Grateful Dead: An Early Silicon Valley Startup

Business strategy never meant much to the Grateful Dead, students of folk music, psychedelia and utopian counterculture.

But they were unwitting pioneers of innovative practices now embraced by Silicon Valley, according to experts gathered this week at San Jose State to study the cultural, business, sociological and spiritual aspects of one of the most consistently top-grossing bands in the entertainment industry.

Their acumen -- creating personalized customer service, early social media, virtual communities, consistent product quality and "open access" to free recordings -- built a business legacy that persists today, almost 20 years after the death of leader Jerry Garcia, said academics.

Steve Rogers, from left, Christopher O'Connell, Jesse Jarnow and David Taylor listen to a panel discussion at the Grateful Dead Conference held at San Jose State University on Nov. 6, 2014. (Gary Reyes/Bay Area News Group)

"The Grateful Dead were in fact an early startup and can be included as one of the many wild success stories to emerge from Silicon Valley," said Jaime Baldovinos, a Mill Valley computer software developer who researched song lyrics that reveal the band's "creative destruction" ethos -- also embraced as the "disruptive economy" needed to move technology forward.

The So Many Roads conference, which ends Saturday, attracted dozens of scholars to a vibrant, multifaceted and often eccentric field of study.

For Deadheads, "Dark Star" holds the same classic status that Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" holds for the Beats, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" for Modernists or "Lost In Translation" for Millennials.

This conference on all things Dead was the inspiration of two educators: Nicholas Meriwether, founding Grateful Dead archivist at UC Santa Cruz, and Michael Parrish, vertebrate paleontologist, music blogger and dean of the College of Science at SJSU.

"We wanted to legitimize the Dead's role in the history of the Bay Area and the history of America," Parrish said.

Trixie Garcia, of the Jerry Garcia Estate, chats with Eric Maki following her panel discussion at the Grateful Dead Conference held at San Jose State University on Nov. 6, 2014. (Gary Reyes/Bay Area News Group)

Participants include founding member and drummer Bill Kreutzmann; Trixie Garcia, Jerry's daughter; and Carolyn "Mountain Girl" Adams Garcia, his second wife, and Roger McNamee, partner of the Sand Hill Road private equity firm Elevation Partners and guitarist with Moonalice.

Both the Grateful Dead and Silicon Valley were products of a culture that rejected static ideas, said Baldovinos.

For instance, the Dead found new ways to create customer loyalty.

It was the first major band to offer wheelchair seating at the front row of the orchestra pit, "the best seats in the house," said Steve Marcus of Grateful Dead Ticket Sales.

The band distributed 600,000 tickets a year through its own small mail-order house, creating a personal relationship with fans. Ticket lotteries for high-demand shows sometimes favored envelopes beautifully decorated by Deadheads. The band offered "Tour Book" tickets for every concert on a tour.

"The idea behind the enterprise was not to make money, but to make it easier for the band's hard-core, longtime fans to purchase tickets without using a credit card," Marcus said. "Yet (the ticket service) was immediately profitable."

The band had the prescience to create virtual communities, where music linked fans separated by geography.

A phone hotline notified fans of the band's touring schedule long before it was announced to the public. Impromptu gatherings of thousands of Deadheads filled parking lots before shows, creating instant communities bound by a concert.

And the Dead were early adopters of what's now called "open access." Rather than banning recordings, they created a special taping section for those who wanted to record the concert.

This turned out to be a brilliant marketing tool, expanding their audience, as well as a "cutting-edge music-sharing idea" that became the cornerstone of Deadhead culture, according to Scott Carlson of Rice University.

Open access -- the unrestricted access to scholarly work -- has been adopted by a growing number of universities and academic librarians, he said. The band U2 recently gave away a free album to all iTunes users.

Innovation and improvisation made each of their 2,333 live shows unique.

Asked to improve the Dead's sound, audio engineer Ron Wickersham turned their gear -- instruments, guitar amplifiers, microphones or sound system -- into an experimental test bed.

Each instrument had its own sound system powerful enough to directly address the audience. Monitor speakers were on stage along with a separate monitor mix. The original stereo sound reinforcement system grew in power.

As with tech companies today, there was continuous engineering to measure, improve and correct every detail in the system.

"Their instincts were really good," said Carolyn Garcia. "And they learned it all from the ground up."

Contact Lisa M. Krieger at 650-492-4098.

'So Many Roads' conference:

The conference features discussions on topics as diverse as the band's innovations in sound engineering, symbolism in lyrics and the dancing of nomadic "spinners." Saturday is the last day. Information at www.sjsu.edu/somanyroads.

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