Muchas Garcias
This is my shrine of Grateful Dead tickets, backstage passes and laminates over many years. It's my Golden Road in a nutshell.
My first experience with the Grateful Dead was in 1969. My girlfriend and I had just moved to the Bay Area and we lived in a communal house in Oakland. A friend's ex-wife, Annie Hatch, had a dream to convert an old movie theater at the north end of the bay into a music venue. It was a worthy low budget endeavor and several of us from the commune; Gary Cohen, John Cole, Jim Hatch and myself volunteered to get a new stage built before the opening night; November 15, 1969. The first show was a benefit for an anti-nuclear organization, the August Sixth and Ninth Committee, and the band that offered to play was the Grateful Dead.
The huge San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers drain California's central valleys and join in a vast delta. Seagoing freighters travel up and down the largest channel all the way to Stockton, 80 miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge. The water's course cuts through the landscape at the 1000-yard wide Carquinez Strait, before entering San Pablo Bay, the large northern lobe of the San Francisco Bay, at Crockett.
Crockett had been a company town for C & H Sugar; C & H signifying California and Hawaii. Years later we lived on the Hawaii's Big Island when there were still huge sugarcane fields. There was a constant flow of burned and cut cane hauled to the local mills, crushed and turned into raw molasses, then trucked and loaded into ships in Hilo Bay for the thousand mile voyage across the Pacific Ocean, into San Francisco Bay and to Crockett, to be offloaded at the C & H refinery. It could have been just as aptly named "The Crockett & Hilo Sugar Company".
The town surrounded the dock and factory where the raw molasses was refined into household white, brown and powdered sugars. The workers' housing and storefronts included a small movie theater, sitting at the corner of Star and Second Street almost underneath the huge steel girders of the south anchorage of the Carquinez Bridge. In keeping with the Hawaiian theme, it was called the Lanai Theater.
Our job was to extend the movie theater's narrow stage out to 16 feet all the way across the room, a bare minimum for a fully equipped rock band of the day. As I remember, the work took place over a couple days and on the night of the show, our crew and some guys we didn't know were warming our hands over a fire in a steel barrel in kind of a utility shed behind the theater. I think those other guys were Grateful Dead roadies. They could have been band members for all I knew, warming up their fingers. There wasn't much of what you could call backstage there and I couldn't have picked members of the band out of a lineup. We passed around a whiskey bottle and a few joints.
Inside, the refreshments were wholesome hippie style baked goods; blueberry muffins and banana bread; juices and lemonade, served up by volunteers including my girlfriend Patti and Sandy Schiller from the commune. The auditorium was cold as there was no mechanical heat in operation, so they relied on the crowd's body heat to warm the room. Sure enough when the music started everybody warmed up just fine, as it doesn't take much to get a Grateful Dead audience to start dancing. The show went on for two glorious hours, capping my first rock and roll adventure in the Bay Area.
Well, the following year I met Dick and Carol. They had arrived just at the point when our original Oakland commune had grown beyond capacity and people were choosing up teams to split up into new houses. Patti and I spotted Dick and Carol and immediately said to each other,"Let's get them". They had recently arrived from Hawaii where they came into contact with our extended commune on the Oahu's north shore. They joined our sub-tribe and we made plans to get a house in San Francisco. In the next year and a half, Patti and I had a son, Johnny; Dick and Carol got married; and they had their son, Richie. By 1974, our game plan there in San Francisco had run its course, and there was a diaspora of our SF family. Many of us moved to Hawaii's Big Island; first Roger and Bonnie Bartman, then Dick and Carol, then Patti and I.
Now, everybody my age in the sixties and seventies had at least one friend who became a serious fan of the Grateful Dead. Most of us had at least one friend who became rather enthralled, and many of us had friends who became completely obsessed Deadheads. I fall somewhere in the middle of that scale; Dick Latvala was on the extreme far end of that scale. He dedicated his entire life to the appreciation of Grateful Dead music.
At our San Francisco commune, Dick and Carol took charge of the house's musical system. At first they provided a mixed playlist of great rock, but more and more of it was live Grateful Dead as Dick discovered the world of bootleg concert tape traders. He began a collection there that became legendary. After he moved to Hawaii, he spent every waking moment listening, evaluating, documenting, reviewing and archiving the traded abundance of taped concerts for their musical quality but also, since there were multiple tapers at any given show, each with a little different equipment in a little different location, he noted the recordings' different technical qualities; hisses or buzzes, ambient sound near the microphones.
At some point, in the mid 1980's, Dick and Carol moved back to the mainland and settled in the Bay Area again. To shorten a very long story of which I don't know all the details, Dick got hired by the Grateful Dead to be an all round gopher at the band's Front Street studio in San Rafael, and to organize the band's unruly storeroom of soundboard tapes, making it into what became known as The Vault.
