of California at Santa Cruz, will be a mecca for academics of all
stripes: from ethnomusicologists to philosophers, sociologists to
historians. But the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business
scholars and management theorists, who are discovering that the Dead
were visionary geniuses in the way they created "customer value,"
promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning.
--
Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201003/grateful-dead-archives
March 2010
by Joshua Green
Fans of the Grateful Dead are big believers in serendipity. So a
certain knowing approval greeted the news last year that the band
would be donating its copious archivefour decades' worth of
commercial recordings and videotapes, press clippings, stage sets,
business records, and a mountain of correspondence encompassing
everything from elaborately decorated fan letters to a thank-you note
for a fund-raising performance handwritten on White House stationery
by President Barack Obamato the University of California at Santa
Cruz. Santa Cruz was understood to be a fitting home not only because
it exemplifies the spirit of the counterculture as much as, and
perhaps even more than, Berkeley and Stanford, which also bid for the
archive, but because the school's faculty includes an
ethnomusicologist and composer named Fredric Lieberman, who is
prominent among a curious breed in the academy: scholars who teach
and study the Grateful Dead.
It's worth noting right up front the hurdles Dead Studies faces as a
field of serious inquiry. To begin with, the news that it exists at
all tends to elicit grinning disbelief; a corollary challenge is the
assumptions people carry about its practitioners, such as my own
expectation when arranging to visit Lieberman last year that I would
encounter an amiable hippie, probably of late-Boomer vintage and
wearing a thinning ponytail. Rough mental image: Wavy Gravy with a Ph.D.
Lieberman is nothing of the sort. A small man with parchment skin,
wisps of white hair, and large round glasses, he could have looked
more professorial only by wielding a Dunhill pipe. His interest in
the Grateful Dead, he explained, had arisen largely by chance. In the
1960s, he studied under the noted ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger
(father of Pete Seeger) at UCLA, and came to share his mentor's
dismay at the academy's neglect of popular and non-Western music.
Lieberman went on to teach a series of classes in American vernacular
music and, though he held no particular fondness for the Grateful
Dead, became one of the first academics to teach the band's music, in
the early 1970s.
In 1983, the Dead's drummer, Mickey Hart, asked Lieberman to help
catalog his vast collection of instruments. When the project
developed into a larger study of world percussion, Hart invited
Lieberman to join him on tour. "I thought it would be interesting to
treat it as an ethnomusicological field trip," Lieberman told me. For
some years, when he wasn't teaching he traveled with the band,
introducing Hart to ethnomusicologists by day and attending shows by
night. If you squinted hard during any number of the Dead's most
famous shows in the 1980s and '90s, you might have glimpsed the
unlikely spectacle of an ethnomusicologist crouching in earnest
concentration behind the drummer, going about his fieldwork.
Lieberman apologized for not being able to show me the archive. The
whole thing was under lock and key in a Northern California warehouse
whose location was a closely held secreta precaution against
overzealous fans' plundering a hoard that many would regard as akin
to Tutankhamen's treasure. On March 5, the New York Historical
Society will open the first large-scale exhibit of material from the
Dead Archive. Then, if all goes as planned, the collection will
become the centerpiece of a new campus library at Santa Cruz slated
to open later this year. Among other things, it is hoped that the
Dead Archive will galvanize a nascent group of scholars across many
disciplines who, like Lieberman, study the Grateful Deadnot just
musicologists but historians, sociologists, philosophers,
psychologists, and even business and management theorists. Some have
risked their academic standing in the belief that the band and the
larger social phenomenon that surrounds it are far more significant
than is commonly understood. Lately, the world has been changing in
ways that make that not so hard to believe.
One of the first academic articles on the Grateful Dead appeared in
the Winter 1972 issue of the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, a
periodical for medical professionals, and drew on emergency-treatment
records to compare drug use at a Grateful Dead concert with that at a
Led Zeppelin concert. (Verdict: Deadheads favored LSD, Zeppelin fans
alcohol.) The popular association between the Dead and a drug-fueled
counterculture did little to encourage respectable academic endeavor.
As the band's following grew, the notion that it might have something
to offer scholars, particularly in the social sciences, became
somewhat less far-fetched, though still not without professional
risk. In the late 1980s, Rebecca G. Adams, a sociologist at the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who studies friendships
formed across distances, noticed deep bonds between Deadheads. The
bonds seemed to belie the idea, then popular among leading social
thinkers, that communities based on common interest, whose members do
not live near each other, lack emotional and moral depththat
Deadheads might belong to what sociologists call a "lifestyle
enclave," but couldn't possibly form meaningful relationships. Adams
brought a class on tour with the Deadan opportunity, she thought, to
teach classical theory while letting students study a cutting-edge
contemporary community.
She became instantly famous, among a small group of scholars, and
then, suddenly, among a much larger group of people. One day, without
warning, Senator Robert Byrd, the histrionic and prodigiously
opinionated West Virginian, gave a speech decrying what he considered
an appalling decline in the standards for higher education, and cited
Adams's class as an example. Adams had unwittingly placed herself in
the crosshairs of the culture wars and was beset by, among other
things, an inquiry from the president of North Carolina's state
university system. Though she survived with help from her chancellor
and her department head, and though the question fell squarely within
her specialty, Adams was politely discouraged from pursuing her line
of inquiry. "I was advised to concentrate on the more respectable
areas of my research," she told me.
