached Stanford University; however, Stanford wanted to charge a significant fee to process the archive. The band demurred. 

The late UCSC professor Fredric Lieberman, an ethnomusicologist who taught one of the nation’s only serious courses about the Grateful Dead’s music, had urged his employer to throw its hat in the ring. Leopold heard about the opportunity through the university’s librarian, Margaret Gordon, who knew he had a connection to the band through the Rex Foundation. 

Leopold began charting the connective tissue between UCSC and the Dead to puff up the university’s pitch. Cameron Sears, the band’s longtime manager, graduated from the school, and Alan Trist, head of the band’s publishing arm, Ice Nine, had a Banana Slug daughter. Then there was Lieberman, who was not only leading serious academic inquiry into the band, but had helped drummer Mickey Hart write two books, including the influential “Planet Drum.” 

The university also already housed an impressive collection of American pop culture archives from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s paintings, and Robert Heinlein’s and Kenneth Patchen’s papers. UCSC’s archive room was more than just some stiff, dusty hall of manuscripts. However, the university soon had competition. 

“Usually when one UC goes after an archive, the other UCs respectfully back off a little bit,” Leopold said. “Well, as we’re moving this along, Berkeley comes in and tries to put their big foot down.” 

Bassist Phil Lesh was born in Berkeley and had attended UC Berkeley, and Hart’s wife, Caryl Hart (who now sits on the California Coastal Commission), was actively working toward a doctorate at the school. Between 1967 and 1989, the Dead played 29 shows at the Greek Theatre alone. 

But UCSC held a particularly special hand. As Leopold tells it, the university had planned to surprise the band with a final cherry once the deal was closed: a permanent Grateful Dead exhibit inside its newly renovated library. Berkeley couldn’t offer the same kind of permanent air time, but its connections to the Grateful Dead made it a more logical choice. Time was of the essence, and Leopold urged the university to put all its cards on the table. 

“While Berkeley was trying to make a play, Cameron Sears and I told the university that it would be a good time to mention the permanent exhibit idea,” Leopold said. 

The choice was left to the band, and the permanent exhibit tipped the scale to Santa Cruz. In April 2008, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and UCSC officials gathered inside the historic Fillmore West in San Francisco to announce the decision. Weir said the band agreed that the best place for the archive was somewhere the community could interact with it. 

“We discovered a new land, a new place, and these folks are the cartographers and are going to map it out,” Weir said then, referencing the university employees leading the effort. “UC Santa Cruz is the seat of neo-Bohemian culture, which we’re a face of. So there could not be a more cozy place for this collection to land.”

According to news reports from that time, Hart acknowledged that not even the band was sure what was contained in the archive. 

“They’ve got a big task before them,” Hart said of the university’s archivists. “Talk about a long, strange trip.”

‘I felt loved back’

News of the archive rang through the regional and national media. A New York Times headline read, “A Deadhead’s dream for a campus archive.” Comedian Jon Stewart even tackled it on “The Daily Show.” During a segment in which he read ridiculous job descriptions, Stewart focused on UCSC’s search for its inaugural Grateful Dead archivist. 

“They’re looking for someone who loves the Grateful Dead, yet somehow also has ‘exceptional organizational skills’ … basically, UC Santa Cruz is saying, ‘I need a miracle,’” Stewart joked. “Four years of undergrad, and two years of graduate school, and you can spend your days picking blotter acid out of Phil Lesh’s underwear from the Blues of Allah tour.”

The university brought on Ivy League-educated academic and Deadhead Nick Meriweather from the University of South Carolina to handle inaugural archivist duties. The job included sorting, organizing and categorizing the trove, item by item, but also accepting interviews, writing essays and maintaining a certain amount of hype around the collection. Meriweather had to also build the system by which fans and scholars could engage with each and every scrap. 

The archive debuted at the New-York Historical Society before settling into the new McHenry Library in 2012, around the same time Wyatt Young was thinking about community college. 

Young, a high school dropout from Georgia, had spent his 20s waiting tables at fine-dining restaurants, digging ditches in Texas and traipsing through other “weird jobs.” The Dead, and Garcia in particular, often on his mind. 

“I didn’t finish high school, and that’s probably thanks to the Grateful Dead,” Young told Lookout during a Zoom call in early May. “Apparently teachers don’t like it when you skip school for two or three weeks to follow bands around the country.” 

