The life of the Dead

They were such a strangely successful cultural anomaly, yet they're very much a part of what's become mainstream popular culture. The Dead went from being crazy freaks way out on the fringe to being a corporation with one of the country's most recognizable logos. How has their image of themselves and their place in the culture changed over the decades?

I think they've got a wonderful sense of humor about it. The irony is that because they did it their way, and because their way involved ignoring every rule in the book, and because the end result was this remarkable and completely unforeseen success, it's just the best joke ever. I end one chapter by saying something like, for once the Grateful Dead had the last laugh. And it's true.

They did things often for completely odd reasons. As an example, taping. They permitted taping for no other reason than that they didn't want to be cops. They were lousy cops, they were antiauthoritarian to the core, and it was too much work, too much bad vibes, too much everything. And, frankly, they were realistic and said, It's impossible to stop taping unless you strip-search every member of the audience, which ruins the atmosphere, of course.

But the serendipitous result was that they doubled their audience -- from the early '80s when they started to allow taping to until just before, say, "Touch of Grey," the audience increased tremendously. Why? Well, one of the reasons was they allowed taping, the audience responded to that by being ever more tightly bound to them because they were trusted. The teeniest percentage violated that trust -- the band's only request was that you don't charge money for these things. And almost no one did. And the end result was a greater intimacy, a greater trust.

One of the things that was very surprising was to learn that they were together a long time before they started making big money.

Absolutely, which is one of the best things, because that meant there was nothing to squabble about, nothing to divide them and they were all in the boat together. It was not until the mid-1980s that they started getting to the point where every show sold out. After "Touch of Grey" and "In the Dark" made lots of money, from then on they were quite prosperous, although not at a Michael Jackson or Paul McCartney level. They stayed close to their roots right through the mid-'80s.

Did the prosperity have a negative effect on them?

I don't think it helped any. Money divides. Or, rather than divides, it isolates. As they grew more prosperous, I don't think it had a particularly wonderful effect in the '80s and '90s. But it's also a function of having families and just having less time for each other. And they were definitely not as receptive to each other as people by the end. But how long do you maintain intimacy on an emotional and social level? They managed to do it for more than 20 years -- that alone is quite an achievement.

Some of the most interesting parts of the book were your accounts of how the Dead ran their business -- the meetings, the decision-making, such it was, the negotiations with record companies and concert promoters. It was often extraordinarily chaotic, but in the long run, it worked -- in spite of itself. I could see some business major doing a thesis on nontraditional business structures and using the Dead as the case study.

There have been a number of case studies -- by the Harvard Business School and others not so well known. And they all end up with the same conclusion: the Dead have very old-fashioned business values, which are: no hype; offer a product based on paying maximum attention to the important thing -- the sound system -- and a legitimate and honest concern for the audience. You don't do anything that isn't necessary. You do what's important and you do it well.

I know that sounds terribly old-fashioned, like Smith Barney: "We do it the old fashioned way, we earn it." Well, the Dead earned it -- they worked, they cared, they offered integrity. I know that sounds almost naive in this day and age, especially in the last month in America. Nobody ever cooked the books in the Grateful Dead, though of course we aren't a public stock.

The point is that they did very old-fashioned things in a very old-fashioned way, and it worked. It was a point of pride to sell tickets at a lower rate than everybody else was doing. I'm sorry, but I think -- and other people in the organization agree; I'm not alone -- the notion of selling the front row for $250 is disturbing and it doesn't feel right. The day that the Grateful Dead had to charge $30 a ticket, mostly because we had an extremely expensive sound system, but also -- this was on a summer tour -- we were paying the so-called opening act a great deal of money, people were upset. It's for real, because that's part of caring for your audience -- you offer value for the money.

Next page: What LSD did was made them understand that the audience was not separate from them