A New Life for the Dead: Grateful Dead Handle Their Business

A message to Garcia, that’s what she has.

“Who do I see about getting backstage?” she asks with musky urgency. “I’ve got a message for Garcia. It’s very important.“

She’s not sure she’s hitting on the right party; her expression is guarded and nearly indecipherable in the Dead-loud murk of the Fairgrounds Arena, except for the urgency in her eyes. Groupie urgency? Space urgency? There are variations on this movie. “He’s such an amaaaazing dude…. I’ve driven all the way from Dallas here to Oklahoma City…. Tell them my old man died last year and I’ve got to talk to Jerry.”

A message to Garcia. Everybody around the Grateful Dead knows about messages to Garcia. Keith Godchaux, who’s played keyboards for the Dead for two years, remembers with an ironic grimace having to go through the meeting-Garcia movie before he could show his stuff. It seems everybody who’s ever gotten high behind a Dead album has to talk to Garcia.

Jerry Garcia stands for the Dead for a lot of people. He’s the lead guitarist and singer, most of the song credits are his, he’s extraordinarily articulate, and most of all everyone senses his special spiritual authority in the band, his permissive guru-figure status. But at the same time he never puts himself in front of the band. Even in the matter of composing credits, he is so far from claiming the spotlight that the group has just adopted a “Plan C,” under which royalties are not distributed exclusively to the composer and lyricist—the parties of the “original creative flash,” to use Jerry’s term—but a percentage also goes to all members of the band, to acknowledge their part in the finished version of the song.

For that matter, the Dead depend on their road crew of 16—they won’t use any PA system but their own—and, in varying ways, on larger and larger circles of people, ultimately including the whole Dead family of perhaps 150 persons. That’s friends, old ladies, co-workers, resident artisans, side trips—everything from Grateful Dead Records Corporation to Sparky and the Ass Bites from Hell.

* * *

The offices of Grateful Dead Records, Inc., are in a classically funky Victorian house in San Rafael, California. Classically funky by definition—a reminiscence of the Haight transplanted here in Marin County—because it used to be the Dead House before their office operations outgrew it. An audacious idea is afoot down the hall from the painting of Mickey Mouse and Pluto: a rock & roll artist-owned record company. Not a record label, such as Apple or Grunt, under the corporate wing of an established record company, but a company that presses and distributes its own disks and takes the consequences.

“I got the idea for the company on the 18th of March, 1972,” said company president Ron Rakow, characteristically beaming mellow relaxation and at the same time twisting around in his chair from a slight overplus of animal energy. “I was driving on Highway 1 between Bolinas and Olema, and I saw a picture of the whole system, how it would work. So I went on the road to research it. I started at the Securities and Exchange Commission, xeroxing the big record companies’ financial statements. That gave me enough information to start asking questions. I ended up writing a 93-page report with several hundred pages of bibliography, which got called the So What Papers.” That title is said to have been born of a psychedelic meditation on the metaphysical ramifications of the phrase So What.

“I presented the papers to the band on July 4th, 1972. I was surprised they didn’t OK it right away, so I went on the road as part of the equipment crew to work off my frustration. It was finally approved on April 19th, but of course in changed form.” The original plan called for a radical distribution system, completely bypassing record stores: Good Humor trucks, for instance, mail ordering, and distribution through head shops. But the conservative faction of the Dead, anchored by business manager David Parker, prevailed to the extent that Good Humor–type trucks will not deliver the first record, anyway. The first record on the label, Wake of the Flood, is already in record stores, distributed in the U.S. by distributors chosen by Grateful Dead Records and in Europe through Atlantic Records’ distribution.