She Wore Scarlet Begonias: Art, Commerce and the Grateful Dead

Strategic Improvisation, in music and business, was at the core of the Grateful Dead's long-time professional, creative and business success. That is the interesting thesis in an article in the Atlantic Monthly that hits the stands at the same as the opening of the exhibit at the NY Historical Society from the new Grateful Dead Archives at the University of California at Santa Cruz. 

My impression was that the Dead and their circle were very pragmatic and “seat of their pants” in that good old American way of non-professionally educated, non-tutored, self-taught business practitioners . “It” all just worked because they were bright/creative/aware enough people who worked hard and were able to make good decisions on business as well as music.. So now someone is going to try to codify that into a business plan or practice. The thing is, probably if you follow it as a “plan” as opposed to proceeding instinctually and intuitively, you won’t have the same great results….

At the same time, I recall reading that Jerry Garcia had a complex view about Labor-Management..Once there was some kind of a protest of the lighting techs in 1969 at some theater in SF, and the techs threw up a picket line and Jerry refused to cross the picket line because his grandmother was a founder of the Laundry Workers Union in SF and believed in organized labor…when someone asked him why he couldn’t play he said “My grandmother” because “she would kill him if she knew he had ever crossed a picket line”…Bill Graham on the other hand probably would have just punched out the strikers and thrown them out.

The Grateful Dead live on, in blessed memory and in music files, CDs, LPs, 45s, and homemade cassettes and audio tape throughout the land and have reconnected with the zeitgeist in NYC and beyond.

Some cool links:

The Grateful Dead Archives at the NY Historical Society link here

The Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California Santa Cruz link here

The Atlantic Magazine: 'Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead'

--Brooklyn Beat