The Grateful Dead Archive Online is a fully digital, open-source trip

Started off in a closet at the Grateful Dead’s HQ in San Rafael (CA), today the Grateful Dead Archive is one of the most significant popular culture collections of the 20th Century. Preserved at University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) since 2009, its web section (the GDAO) grew up to over 45K digitised items uploaded by UCSC and the Dead’s devoted community of fans. The story of this amazing archive and MAG_BTMMusic Archive Gallery: Beyond The Music’s selected finds from the GDAO are just a few scrolls away.

Formed in the smoky mist of the 1960s counterculture in San Francisco Bay Area, The Grateful Dead need little or no introduction. Globally known as one of the most representative bands of American hippie and surf culture, The Grateful Dead had won the heart of one of the most creative and devoted fanbases the industry has ever seen – aka “The Dead Heads” – thanks to their psychedelic sound, free spirit and unique live performances, one-of-a-kind instrumental jams that were almost always fully improvised.

Keeping faith to their core values of openness and sharing, around 2006 the band members and management were discussing what to do with the massive archive they had amassed in their thirty-years history. Understanding the archive’s educational value and wanting to make sure it went somewhere it would be preserved and looked after, the Dead turned to UC Santa Cruz and entrusted the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) Library Special Collections with their archive, donating it to the institution in 2009.

Announced by band members Bob Weir and Mickey Hart in 2008, the archive donation aimed not only to preserve the amazing collection that encapsulates the band’s activity and influence in contemporary music from 1965 to 1995, but also to make the archives available as a research collection as well as a resource on the Internet.

To this end, over 45,000 digitised items have been drawn from the UCSC Library’s extensive Grateful Dead Archive and from digital content submitted by the community and global network of Grateful Dead fans. Thoroughly catalogued, digitised, and uploaded to the web, they are now free to access for everyone to discover, Deadhead or not.

The array of content accessible through the GDA website (the GDAO) reflects the range of materials collected, managed, preserved and made available by UCSC Library’s Special Collections and Archives department, and it is so vast it is almost overwhelming.

All things Grateful Dead are here: from hotline recordings, fan art, fanzines, tickets, passes and T-shirts, to photographs and posters – including designs by artists like Stanley Mouse and Wes Wilson, radio interviews and videos, as well as web resources such as David Dodd’s The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics website and the fan recordings of concerts archived by the Internet Archive.

And this, is “just” what has been made accessible online…

In fact, the GDA also preserves the band’s business records and correspondence, press clips and awards, framed photos by renowned photographers such as Herb Greene and Susana Millman, and unreleased videos of interviews and TV appearances, which are available for viewing.

Large stage backdrops, stained-glass pieces, and props from live performances are also featured, alongside one of the most surprising holdings of the Archive: a unique and touching collection of fan mail that Eileen Law took care of from 1972 and that, in one sense, constitutes the mainspring of the GDA.

Originally hired by The Grateful Dead to work on their first mailing to their fans in 1972, Eileen Law became a trusted member of the Dead’s entourage, and ended up becoming the band’s original archivist. For over thirty-four years she saved everything, including the over fourteen thousand decorated fan envelopes that constitute this special section of the Archive.

Working for the band until early 2009 when the archives were moved to UC Santa Cruz, “the spiritual mother of all Dead Heads” – as Grateful Dead publicist and author Dennis McNally called her – has been instrumental to the birth of the Archive.

In the summer of 1976 Eileen was alone at the GD’s office in Lincoln Avenue, where she discovered boxes and boxes of promotional materials and other ephemera left behind. It was then that she started to put the press clippings in chronological order and, in some way, began to shape the Grateful Dead Archive.

“I always like collecting things” recalls Law, interviewed by UCSC Library. “At first the archive collection was small, but then it started growing, especially after the newsletters were being sent out on a regular basis and the publication of the official Book of the Dead Heads, which was later in 1983. Many wonderful letters and art started coming to the band”.

Today, some of these decorated envelopes and other artworks by the Dead Heads form the temporary exhibition When We Paint Our Masterpiece: The Art of the Grateful Dead Community, curated by Wyatt Young, Jessica Pigza and Alix Norton, on display until December 22 2022 at the McHenry Library in Santa Cruz.

Originally set-up in February 2020, the exhibition is now back on display, and it’s free and open to the public, offering a powerful example of the possibilities of fan culture. In addition, for those who cannot travel to California, UCSC provides a 360° virtual tour of the exhibition, which is accessible at this link. The virtual tour was created by Queenie Don, Kristy Golubiewski-Davis and Alix Norton.

The GDAO wesbite is a unique, psychedelic, open-source treasure trove, and we invite you all to enter The Grateful Dead’s world and lose yourself in this amazing digital archive, either “going your own way” or diving deep into one of the online exhibitions curated by the GDA.

Let us know what your favourite finds are connecting with us on Instagram.

Engage with the Deadheds’ community on GDA’s officail Facebook page, and help support the continuing work to process, preserve, and promote the Grateful Dead Archive by contributing via the Grateful Dead Archive’s donation page.