2000 David Lemieux article from the The Ottawa Citizen SAN FRANCISCO, California HEADLINE:What a long, strange trip it's been: David Lemieux has seen the Grateful Dead in concert 101 times, but he's not merely a Deadhead. These days the Ottawa native is chief keeper of the Vault, the extensive archive that holds the band's 15,000 tapes and 2,500 videos. His job? To preserve the Dead BYLINE Chris Cobb SOURCE The Ottawa Citizen SAN FRANCISCO, California - It is early evening and David Lemieux is driving across the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco. A Jerry Garcia rendition of Paul McCartney's Let Me Roll It fills the Subaru station wagon. ``I can't tell you how I feel, My heart is like a wheel, Let me roll it, let me roll it to you ... '' Jerry, who died more than five years ago, sounds good on this June 1978 recording from Berkeley, California. He's hitting the high notes and sustaining the longer ones, which was not always guaranteed, especially in the later years when his drug-ravaged body was barely functioning and he needed a prompter for lyrics he had been singing for more than three decades. Casual listeners would think nothing of Garcia singing McCartney. Deadheads, as the international legion of fanatical followers of the Grateful Dead are called, will greet and analyse it as a rare gem. And Lemieux, an otherwise regular guy from upscale suburban Ottawa, is quite definitely a Deadhead. The band's unique, eclectic blend of rock, blues, jazz, country and bluegrass has consumed many lives, Lemieux's included. If the Dead were the Pied Pipers, the Deadheads were the followers, trekking across North America and beyond to concert after concert, night after night. Deadheads come from all walks. They are Liberals, Conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. (Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore is a tie-dyed-T-shirt-wearing Deadhead.) ``Being a Deadhead means so much more than being a fan of the music,'' Lemieux explains with almost evangelistic passion. ``It has nothing to do with what you do for a living. It's about what values you have as a person -- compassion, environmental awareness and such. Deadheads are people who have been awakened by the music.'' This Garcia-doing-McCartney tune on the car stereo is one of five live versions that Garcia recorded for a solo effort. It has been well preserved in the Grateful Dead's archive, which is known to fans as ``the Vault.'' Lemieux has listened to each version dozens of times, mulling them over and comparing their relative merits. But Lemieux is more than a fan, he's keeper of the Vault and if the Jerry Garcia box set he wants to compile ever sees the light of day, Saint Jerry doing Sir Paul will be a shoo-in. Through a mix of extraordinary good luck, hard work and persistence, the 30-year-old is at the centre of the musical inner circle of Grateful Dead Productions. He's still pinching himself. Lemieux produced Shining Star, a Garcia CD due out next week. It is his third compilation of Vault material. View from the Vault, the first volume of a video series he is producing, was certified gold last week. For a member of the fanatical, international Deadhead fraternity, it's an awesome honour. For a young, johnny-come-lately member of the 30-member staff at Grateful Dead Productions, it's an awesome responsibility. Lemieux, who quit high school to follow the Dead, isa proud member of both. On the Golden Gate Bridge, with the distant shadow of Alcatraz to the left and the mouth of the Pacific to the right, Lemieux chats non-stop about his life among the Dead and about his short but life-changing relationship with the late Dick Latvala, supreme Deadhead and original keeper of the Vault. The former Government of Canada archivist speaks of weekly visits to Garcia's widow, Debora Koons Garcia, who married Jerry a year before he died and owns the rights to his solo recordings. As producer of Jerry's solo compilations, Lemieux must seek her approval for his selections. (Jerry's second wife, Carolyn Garcia, known as Mountain Girl, is the Deadheads' sentimental favourite and is still fighting for a $5-million share of Garcia's estate. She married Jerry backstage at a 1981 concert. Garcia had four daughters-- Heather, Annabelle, Trixie and Keelin -- with three partners.) Lemieux describes the joy of working in the spartan, climate-controlled chill of the Vault, surrounded by 15,000 audio tapes and 2,500 videotapes. Recordings date back to three shows in 1967; there are 20 taped concerts from the following year. Almost everything from 1970 is missing, but most tapes from 1972 to 1974 are on hand. The Vault contains 70 per cent of recordings from 1976 to 1978; 40 per cent from 1979-82, most from 1985-86, but only 30 per cent from 1987. The final touring years, 1988 to 1995, are well documented. Missing tapes were given away or taken and not returned. The Dead were not always protective of their musical history. There is little archived film of the early shows, except for outtakes from The Grateful Dead Movie, which was shot over four nights in 1974. From 1988 onward, there are 75 complete shows plus other peripheral video. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann calls the video and audio archive the ``family jewels,'' but it is also the Dead's insurance policy and cash cow. Between music and merchandise, it is estimated the group grosses about $60 million a year. Half that wouldn't be bad for a band that ceased to exist half a dozen years ago. The dream job has its pressures. Even the most easygoing of aging rock legends are notoriously protective of their reputations. And while they were once indifferent about their old recordings, today band members are anything but. The ``family jewels'' have yielded more than 20 compilations. The annual flow of four Dick's Picks -- named after Latvala, the original archivist -- and various other audio and video compilations will continue for years. And then there are the Deadheads, who, like rare wine experts, examine every nuance in every release from the Vault, making vigorous use of the Internet and the unofficial Dead magazine Relix to opine on the most arcane of points. ``There are pressures,'' says Lemieux, waving three bills at the Golden Gate toll attendant. ``But when the demands get heavy at work, I remind myself: `Hey, you listen to Grateful Dead music for a living and they pay you well to do it.' That never fails to put things in perspective.'' This is the Vault of the Dead. It's a simple, climatically sealed enclosure at Grateful Dead Productions in Novato, a half-hour outside San Francisco. The nondescript headquarters is a vast warehouse that also features a recording studio, merchandise operation, boardroom and business offices. In the mailroom, Jerry Garcia still has a slot for the mail he continues to receive. (The letters are forwarded to his estate.) The Vault is about 20 by 12 metres with a four-metre-high ceiling. Inside, a small cluttered table sits on an old throw rug, the only covering on the concrete floor. Seating accommodation is an old brown armchair, beige faux-suede futon and a grey, comfy chair. A stylized neon version of the Dead's skull and roses logo is pinned to a wall above a reel-to-reel tape machine. Like most people who spend their working lives in an office or cubicle, Lemieux is surrounded by mementoes. One wall features a post-election photograph of Prime Minister Jean Chretien, hastily cut from the Ottawa Citizen. On another wall, near an encased gold record that Lemieux received for his work on So Many Roads, a 1999 Dead box set, are Lemieux's university degrees -- a BA in history from Carleton, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Studies from Concordia and an MA in film archiving from the U.K.'s University of East Anglia. In an office in another part of the building, Lemieux has stuck half-a-dozen other newspaper pictures of 2000 Chretien. In each caption, he has changed the prime minister's name to ``Poutine'' in deference to Rick Mercer, of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, who asked George W. Bush at an election event last year if he planned to continue good relations with Canada and ``Jean Poutine.'' 'It's also quite funny explaining to Americans what poutine is,'' Lemieux explains. A little shelf space in the Vault is reserved for an Ottawa Senators shirt, cap and a small replica Division Championship banner. Lemieux keeps inline skates and a hockey stick at work and enjoys scooting around the yard working on his game. The Senators are his team and he often rushes home to listen to live broadcasts on his computer. For a fix of the real thing, he settles for the San Jose Sharks, an hour or so away. The Vault is hardly palatial but Lemieux loves working among the ghosts of this most remarkable musical and cultural phenomenon. He casts back and recalls his first encounter with the band -- a teenage obsession that would propel him to 101 Grateful Dead concerts -- 96 in North America and five in Europe -- and land him here in Northern California where his idols became his employers. David's older brother, Jason, started it all in 1984 when he brought home a greatest hits album. David, a 14-year-old Manor Park lad with a head full of Police, T-Rex, David Bowie and Pink Floyd, was hooked after a few