Carol got hired also to work in the Grateful Dead ticket office. In the meantime, I moved from Hawaii to Southern California, and went to work for a big skateboard company, Powell-Peralta. During those years, 1986 through 1991 any time I wanted to attend a California Grateful Dead concert, Dick and Carol would arrange tickets and often backstage passes.
By the time I left the skateboard company, Dick and Carol had separated and divorced as were Patti and I. Carol was living with her boyfriend in Marin County, Dick was living with his second wife in the Berkeley Hills. I ran into an old flame, Katie, and moved in to a studio apartment next to hers in the Rockridge district of North Oakland, near the Berkeley city line.
Some months later, Dick called me up. He said he was breaking up with wife #2, that he needed to move out now, and did I want to be roommates? I wasn't getting anywhere with Katie so we agreed to get an apartment in Richmond, where we stayed for a few months until we found a house in Petaluma, Sonoma County, North of Marin County. That was 1993.
On Halloween that year, the band released the first live Grateful Dead recording: Dick's Picks, Volume 1. Dick had become a key player in the Grateful Dead organization. Volumes 2 and 3 took more than a year to be "picked", since every member of the band had veto power. Phil Lesh was particularly hard to please. Volume 2 was released in 1995, just a few months before Jerry Garcia's death in August. Garcia's death emptied the cup of new Grateful Dead music and Dick's role became even more important: all further releases of Grateful Dead music would have Dick's fingerprints on it. In the next 4 years, there would be 13 more releases under the series named "Dick's Picks".
Just before Garcia's death, Carol was able to swing the purchase of the house next door to Dick and I in Petaluma. She had just moved in weeks before when the news came that Jerry had been found dead. In a fateful window of time, Carol had used her inheritance to make the down payment and had a good solid job with the Grateful Dead for the previous 10 years, to qualify for the loan. A month later, she had no job; there was no Grateful Dead and the ticket office was no more; no tickets to be distributed.
So in this book of a mock garage sale, what artifacts do I have to show for all this?
Over my bed is a display of Grateful Dead tickets, backstage passes, laminates and stuff. Here's a complete list of what's up there:
First of all, there's a bumper sticker that I thought was very cool. It says "Muchas Garcias", in small print it says "Two Gippies from Gila", (an Arizona joke). I've also got a t-shirt with the same image on it. That should go with the display.
Going along chronologically, here's the list of tickets, ticket stubs and backstage passes and "All Access" laminates from mostly Bay Area concerts from 1989 to 1995
Ticket stub from 12/30/1989 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Fancy ticket stub from 12/31/1989 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Two ticket stubs and two backstage passes 2/25/1990 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass from 12/3/1990 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass from 12/30/1990 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Fancy ticket stub from 12/31/1990 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass 10/31/1991 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass 12/30/1991 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass 12/31/1991 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass 5/11/1991 Shoreline Amphitheater
Ticket stubs to see the Dalai Lama at UCSB. April 7, 1991
Wristband from Electric on the Eel 8/10 1991, French's Camp
Ticket stub from 2/22/1992 Oakland Coliseum
There was a most memorable concert, I can't pinpoint the date except that it was before we moved in together. Dick invited me to come along with him to a show at the Oakland Coliseum. He had a mission to accomplish and he would need a little help. I was going to take some acid and Dick knew very well my capabilities in this condition would not be a problem, more likely an asset.
This was a last minute thing, and Dick didn't have a ticket or a backstage pass for me to get through security at the backstage entrance into the Coliseum. Dick had a way about him and a habit of befriending the lowest man or woman on every totem pole. So he was well known to these security guards, who in their position had heard absolutely every possible yarn about why someone should be let in without the right stuff. He promised them sincerely that by the end of the first set he would have me back there with a ticket and pass, and they let us in. Dick went off into the coliseum leaving me at a known location, and after a half hour he came back with both.
The ticket was a regular unused General Admission ticket, but the backstage pass was a little unexpected. Apparently they have a number of backstage passes printed for each occasion, and they are still distributing them for various reasons up to and even during the show...and some times they run out. So there is somebody who is in charge of the passes that has a backup of generic looking passes, and the security guards knew that this particular generic was the wild card for the night. No problem, promises had been kept, and everyone was satisfied.
After the dazzling spectacle of this Coliseum Grateful Dead show, Dick and I wended our way backstage to where there was a big white semi trailer, with steps leading up to a side door. Dick knocked, the door opened. We were expected.
Inside there was dazzling spaceship of technology with lights, vu meters, equalizers and giant 16 track tape recorders. Our job was to take the master tapes from the Oakland Coliseum to the Front Street studio in San Rafael, across the bay some 30 miles. The only reason he needed me was that he couldn't carry all those 10-inch reels of 16 track recordings by himself, and he knew that I would enjoy the mission.
