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Surely You Jest (listen) David Gans You’d best be glad this guitar ain’t a weapon I’d strum your lyin’ ass on up to Heaven But you’d not get in Takin’ lessons from that thug Shakin’ hippies down for drugs And drinkin’ from that jug Of stolen liquor I’ve been runnin’ with a crowd of rowdy rascals A rootin’ tootin’ band of Eddie Haskells That bet of Pascal’s You know it’s not for me My eyes have yet to see A scrap of proof that he Believes in humans I thought it was a hole that needed fillin’ To you it was a a plan that needed killin’ Supervillain So you’ve cast me in your flick You’d make a dead man sick As if you had been kicked As much as I have And after all this storm and drain You come by to pick my brain To see what keeps me sane So you can steal it I overheard your mumbled malediction My truth is even stranger than your fiction This grave addiction Well I came here for the fun But I see those days are done I’m not the only one Who saw it comin’ I thought that you and I would be like brothers Instead we just keep dissin’ one another You sorry mutha After all the tears we’ve cried Since our broken angel died These acts of fratricide Are so offensive So go tell your kleptocrat That he ain’t no diplomat If everybody’s fat Then what’s the skinny?

© 2004 Whispering Hallelujah (BMI) All rights reserved

Two posts by Steve Marcus, former head of Grateful Dead Ticketing, from the WELL, reproduced here with his permission.

539, 416 of 428: Steven E. Marcus (smarcus) Sun 4 Dec 05 01:56 65

I am just happy for all that I have received in the past and for the
over 100 times that I was allowed to plug into the board.

The facts are fairly simple. When the Dick’s Pick’s series was started
each one sold about 25,000 units, but in the last few years that has
dropped to 10,000 or less (which is why the Fillmore boxed set was
limited to 10,000. Hind sight is most likely now telling GDP that they
could have easily sold 25,000.)

Offering a new Dead Download every month is NOT going to make any one
rich, and the fact is that because of the way that the band ran their
business none of them are rich in the true sense of the word. Some of
them put away their money and invested, but I would be very surprised
if any them are worth more than $15,000,000.

This band was overly generous in the wages they paid their employees.
At the peak I was paid a base of $62,500.00 (which was at the time
about $20,000-$40,000 more per year than all other box office managers
for all the major stadiums and arenas in the country and a hell of a
lot more than any other ticket sales manager for any other band) on top
of that base you can add four bonuses per year; one for each tour
(Spring, Summer, Fall at approximately $5,000 per tour) and a Christmas
bonus of around $10,000 although I believe it was $20,000 in 1988.

One top of that add in the 15% of the TOTAL amount earned that GDP
contributed into a profit sharing plan and COMPLETE Dental and Medical
coverage plus four week vacations (not including the two to four weeks
GDP was closed after New Years.) The free tickets for almost every
show for almost every employee. Hell the women that were basically
receiptionists were getting over $45,000 per year plus all the above.
In the real world they would have been lucky to get $30,000 total per
year!

A few months after Vince was brought into the band he finally asked
how much he was getting. He was told $1,000 per day. His response was
so we play 80 shows per year, that good. He was corrected and told
that it was for 365 days plus tour and Christmas bonuses. He was paid
exactly the same as Garcia and everyone else. Do you think Ron Wood
was paid the same as Mick or Keith? Not a chance. Do you think Darryl
Jones is getting paid the same as Bill Wyman was getting even after 15
years in the band? Not even close.

My point is that this band could have cut everyone’s pay almost in
half and we would still have been well paid, but their basic attitude
was share the wealth.

In a period of one year I went from sitting outside Frost because I
couldn’t get a ticket (1982) to NEVER having to worry about getting a
ticket for ANY show AND being paid for it. I am thankful for all of
that.

My point is that all of us have benefited from this bands generousity
if only from the years of allowing us to tape shows and share them.
Even as an employee I bought EVERY single music or video release.

And when I have the money I still do.