listens. ``It was like nothing I'd heard before,'' he recalls. ``It was incredible.'' Mainstream radio stations rarely played the Dead because their rambling songs weren't delivered in three-minute, radio-friendly packages. (The Dead would only have one Top Ten hit, a radio-friendly length Touch of Grey in 1987.) So what if the band first performed 15 years before Lemieux was born? And so what if they were the same generation as his parents? ``I was beginning to get into music,'' he says, ``but not music that was mainstream. I'd call it misfit music, stuff that lots of my friends heard and said, `Yuk, what's that?'". Lemieux discovered that a couple of his 14-year-old buddies also had older brothers who were into the Grateful Dead and they all had concert tapes. ``They made me my first bootleg tapes,'' he says. ``Before I knew it, I had a collection of 30 or 40 live Grateful Dead tapes. By 1986 I was trading tapes myself. I had two tape decks and traded through Deadhead magazines.'' The Grateful Dead were unique in many ways but especially in their egalitarian philosophy toward concert performances. Unlike any other rock band of the past 30 years, they encouraged fans to record their concerts and even provided a special section for fans with tape machines. The band asked only that the tapes be copied and traded freely among other fans. It was, and is, a remarkable worldwide honour system. By conventional business models, it was a recipe for fiscal suicide, but then the Dead were anything but conventional. They eventually got rich anyway. ``Through 1985-86 I became a huge fan,'' Lemieux recalls, ``but I never even imagined I would get to see them live.'' It seemed less likely after Garcia got sick in 1986 and slipped into a coma. Perhaps it was Garcia's near-death experience -- he had several -- but Lemieux suddenly grew determined to see the band in concert. He called the Dead hotline daily for news on Garcia's health and tour prospects. The line was updated by Eileen Law, a Dead employee since 1970 and now the band's paper and picture archivist. Law's voice was a source of comfort for the teen. Fourteen years on, Lemieux still gets a kick out of being her colleague. In the spring of 1987, Garcia was in better health and the band went on tour. Lemieux mailed off for tickets for two concerts in Hartford, Connecticut. He was only able to obtain tickets for the first, but it was enough. ``I remember holding he tickets when they arrived,'' he says. ``I couldn't believe it.'' He and a friend planned to make the trip by train, with a stopover in New York City. Lemieux's mother had other plans. ``Being the greatest mom in the world, she drove us to Hartford.'' Lemieux remembers everything about March 26, 1987. ``I couldn't believe I was sitting in a Grateful Dead show ... A year later I got the tape of the show and wore it out.'' Lemieux's mother, Pat, also remembers it well. ``There was no way I would let him travel all that way. So I drove them. I didn't get to see the show because it was sold out. I didn't realize back then that the Grateful Dead had taken over his life, but I was never too worried. Mind you, I was a bit ignorant. I didn't know what went on in those concerts except that they all wore tie-dyed shirts.'' Ignorance was bliss. Dead concerts never had the reputation for being dens of iniquity but the band began life in the 1960s when LSD was still legal, pot smoking was a mass pastime and mushrooms were magic. Dead concerts were a venue for all that but, says Lemieux earnestly, the biggest high was the music. ``I used to see people made so happy by the music and dancing their asses off -- as I used to -- that you would swear they were dosed but weren't. ``I remember coming out of one show, after the band had played a song they hadn't played in 18 years, people were hugging each other. It was like everyone was on Ecstasy, but they weren't.'' The concerts never started on time, but eventually the band would meander onto the stage and tune their instruments. ``During that tuning time you would hear little phrases of songs and you'd turn to someone and say `Hey, they're going to do Shakedown Street' or whatever. Then they'd kick into the show and all was right with the world for the next three hours.'' Band members rarely communicated with the audience, except through their music. Lemieux recalls one 1988 show in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin.``They had to tune up for seven or eight minutes after the first song. Jerry went up to the mike and said `Professionalism folks.' It was the only thing I ever heard Jerry say in more than 100 shows. Bob Weir would say at the end of a set `We'll be back in a bit' and occasionally at the end of a show say `Thank you, good night.' But that was it. It was all about the music. ``As I've got to know them, I realized they are just regular guys and, like most people, don't have a lot to say to strangers.'' Lifelong friendships were formed at Dead concerts. Fans who snapped up tickets for a run of shows in a town would invariably sit in the same seat each night. ``I made some very good friends over three-or four-night runs,'' Lemieux recalls. Lemieux's obsession peaked in 1990, during his final year at Rideau High School. He was working, borrowing money from family and, when he wasn't driving around North America, occasionally attending classes. That summer, he joined the tour in Eugene, Oregon, drove to Kansas City and literally followed the band from concert to concert. It was enough to satisfy any Deadhead. Two days after the summer tour, keyboardist Brent Mydland died of a drug overdose. Lemieux did not need to be convinced that the Dead with a new keyboard player was a must-see. He caught the band in Ohio that fall and, feeling less and less enthusiastic about school, headed to Paris and London for more concerts, financed by work, family and a newly acquired credit card. By this time, Vince Welnick was official keyboard player with Bruce Hornsby sitting in on a semi-regular basis. ``The Dead were playing really well in '90,'' says Lemieux, by way of explaining his European jaunt. ``I heard that the place in Paris -- the Zenith -- only held 5,000, so I couldn't miss it. About 4,500 of the people in the audience were American. After the London shows, I came home and went to Rideau for one day and decided that school just didn't cut it.'' Although he did not graduate, eventually he settled down. In 1991, he was accepted into Carleton's mature studen 2000 t program. ``I took a Film 100 course and by the third or fourth class, the academic study of film began to fascinate me. I learned you had to get away from subjective terms such as `like' and `don't like.' '' He joined the Independent Filmmakers Co-operative at Arts Court and took courses on film and sound editing. In 1995 he headed to Concordia to study film history. While there he won the Cinema Prize, awarded to the most outstanding student graduating in the program. He made an eight-minute, 16-mm film on the closing of the Montreal Forum and called it Thank You For a Real Good Time, which is the refrain from the Grateful Dead song Loose Lucy. The soundtrack featured the Dead, of course. ``It was a way for me to pay tribute to two big parts of my life that were passing,'' he says. ``Jerry had died six months before and the Forum closed in March 1996.'' After two years in Montreal, and armed with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he began work on a Master's degree in film archiving at the University of East Anglia in England, the only school in the world to offer such a program. Preserving and restoring old film was a key part of the course. Lemieux had deliberately set out on a road away from the Dead. Unplanned circumstances would lead him back. on July 21, 1998, Lemieux sent an e-mail to Dick Latvala, legendary keeper of the Grateful Dead's archives. The MA student, who was then working at the British Columbia Archives, explained how a visit to the Vault would benefit his studies. ``I can think of no better archive to study than the Grateful Dead's sound archive,'' he wrote. ``In addition to any film/video holdings in the Vault, the various formats of audio obviously offer challenges relating to preservation and I would be very grateful if it were possible to arrange a visit. '' Latvala had an uneasy relationship with computers and Lemieux did not hear back, at least not right away. ``I wanted to meet Dick,'' recalls Lemieux, ``because he had the dream job. But when you don't get a response to e-mail after a couple of days, you assume you're not going to get one,'' he adds. ``So I forgot about it.'' Three months later, the day before Lemieux was to leave for a planned vacation in California, the phone rang. It was Latvala with an invitation. A few days later, Latvala introduced Lemieux to John Cutler, the Grateful Dead's long-time producer and recording engineer, who spent a few hours showing him around. The two chatted and got along well. Lemieux returned home and sent thank-you e-mails to Latvala and Cutler. While Latvala received ``a Deadhead letter,'' Cutler's note was a little more businesslike. ``At the bottom, I wrote `If you're ever interested in hiring a video archivist, please give me a call.''' Lemieux spent 10 minutes deleting and reinstating the sentence before hitting ``Send.'' ``I