2000 David Dodd and Rob Weiner interview with David Gans Grateful Dead Hour No. 483 December 1997 David Gans: With me this evening I've got a guest, a gentleman by the name of David Dodd, who I know from the online world. And I first heard of him when he put up an amazing thing, the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics Web page. This guy started digging out information about every song that he could find. He actually got permission to put the lyrics themselves up, which made it a lot easier to add links to the concepts and stuff, and just began illuminating the literature of the Grateful Dead in a really, really wonderful way. And then the next thing I heard, he was putting together a bibliography, which I'm holding in my hands. It's called "The Grateful Dead and the Deadheads: An Annotated Bibliography." And fortunately for me, David Dodd moved to California not long ago, so he can come into the studio and appear in person. Good evening, David, thanks for being here. David Dodd: Well, thank you for having me. Gans: And thanks for doing all this amazing work you've done. Dodd: It's been a lot of fun. Gans: Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to do these massive projects? Dodd: Well, that's a good question. I'm not sure myself, actually. I'm a librarian by trade, so I found myself a couple years back at a university library, at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where they put you on a tenure track and you're supposed to be a professor. And I'd always just been a librarian, a public librarian before, so it was kind of daunting to be suddenly in this tenure world. And part of what you do in that world is write and publish. And so the World Wide Web was just sort of getting big at that point, and I thought to myself, this is perfect for annotating literary text. And the literary text I know best, and by heart, is the lyrics of the Grateful Dead. Gans: So this was a school project that sort of got out of hand? Dodd: Yeah, exactly. Gans: Wow. Dodd: It was a project that I thought might actually count towards tenure, and yeah, it got out of hand. It really did get out of hand. It's *still* out of hand; it's still going, and growing, although I'm currently moving it the site from the University of Colorado machines to the new host, [which] will most likely be the University of California, Santa Cruz. Gans: Oh, that's a good thing. For those of you who are not familiar with how this works, the World Wide Web is a "hypertext" medium in which you can put a link under a word or a phrase or a sentence, so if you're reading along the lyrics to a song, and David has a reference, a piece of information, for example, maybe the name "Fennario" in "Dire Wolf," that would be a different color with an underline. And you could click on that and it'll take you to another section that has some information about that. So it's a wonderfully flexible and expandable medium, where you can just put stuff up and as you get more information, you can plug it in -- Dodd: Right. Gans: -- so it's the kind of place that you go back to and visit again and again to see what new stuff he's put in there. Dodd: It does change, from time to time, and I try to keep people up to date on what has changed in the past month. I have a monthly mailing list that I send out. . . Yeah, the first song I did was actually "Ramble On Rose," because it contains so many obscure and wonderful references to characters from American history and American folklore, if you will. So, you know, who was Crazy Otto, and who was Billy Sunday, and who are these people, anyway? And *I* wondered, so I went and looked them up and found out who they were. Gans: Why don't you give the URL for that on the air here, for people who have access to the Web and might want to check it out. Dodd: Okay, it's still there. It's That's a mouthful. Gans: Boy, is it a mouthful. Dodd: I hate that. Gans: Get a pencil and piece of paper out, kids, and we'll give that again in a little while, so you can take it down carefully. Dodd: Gans: Giving Internet addresses is so -- Dodd: I hate it. Gans: -- annoying on the air, but sorry. It's worth it, believe me, it's worth it to get this right and check this out. We also have -- I'm expecting a call from your collaborator, Rob Weiner, who worked with you on the book, The Annotated Bibliography. What I'd like to do now is play a piece of music while we see whether this call is Rob and get him lined up to talk on the air. You asked me to bring in music from 10/9/76 at the Oakland Stadium. What's the significance of that show for you, David? Dodd: My first show. I went to see the Who, and I came away a Deadhead. Gans: Wow! Dodd: It was a very simple process; I just was blown away. And I distinctly remember things that probably didn't occur. For instance, I remember the sun blinked. It went off and came back on. And I later corroborated this with a number of other people, so it wasn't