However, the Grateful Dead, which played a role in knocking him from a more traditional education, now offered a new motivation. Young resolved to go back to school, with a “laser focus on working with collections,” fueled, in part, by news of the band’s. 

Young eventually transferred to UC Santa Barbara in 2015, where he focused his undergraduate honors thesis on the history of the Grateful Dead archive. That helped propel him to a master’s and doctorate program at UCSC, where in 2018 he finally landed a job as Dead archivist, following Meriweather. Young would hold that post until the pandemic shut everything down. 

By the time Young took over, the archive was still far from processed. The job required him to categorize more than 300 linear feet of material,  describe each piece for research guides and curate Dead Central exhibits. Young provided the final heavy lift in shaping the archive as it stands today, and was the last person hired by the university to focus solely on processing the Grateful Dead collection. Today, the library’s special collections staff handles all of the university’s archives. 

Young would tease the Deadheads in his circle that he knew Jerry Garcia’s Social Security number and checking account balance during certain stretches of his career. The expansive collection of fan correspondence moved him most. Sorting through a history he not only loved but saw himself as part of, he said, felt like an intimate, revealing moment with a longtime friend.

“The fact that they held onto nearly every scrap of paper anyone ever sent them as a fan told me how much they cared for the community,” Young said. “It wasn’t a one-way street. I felt loved back, even though it wasn’t my stuff. I felt validated, like, ‘Oh, they loved us back.’ 

“I know the fame was hard for them,” Young said before catching himself. “There I go, talking like I know them personally again.” 

Parasocial relationship, the term used to describe a one-sided connection between someone and a person they often see but don’t know, may feel like a 21st-century phenomenon born from the ferment of celebrity obsession and social media. However, Young sees parallels between the Deadheads and today’s Swifties, Taylor Swift’s zealous fan base.

“People definitely had parasocial relationships with Jerry and the Dead,” Young said. “It’s not malicious, and it’s not like a stalker, but everyone felt like they knew them and they were so close.” 

It’s that feeling of closeness — one that sometimes bleeds into obsession — that helps to breathe vitality into the archive; energy found not only within its boxes but in the steady stream of people who visit McHenry Library each year to engage with the band’s physical history. 

“It’s a unique place,” Young said of the archive. “It’s not just a bunch of papers and manuscripts and government documents. It’s important to people. They expect wild things and there are for sure wild things in there.” 

‘We will not fade away’

When I arrived at the Special Collections room on the third floor of the McHenry Library earlier this spring, any expectations I brought of a wild place quickly vanished under the monotones of academia. 

Fluorescent lights hanging over vacant study tables illuminated beige walls and a slightly darker beige carpet. A quintessential reading room: so nondescript as to dull out any distractions between the reader and the read. 

The real magic hides behind keypad-locked doors (also beige), gates kept by Teresa Mora and her special collections team. Mora laughs when I ask whether she is a Deadhead. She knew the question was coming. She is not. As mother to the university’s full collection of archives, she is careful not to over-love any one child; however, she admits the Dead bring a life to this room that other collections don’t. 

“We have a lot of significant holdings, but nothing has gotten quite the same amount of buzz as the Grateful Dead,” Mora tells me. “I knew the cultural impact of the band existed, but coming here and getting a deep dive, I didn’t realize to what extent it existed until I was in the thick of it.” 

Mora said members of the band have visited the archive, and many significant projects on the Grateful Dead use the collection for research. The Dave’s Picks series, the highly anticipated, vinyl box sets released quarterly by Grateful Dead tape archivist Dave Lemieux, relies on UCSC’s archive to help give historical context to the live recordings. Young believes the team that produced 2017’s “Long Strange Trip” documentary (Martin Scorcese was involved) must have used the archive during the research phase, though their use is unconfirmed. 

The nearly 1,000 Grateful Dead boxes in the university’s vault contain more than 925 linear feet of materials. The archive is organized into 12 categories, or series: history, business records, show files, press, correspondence, photographs, media, posters, artwork, everyday items, decorated envelopes and, in the final category, backstage passes, tickets and laminates. 

The materials include flashy pieces, like a thank-you note from President Barack Obama for a benefit show, to the flotsam of a band on the road, such as concert itineraries, old contract riders, and notes on live performances from Dick Latvala, one of the band’s tape archivists. Mora and Young both pointed to the archive’s business records as a main draw for scholars. 