decided I was never going to see those guys again, so why not?'' A week later, Cutler invited him back for an interview. ``He wanted the videos catalogued,'' says Lemieux. ``He didn't know how much of a Deadhead I was, but he knew that I knew the music and the principles of film archiving.'' Lemieux was born in New Jersey when his father worked for the United Nations. It was a retro stroke of luck that eliminated immigration and work permit hassles. He began work Feb. 1, 1999. During his four-month stint, he set up an archive and created a database. He was preparing to return to his job at B.C. Archives when he first learned of the Grateful Dead employment philosophy: Nobody lobbies for jobs in the organization, but if you happen to be around when something needs doing, you're likely to get to do it. Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, rejuvenated with a new liver, was putting together a band, Phil Lesh and Friends, and performing around San Francisco. Cutler asked Lemieux to help out with the mobile recording equipment. Lemieux returned to B.C. after the shows only to be invited back for more. On July 30 he was packing for San Francisco when a friend called to say that Dick Latvala was in a coma. ``I didn't realize how serious it was,'' Lemieux says. ``I just thought he'd get out of it'' Latvala died of heart failure a week later, shortly after his 56th birthday and around the fourth anniversary of Garcia's death. Lemieux was invited to the wake, emceed by long-time Dead friend Wavy Gravy, of Woodstock fame. Music was played by former Dead drummer Mickey Hart, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, several members of Weir's own band, Ratdog, and others. ``It was a good send-off,'' recalls Lemieux. ``Dick was a good guy and every day I worked with him was memorable. Every morning he'd say `Well David what do you want to hear today?' He would pull something good off the shelf, put it on and leave the room. Then he'd come back and ask me what I thought.'' Tragedy of one sort or another has punctuated the Dead's history. But by now they knew the show must go on. On the last night of the Lesh tour Lemieux was offered a permanent job as trainee engineer with archival duties. He packed some T-shirts and jeans and moved to California in September 1999, not quite knowing what had hit him. The Grateful Dead were never rock stars, they were cultural icons. It was never just about the music, although music was obviously at the root of it. Garcia, the musical and spiritual leader, was not a guitar hero in the Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix sense, but his skill at blending numerous musical styles into a distinctive, often deceptively simple sound earned him the respect of his contemporaries. The Dead did not use a playlist. At the end of one song, they would decide what to play next. They could shift effortlessly from down-home country twang to Detroit soul. ``It's honest music,'' says Lemieux. ``It's not formulaic and that's always been its great appeal. In the early '80s there were all these bands that were nothing but formula. The roots of the Grateful Dead are blues, folk and bluegrass and they were pioneers of the psychedelic rock movement, which was truly honest music. ``I found it especially appealing that you could hear two versions of the same song played a week apart and they were completely different. That's why Dick's Picks are so appealing: We aren't simply rehashing the same thing.'' It's true, however, that the Dead were never able to replicate in the studio what they did on stage. Long essays have been written on the subject. ``Some of their studio albums sound incredible,'' says Lemieux ``but it never came together in the studio the way it did live. It was like the very best jazz musicians of the 1950s. They always knew what the other guy was going to do.'' Dick Latvala met Phil Lesh in 1985 and told him the band was crazy not to have someone looking after the concert tapes stashed away for anyone who asked. ``Dick truly believed it was an important historic collection,'' says Lemieux. ``He was the first person to recognize its importance. That was eight years before the first Dick's Pick.'' The band figured there were so many tapes traded freely that the material in the Vault held no commercial value. It's not like they were hungry. The band was playing stadiums and making big money. Garcia was still performing, albeit between stints in detox. In the early '90s, they played to seven million people and earned more than any touring band that decade other than the Rolling Stones. Reaction to Dick's Pick One -- Latvala's first choice from the archived