University of Illinois Press

I never liked the Grateful Dead.  In high school I wrote a piece for the school newspaper on my Deadhead friend’s experience at a “punk rock” concert (I took him to see The Jam). Five years later, my college roommate (yet another Deadhead friend from high school) used to play me his latest traded cassette tapes of live Dead performances.  He had plenty of girlfriends over the years but never settled down until after Jerry Garcia passed away in 1995 and the touring ended. I was always curious about the Grateful Dead touring phenomenon, though I never viewed it as an obvious subject of scholarly pursuit.  This month’s Atlantic magazine looks at the recent donation of the Grateful Dead archives to the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the band’s contribution to social networking.