I have hundreds and hundreds of hours of incredible music that I can
listen to some of it high quality board source and some of it high
quality audience source. Everytime I listen to one of those tapes I
thank the Grateful Dead for letting me relive incredible times, and if
they choose to take all the free stuff off line it is their choice. I
can still trade what I have.

Shit, it’s 2 am and I am rambling…

539, 418 of 428: Steven E. Marcus (smarcus) Sun 4 Dec 05 06:43 13

I left off the “per diem” when on the road which was $45-$60
per day for expenses, but the Grateful Dead traveled with a four star
chef from a major resteraunt AND a Vegan chef, plus we could order food
“bags” with custom made meals for the days off. 30 days on the road
at $45 per day = $1,350 of which I would usually spend less than $300.

And another point about sharing the wealth. When David Bowie was paid
$1,500,000 to play the 1983 US Festival he paid each member of his
band union MINIMUM!!!! Which I believe was $350 each!!!!! Stevie Ray
Vaughn was supposed to be on that tour until he found out what Bowie
was planning on paying him.

539, 429 of 429: Steven E. Marcus (smarcus) Sun 4 Dec 05 12:48 17

… in 1987 when they
started making $50,000,000 per year in ticket sales […] their song
lyric writers were living off royalties from record, tape and CD sales
which was and is very little. At that point the Grateful Dead voted to
pay Hunter and Barlow annual salaries, plus the royalties.

Also I wanted to make it clear that my above posts are relating only
to the Grateful Dead with Jerry, not The Other Ones or The Dead who I
am very sure aren’t paying every player the same, and that that policy
ended with Jerry.

Peter Braverman pointed me at a blog called Cullen Sweeney, American Dreamer. In an entry titled “Requiem for the Dead,” Sweeney writes:

In a lot of ways, the Grateful Dead were more of an idea than a band. Which is a clumsy way of saying that the fact they played musical instruments really, really well was far less important than the shared intuition that they were actually instruments themselves: master craftsmen in whom a holy fire found its rightful vessel. Which is an elaborate way of saying that the Dead as musicians were greater than the sum of their parts, that it wasn’t just fingers and strings and drumsticks but rather, somehow, a collective of seekers aiming their arrows at the Infinite, just beyond the pale of our usual understanding.
Which is all a lengthy preface to a bleak finale, because the Dead have died, at their own hands. As far as deaths go, it was a quiet and mundane affair. The passing was, in a word, businesslike. And, indeed, no word but that could ever describe their demise, because it is the ultimate negation of their entire journey. It is the darkness at the end of the tunnel.

Later in the piece:

…if we accept the premise that life is but a series of moments, to be performed in as we are able, then the Dead’s long train of action-in-time was more powerful, more awe-inspiring and just more totally fulfilled than almost anything else you could compress into the narrow historical document of a musical recording. It was all there, all free, all open – and just as the Dead wanted it.

And:

The surviving members don’t much play like they used to, at least not with each other. The day-to-day operations of the Grateful Dead organization have been pawned off on hired corporate jockeys who pronounce “music business” with a silent “m-u-s-i-c.” The Dead’s “scene” long ago atrophied from lack of exercise, meaning that there just wasn’t much left for the band to keep in touch with outside of their ever-narrowing world. The band members gradually disappeared behind a faceless conglomerate. And there is no accountability – no address to write to, no sympathetic ear to speak to.

Every day has delivered a new twist to this sad story, and along with it a new adjustment to my attitude about it. Hearing Weir’s KBCO interview yesterday broke my heart; he may be right about the archive’s legal exposure with regard to publishing rights, but the nastiness of his tone at the end of the interview – sneering “information wants to be free” the way he did, and kissing off the boycott-petitioners with a curt “seeya” – put an end to Bobby’s long streak of being a decent and classy voice in the middle of all the bickering among the ex-brothers.
There is some merit to the concern about the archive putting the GD at risk of lawsuits over the use of cover songs on this free archive. But the GD organization’s handling of this mess rivals that of the Bush administration regarding Iraq: one rationale after another, any of which might have been convincing if it had been delivered with some respect for the people it was addressed to, and if it hadn’t been replaced the next day by another.
Back to Cullen Sweeney:

The good ol’ Grateful Dead carved out a sizeable homestead on the frontier of human possibility. While it lasted, it was a good place. It was worked and tended in their image and those who had eyes to see, saw that it was good. After Reagan, even after Jerry, it still stood.
But they have grown old now, those who remain. In large part, I can’t even really blame “the boys” for seeking some easy financial solace in their waning years. And, in truth, there wasn’t much left for them to wash their hands of.