“I know the Dead are associated with hippies and counterculture, but one thing I learned is that they really were capitalists,” Young told me. “If it could fit a Steal Your Face logo on it, they were going to market it.” 

Yet, if there is a linchpin for the sustained Grateful Dead fever, it was the band’s decision to include the following message on the sleeve of its 1971 live album, “Grateful Dead.” 

DEAD FREAKS UNITE: Who are you? Where are you? How are you?

Send us your name and address and we’ll keep you informed.

Dead Heads, P.O. Box 1065, San Rafael, California 94901.

A direct access link between the band and fans was born. Once the band set up that post office box, Law told the Associated Press in 2008, the mail never stopped pouring in. Law kept nearly everything. 

I’ve seen Dead & Company live, fallen down my share of band lore rabbit holes, and genuinely enjoy the music, but I do not claim residency among the Deadheads. So, with more than 900 boxes of materials at my fingertips and only so much time, I spent my two days at the archive sorting through folder after folder of fan correspondence, hoping to better understand how that fervor felt. 

A box titled “Weird Mail” quickly reminded me of passion’s darker, impulsive side. 

Aggressive letters called out Jerry Garcia and the band for their relationship with the Hells Angels and how it led to the disaster at the 1969 Altamont Speedway concert where four people died. One of those letter-writers, a man from New Jersey, filled the page with epithets, threatened to “cut some blubber off [Garcia’s] fat, greasy stomach,” and then signed his screed with his full name and home address, ZIP included. 

Much of the weird mail includes people asking for money, or having what reads as nothing short of psychotic breaks on the page. Many of the letters ride the line of eerie and desperate, begging the band members for help or absolution. There is an entire file titled “Gary Virgil” whose documents reveal a winding story about a relentless letter-writer who appears to eventually turn into a stalker with several aliases. The file includes telegrams from private investigator agencies the band’s management seemed to be courting, attached to a criminal file on Virgil. 

Once the novelty fades, it dawns on me that I am violating something sacred. A personal letter, whether typed or handwritten, is among the most intimate forms of communication we have. Sure, these people signed, sealed and sent these off to one of the world’s most popular bands, but it feels strange that 50 years later they have ended up in my hands, subjected to my judgments. Ethical questions begin to arise, and the letters seem to grow more incoherent and anguished. Time to move on. 

I soon found a box titled “Condolences for Jerry, 1995,” holding letters from fans following Garcia’s death. As I begin reading, an overwhelming sense of love leaps from the pages. I came upon an entire photo album sent to the band from a young fan in France, the pages containing printed photographs of teenagers in a concert hall, seemingly celebrating the life of Garcia and the Dead. 

I then held a handwritten letter wrapped into a tie-dye bandana. “Hi, I attended the vidual [sic] for Jerry Garcia in St. Louis Missouri at Forest Park,” the letter reads in neat print. “I passed around this bandana in memory of Jerry. Please give it to Bob Weir. I don’t know how to get in touch with him.” The attached bandana is covered in heartfelt notes to the band and prayers for Garcia. Other letters contain origami cranes, handmade turtles and earrings, personal mementos memorializing their hero. 

Most moving, however, was a letter from a Wisconsin man who identified himself only as Marlin. While reading his single-spaced, printed message, I felt I had touched something essential about this collection, its importance to fans, and its place as a record of 20th-century American pop culture. 

Marlin paraphrased famed scholar Joseph Campbell, who once said of the Grateful Dead, “This is more than music, it turns something on in here [the heart.]” After attending several Dead shows, Marlin said he came to understand that it was not the musicians and not the concerts, but each individual unto themselves “who brings this exuberance to the gathering.” Yet, he said even if the phenomenon was more than the band, the band had to resolve to continue without Garcia. 

“Jerry may have been the seed, but it grew beyond what he or anybody could imagine and though one blossom may fall from the bush (or several) you don’t kill the plant,” Marlin wrote. “I believe we came together for something greater than the playing of one man’s guitar. If the band dissolves will people be led to believe that it was only Jerry? Now that he is gone, go home. … We all loved and still love Jerry and I believe we love loving even more. 

“Please continue to create those spaces in time where our colorful and hope-filled family can continue to gather and celebrate the wheel goin’ round. We will not fade away and I pray that you won’t either.” 

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