concert tapes -- began to convince the band they had been wrong. While Deadheads may own numerous versions of any one song, they buy Dick's Picks for the quality of the recordings, liner notes and photographs. Even still, non-Deadheads might wonder ``why bother?'' Lemieux has an answer. ``Take Truckin', a song they played for 25 y years. It started as an acoustic song on one of their acoustic albums, Ameri 1160 can Beauty. If you listen to Ladies and Gentlemen The Grateful Dead, it evolved into a powerful rock and roll number and became an open-ended song -- four or five verses, an instrument break and a four- or five-minute jam before it came back to the final verse. That was by 1971. ``By 1972, Truckin' became a show-stopper they would often take into a 30-minute improvisational jam based on the blues, rock and roll and country aspects of the song. You would never know what was coming next. ``They wouldn't want to get bored with it ... so they would try and outdo themselves.'' There are 20 Dick's Picks available, soon to be 21. Amazon.com lists 67 Dead albums, including some tribute compilations by other musicians. As Jerry Garcia once said: ``We're like licorice. If you like us at all, you really like us a lot.'' Lemieux's duties have changed significantly since he started full time at Grateful Dead Productions. His former boss, John Cutler, left to work with bassist Lesh who is, temporarily at least, estranged from the rest of the band. The rift was exacerbated when Mickey Hart speculated to a reporter that it was because Lesh got ``the liver of a jerk.'' All of this sounds like a typical family fight that may, or may not, be resolved. With Garcia gone and everyone working on solo projects, the impetus to mend fences depends on a mutual desire to be friends rather than any need to be workmates. So that leaves engineer Jeffrey Norman and Lemieux in charge of the Vault music. Norman, who has worked on many high-profile albums with the likes of Huey Lewis and the News, Bruce Hornsby, John Fogerty and Santana, is Lemieux's boss and has the only other key to the Vault. Lemieux so impressed guitarist Bob Weir he gave him a wonderful endorsement in a recent interview with Relix magazine. ``There's a kid who's working for us who knows our material. It's scary is all I can tell you. And he's not a `get-a-lifer' either. I don't know where this guy came from ... he must have rolled off a cloud and landed in our Vault. Nobody's gonna replace Dick but this kid, David, is gonna take a little of the sting out of his passing.'' So what's it like working in the Vault? ``As cliched as it may sound, every day is a holiday,'' Lemieux says with a laugh. ``Monday morning is always a thrill. ``I get to listen to this great music. There are six or seven albums every year and video. I always have at least two projects to work on. I've got the new video in my briefcase now. I'm an archivist, a film enthusiast and a Deadhead. I married my passions.'' Lemieux says the transition from ultra fan to workmate happened surprisingly quickly. ``I work for them,'' he says. ``I worked closely with Mickey Hart every day for a month or two and then with Bob Weir when he worked on his album here from last February to May. You get to see the other side, not the performer but the meticulous, creative side. They cease to become idols and instead are just very interesting people. They are no better than anyone else but they have an incredible talent that most other people don't have.'' Still, Lemieux remembers being nervous at his first meetings with Hart, Weir, Kreutzmann and Lesh. But their manner, he says, was quickly disarming. ``When people meet big stars, they often say `Wow, they are just regular people.' Of course, they are. The Dead, as rock stars, didn't let fame go to their heads.'' Lemieux never met Jerry Garcia, but he is ever mindful of his presence. ``It's like a huge, very cool, very good conscience looking over you. ``Every decision I make I think `What would Dick think of it,'`What would Cutler think?' `What would Jerry think?' Jerry took a great interest in his music. I think about that a lot. I love having some autonomy, but it's a great feeling having to answer to people who aren't even here.'' Lemieux falls back on his Vault couch and says he re realizes his job with the Dead will end some day. And he misses Canada. ``I tell people I've peaked as both a Deadhead and an archivist,'' he says. ``As much as it's probably the best thing I'll ever do, there are other things that appeal to me, such as teaching, taking my PhD and getting back into film. But my future for the next few years is here... as long as they'll let me stay.'' . 0