I’ve known all along that this weird little world of ours isn’t anywhere near as wonderful as the myths would have you believe. Doing business with the Grateful Dead will do that to you. But my job in Deadland is to put the best music on the air, and that is what has kept me inspired and productive throughout the journey. There had always been rivers of shit to cross on The Golden Road, but the ecstatic and aesthetic payoff has always been worth it.
When I started doing the Grateful Dead Hour nationally, I thought it would be great if I could say at the ened of each show, “And if you like what you heard, call this number to order a copy.” Now you can do that, and I have a new commercial release to deal with at least once a month. I still manage to feature a lot of unreleased GD (and related) music, and I will continue to put the Dead’s best foot forward on the air every week.
I’m staying for the music, goddammit.
Addendum: A friend of mine, a longtime GD employee who has been (wisely) staying out of this debacle for the most part, sent me this and granted my plea for permission to post it. It helps to explain where Weir has been at through all this shit:

No one – and I mean NO one – fought harder than Bob for the people who worked so hard to keep the Grateful Dead thriving and who stepped up to hold things together after the touring gold mine caved in. No one fought harder to keep the merchandising operation in-house instead of farming it out to Coran Capshaw’s empire. No one fought harder to honor the loyalty of long-time employees in kind. No one took a more hands-on interest in creating new possibilities for the company (including the ahead-of-the-industry vision of digitizing and making available the entire contents of the Vault, and the never-to-be-realized business alliances with other bands, in which such major acts as U2 and Pearl Jam expressed an interest). When Phil’s my-way-or-else conditions for reuniting the Dead spelled doom for GDP/GDM as an independent, viable business, no one took it harder than Bobby, who was near tears during the company meeting at which the layoffs of 2/3 of the workforce was announced.

Hence my shock and disappointment at the thoughtlessness of Bob’s utterances in Boulder this week.

Bob Weir gave an interview on KBCO in Denver, and the subject came up:
Listen to it here. It’s a little jerky, with pieces missing, but I transcribed some of it…

We had to cover our asses. What they’re doing is illegal, unless there are arrangements made… particularly in the case of covers – other people’s material.
If we’re perceived to be distributing their songs without their agreenent, they have every right, and really and every obligation, to sue us…
We had to take it down. We had no choice. It’s archive.com’s [sic] job to make arrangements with the other people whose material… we’re playing, and then everything’s good….
Probably a lot of it is stuff that we intend to release in the future anyway.
We need revenue. Our music division needs revnue so we can digitize all of that stuff.
The ‘information wants to be free, man’ – those folks… this is not information, this is music. It’s kind of value-added information. Some people prefer to call it art….
We had to go ahead and do the right thing, and it upset some folks. I’m really sorry about that. So they started up a petition, a boycott, and all that kind of stuff. I really hope they can stick to their guns, and boycott us, and… seeya….

Weir’s attitude makes me very sad. The publishing/rights issue has been the big unspoken question mark in this whole archive.org deal for quite some time, but coming from Weir in this interview it sounds like legalistic bullshit retrofitted by some bureaucrat.
And really shitty PR, too. Bob’s been a pretty classy character through most of the sturm und drang of the post-Garcia GD drama, and to hear him sneering at fans is pretty distressing. Ratdog’s (and GDP’s) publicist, Dennis McNally, is usually on the road w/ Ratdog – was he there in the studio when Bob blew off a big chunk of his audience?
Sure, some of the most vocal of the complainers in this deal are totally full of themselves, and I thought the boycott petition was a lousy way to seek redress of grievances, but jeez, Bobby.
P.S.The other voice (aside from Weir and the interviewer) heard on the KBCO interview is Mark Karan’s.