just me. But that was one occurrence. And they played "St. Stephen," and they played a great "Franklin's Tower" that bounced off the back wall of the stadium, and you got the "Roll away, away, away. . ." Gans: This is one of my all-time favorite Franklin's Towers as well. [Music: "Franklin's Tower" -- Grateful Dead, 10/9/76, Oakland Stadium (12:47)] David Gans: I'm talking with David Dodd, who is not only the proprietor of one of the most interesting Grateful Dead-related Web sites in creation, but also the co-author with Rob Weiner of "The Grateful Dead and the Deadheads: An Annotated Bibliography," which is nothing more or less than a thorough listing of every known publication in mainstream media and Grateful Dead fanzines, and I don't know what else. Well, you can tell me, David. Let's also welcome Rob Weiner, on the phone. Rob, are you there? Rob Weiner: I'm here. Gans: Okay. You're in Lubbock, Texas? Weiner: Lubbock, that's right. Gans: Birthplace of Buddy Holly. Weiner: Yeah, and Joe Ely. Gans: And Jimmie Dale Gilmore, if I'm not mistaken. Weiner: Jimmie Dale Gilmore -- Gans: Jo Carol Pierce, lots of great players down there. Weiner: Yup. Gans: Well, what the hell *you* doin' down there? David Dodd: Weiner: Well, I work as a librarian, just like David. But my passion is the Dead, just like David's, so. . . Gans: Well, how did you guys meet, and what was your inspiration to create this book, and how do we describe what is in this book? Who wants to go first? Dodd: You go, Rob. Weiner: Okay, well, David and I met through his Web site, the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, found out that he was a librarian, and we corresponded off and on about things, and I told him I was going to library school and all that. And while I was in library school, after Garcia had died and so forth, and the band broke up, I had a couple of professors encourage me who knew that I was a Dead fan to do something with all this knowledge that I had and all that. And I had bounced the idea of a bibliography off on David, and we exchanged ideas, and now you've got it. Here it is. Dodd: He left something out, though. Because first off, he dragged me to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to a popular culture conference, to talk about the writings about the Grateful Dead. Weiner: Yeah, that's right. Dodd: Boy, was that an experience, goin' to Tulsa. I loved it. No, it's -- Gans: What's the popular culture association? Dodd: Oh, Rob, it's the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association, right? Weiner: Yeah. Dodd: A bunch of people who are interested in what significance, academically, those more ephemeral aspects of our culture might have. Gans: So what is contained in this book? Dodd: Well, I'll tak 1de2 e that one on. This book contains 2,839 entries, and each entry is an article, or a book, or a fan magazine, or a review about the Grateful Dead. And it starts in -- let's see, the first entry was from Sing Out! magazine in November of 1965, and -- Gans: Was that Dave Grisman's report? Dodd: That's Dave Grisman's report on the Grateful Dead -- on the Warlocks. Gans: That's great. Dodd: And the last entry is entry 2839, which is -- it's not chronologically, strictly, but this is the year at a glance, annual compilation of set lists. Gans: Ah, yes. Dodd: And in between is contained probably about 4,000 individual articles, all meticulously indexed by author, composer, artist, photographer, subject, or title of the book or magazine. Gans: Well, of course, I go ego surfing in here, and find that my works are represented in the index quite copiously, and my first one is a column I did for BAM magazine called "Dead Ahead," which I did for a little while. Sort of the Dead news beat in the Bay Area; that was a lot of fun. Dodd: That's right. You're entry number 685 there; that's pretty early on. Gans: Well, actually, my first one is 424 from 1977, but the thing I wanted to observe is that the number of reviews and stories and articles and columns about the Dead increased in frequency and density very seriously through the '80s, I guess. Dodd: Yeah, it's really graphically illustrated in the bibliography, since the main section of it -- books, articles, chapters, and papers -- is chronological, and I put this thing together on a bibliographic database software called ProCite, and the files for the 1960s were so tiny compared to the files for the 1980s. I had to use many, many more files for the 1990s. So it's pretty intense, how it did increase. Sort of got out of hand, I think. Gans: Became *big news* over the years. The thing I like about it is that there's a little bit of a sort of capsule description of many of these articles, and some of them -- I mean, if you took this book with you into a very well-stocked library, you could spend days, if not weeks, looking stuff up and reading some wonderful stories about the Dead. I see Mikal Gilmore's articles from 1987 in