Other aspects of the band nevertheless continued to invite academic
examination. Musicologists showed interest, although the band's
sprawling repertoire and tendency to improvise posed a significant
challenge. Lieberman says that fully absorbing the Dead's music could
take years, and he has noted its similarities with South Indian
classical music, with its complex notational system and highly
formalized four-hour concerts. Engineers studied the band's
sophisticated sound system, radical at the time but widely emulated
today. Even legal scholars took note, some contending that the
American criminal-justice system, including the courts, unfairly
profiles Deadhead defendants and has, on occasion, treated fandom as
evidence of mental illness.
Oddly enough, the Dead's influence on the business world may turn out
to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending towhile
intending, in fact, to do just the oppositethe band pioneered ideas
and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America.
One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a
telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any
public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the
house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed
through its own mail-order house. If you lived in New York and wanted
to see a show in Seattle, you didn't have to travel there to get
ticketsand you could get really good tickets, without even camping
out. "The Dead were masters of creating and delivering superior
customer value," Barry Barnes, a business professor at the H. Wayne
Huizenga School of Business and Entrepreneurship at Nova Southeastern
University, in Florida, told me. Treating customers well may sound
like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos
of many organizations in the 1960s and '70s. Only in the 1980s, faced
with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management
theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation.
As Barnes and other scholars note, the musicians who constituted the
Dead were anything but naive about their business. They incorporated
early on, and established a board of directors (with a rotating CEO
position) consisting of the band, road crew, and other members of the
Dead organization. They founded a profitable merchandising division
and, peace and love notwithstanding, did not hesitate to sue those
who violated their copyrights. But they weren't greedy, and they
adapted well. They famously permitted fans to tape their shows,
ceding a major revenue source in potential record sales. According to
Barnes, the decision was not entirely selfless: it reflected a shrewd
assessment that tape sharing would widen their audience, a ban would
be unenforceable, and anyone inclined to tape a show would probably
spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets. The Dead
became one of the most profitable bands of all time.
It's precisely this flexibility that Barnes believes holds the
greatest lessons for businesshe calls it "strategic improvisation."
It isn't hard to spot a few of its recent applications. Giving
something away and earning money on the periphery is the same idea
proffered by Wired editor Chris Anderson in his recent best-selling
book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Voluntarily or otherwise,
it is becoming the blueprint for more and more companies doing
business on the Internet. Today, everybody is intensely interested in
understanding how communities form across distances, because that's
what happens online. Far from being a subject of controversy, Rebecca
Adams's next book on Deadhead sociology has publishers lining up.
Much of the talk about "Internet business models" presupposes that
they are blindingly new and different. But the connection between the
Internet and the Dead's business model was made 15 years ago by the
band's lyricist, John Perry Barlow, who became an Internet guru.
Writing in Wired in 1994, Barlow posited that in the information
economy, "the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it
away." As Barlow explained to me: "What people today are beginning to
realize is what became obvious to us back thenthe important
correlation is the one between familiarity and value, not scarcity
and value. Adam Smith taught that the scarcer you make something, the
more valuable it becomes. In the physical world, that works
beautifully. But we couldn't regulate [taping at] our shows, and you
can't online. The Internet doesn't behave that way. But here's the
thing: if I give my song away to 20 people, and they give it to 20
people, pretty soon everybody knows me, and my value as a creator is
dramatically enhanced. That was the value proposition with the Dead."
The Dead thrived for decades, in good times and bad. In a recession,
Barnes says, strategic improvisation is more important then ever. "If
you're going to survive this economic downturn, you better be able to
turn on a dime," he says. "The Dead were exemplars." It can be only a
matter of time until Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead or some
similar title is flying off the shelves of airport bookstores everywhere.
Recently, Barnes has been lecturing to business leaders about
strategic improvisation. He's been a big hit. "People are just so
tired of hearing about GE and Southwest Airlines," he admits. "They
get really excited to hear about the Grateful Dead."
Until now, scholars who studied the Dead were limited to what was
available in the public domain. Barnes sought access to internal
documents more than a decade ago and was turned down. When the Dead
Archive opens, he and others expect to gain many new insights,
because they'll finally be able to draw on primary source
materialand there's plenty. For years, unbeknownst to just about
everyone, the band's longtime office manager obsessively stashed away
everything that came into her office. The possibilities seem
manifold. "From the economics folks to the anthropologists," Barlow
says, "increasing numbers of people are going to make a pilgrimage to
the archive to see how this all came together."
When a famous author or statesman donates his papers to history, the
task of studying and making sense of them usually falls to some
obvious discipline. That's not quite the case here. Even with the
recent renaissance, Dead scholars are few. The bulk of the expertise
lies outside the academy, with ordinary Deadheads. So Santa Cruz
library officials have devised a novel approach (some would call it
strategic improvisation) to curating the collection. They intend to
post as much of it as possible online in the hope that
Deadheadszealous social networkers that they arewill contribute
their knowledge, and perhaps material of their own, to help build up
the record. With the culture wars of the 1960s finally beginning to
subside, the possibility for sober reflection on a charged era is
more feasible than it once was. Today, the Dead are more attraction
than liability. The library will seek to become a haven for the study
of pop culture since the 1960s, with the Dead Archive anchoring its
collection.
"Revolutionaries get vilified, and then, once they get older, they
just become cute," says Steve Gimbel, who is a philosophy professor
at Gettysburg College and edited the recent collection The Grateful
Dead and Philosophy. "Think of Oscar Wilde. Once they're not
dangerous anymore, it's okay to discuss them in serious ways."
--
Joshua Green is an Atlantic senior editor.
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