here, which is a really, really great piece, and a little commentary about that. And stuff from obscure journals, and scholarly works. All kinds of weird stuff. Dodd: Well, that's the fun thing about an annotated bibliography. If you're the bibliographer, you have to read everything, and then you have to sort of either write about it or summarize it, or -- what would you say, Rob? Weiner: Yeah, summarize it, give a description of what's in there, so people can decide -- who are looking at it, doing research -- whether it's something that they want to look at themselves, and try to track down. Dodd: Right. Weiner; So the book provides a great service in that respect, I think, to anyone researching the Grateful Dead. Gans: Oh, it certainly does. And just for those of us who are just sort of insane detail freaks and want to know everything about this, it's all here. There's tons and tons of information in here. You may think, when you hear that it's a bibliography, that it's just a dry listing of stuff, but that's certainly not the case. Weiner: It's actually fun to read. Dodd: It's fun to read! Gans: It sure as hell is. Dodd: Weiner: And if you look at it as a printed history of the Grateful Dead, it makes it even more interesting. Dodd: That's true. It does sort of read like a history, because the main part of it is chronological, and you can sort of trace their career, going through, reading the annotations. So it's kinda fun that way. Weiner: I might add, too, by the way, that David Gans is kind of the godfather of this book, because the first thing I ever read about the Grateful Dead, like two nights before my first show, which was at the Zoo Amphitheatre [Oklahoma City, OK] on 9/2/85, I sat the whole night and read "Playing In The Band." Gans: Wow. Dodd: Hey. Gans: Did it prepare you adequately for what was about to happen to you? Weiner: It did. It really did, in some ways. In other ways, it didn't because I had no idea. Gans: Weiner: I got into the Dead through listening to "Skeletons From The Closet." I know that that's strange -- Gans: Oh, my. Weiner: -- but that's, you know -- I heard that album, and it was like, this is the greatest music I've ever heard. I mean, it was like something that I was looking for, musically, and that's how I got turned on to the band. And then I went to the show, afterwards. I know that's different from the way most people get turned on, but, you know, to each his own. Gans: Well, that makes me very proud as an author, to know that my book was an inspiration to you. [Music: "One More Saturday Night" -- Grateful Dead, 10/9/76, Oakland Stadium (4:49)] Gans: We were talking about this in the WELL, and a bunch of people had -- somebody, was it Mary Eisenhart, suggested -- Dodd: Yeah, it was Mary. Gans: -- it would be a really good idea for people like us who care about this sort of stuff to maybe chip in, pass the hat, and buy a copy for our local library branch. Dodd: Yes, I love that. Gans: I personally bought a copy because I'm sort of part of the professional user base for all these books, and I have an excuse to buy it, but if you, listening there at home, don't feel that you can take 75 bucks out of, say, your kids' clothing budget or whatever, for this, perhaps you and some of your friends would want to get together and buy and donate a copy to your local library so that everybody can enjoy it. You can all take turns reading it before you kick it into the library, of course. Dodd: Absolutely. Great idea. Gans: So what is that number? Dodd: That number is -- and this is Greenwood Press; they are a legitimate academic press -- 1-800-225-5800. That's the number. Gans: Well, gentlemen -- Dodd: Thank you. Gans: I want to applaud you for doing this work, and David in particular, thank you for making the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics Web page one of the most entertaining and informative documents in the entire Web. Dodd: As long as you don't take it too seriously. That's the key. Gans: What do you mean by that? Dodd: Well, I have people sending me email from all around the country asking me what the songs mean. Gans: Well, that's not your job. Dodd: It's not my job, and frankly, I don't think anyone should take it on themselves to tell someone else what a piece of poetry means. Gans: Well, not even the guys who wrote them want to take responsibility for that. Dodd: Exactly, exactly. So I want to say right up front that I never intended to be a person who claimed to know what anything meant. Gans: Well, I want to thank you both for being here, and I'm going to continue with some music now from David Dodd's first show, 10/9/76, and say once again thank you to Rob Weiner and David Dodd, authors of "The Grateful Dead and the Deadheads: An Annotated Bibliography," published this year by Greenwood Press. Give that 800 number one more time. Dodd: 1-800-225-5800. Thanks a lot, David. Gans: Thank you, gentlemen. Weiner: Thank you. *** . 0