The people inside passed out stacks of open reel tapes in their boxes. We each carried a stack. I was enormously happy floating along with that "permanent grin" characteristic of a good trip. As we were walking through a back corridor of the coliseum toward the parking lot, we came to a place where there were some white trailers. Lo and behold, there was Jerry Garcia standing at the corner of one of the trailers smoking a cigarette. We stopped and Dick chatted with him while I stood there mute, dumbfounded and star-struck; grinning and nodding, hugging the tapes of the concert we had just witnessed, still warm from the equipment that recorded them.
My most meaningful backstage pass is this simple blue and white silhouette of a skyline and some pyramids, the generic pass that I was wearing when we came across Garcia. That was my closest encounter with him unless he was one of those guys around the fire in Crockett, 1969.
One full unused ticket for 12/31/1991 Oakland Coliseum Arena, and one with the stub torn off
Two stubs from 12/12/1992, Oakland Coliseum Arena
Ticket stub from 5/21/993, Shoreline Amphitheater
Backstage pass from 1/26/1993, Shoreline Amphitheater
Backstage pass from 5/22/1993, Shoreline Amphitheater
Ticket stub for Timothy Leary 3/2/1994 at Campbell Hall, UCSB
A laminated pass that let us get through the backstage security at the Memorial for Bill Graham at Golden Gate Park, 11/1/1994.
...and some tickets and stubs are buried and I don't want to take the display apart to find out.
In 1993, after Dick and I became roommates again, I started getting his extra guest laminate, so I didn't need backstage passes anymore. Displayed here are the last six "All Access" laminates the band put out. On their backs, they say "Dick Latvala, Guest". After that I don't have backstage passes because I didn't need them, and I only have tickets and stubs for benefit concerts where it just wouldn't be right to get in free.
The first one I got is my favorite, a golden key inserted into a blue and white globe; my key to the Grateful Dead World, Summer 1993.
Next the next one just says 1993 on a stone carving with an Iguana lounging.
The next one says Spring 1994, Steal your face with sunburst on a Greek column.
The next one says Summer 1994 Skull in a diving mask scuba gear,
The next says Summer 1995, Bald eagle with red, white and blue shield
The very last one was for the fall and winter 1995, a Butterfly fantasy. By winter, there was no Grateful Dead.
Another artifact that I have is the cassette tape of the 1969 Crockett Grateful Dead Show. Dick gave me this tape. This cannot be sold KAPU! Dick was vehement that none of us would ever sell our bootleg GD tapes for money. This was his personal ethos and the rule among of his tape trading friends. Tapes could only be traded for other recorded tapes, traded for blank tapes, or given away. This tape should go to a worthy Deadhead for free.
In 1997, I went to Southern California to build an elaborate skateboard park and when I was done with that, I was visiting my friend Doug Hechter and playing with his new Macintosh computer. We cooked up a logo that would symbolize Dick and his work to anyone who knew about Dick's Picks. The image was that red and black Ampex box with the outline of a reel-to-reel tape. Any GD taper would know what that signified immediately. We screwed around with the image and found that if we distorted the reel-to-reel tape image, it began to look like an alien's face. Underneath I wrote "They Keep Coming"; that's the image on the back.
When I returned to Petaluma and moved into Carol's house, I had the prototype. I had in mind Dick could augment his income in this way, but he was picky about what he would do for money. It was too mercantile for him. He just liked to complain about money, but he didn't really want me to do anything about it. He loved the shirt though, so we screen printed about 30 of them for his closest friends.
I have two shirts remaining. A medium, which is Carol's, that I ended up with somehow, and a large, and somewhere I have another large that was the original prototype, different than all the rest with no copyright notice.
In 1999, I was living next door to Dick at Carol's house. We had the back fence down so that the two backyards were one. Dick had a couple of friends living with him, Joanne and Don. It was akin to our old commune. When I came home from work one day in July. Everyone was gone to the hospital except Joanne. She was waiting for me with the news of what happened. Dick could not be wakened that morning. He was usually a very early riser, but this day Joanne and Don realized he was still sleeping at 9:00am. When they tried to wake him up, he would not and they realized something was wrong. At the hospital they determined that he had had a heart attack during the night that cut off circulation to his brain long enough to do permanent damage. He was determined to have no brain function, and there was nothing to be done. We set up a hospice in his living room and played Grateful Dead music constantly as would have been his wish, and let him drift away. Friends and family came to sit at his bedside and say goodbye over the next ten days until he was gone.
There's an odd coincidence in the name of the anti-nuke organization from the Crockett show: It was the August Sixth and Ninth Committee; so named for the horrific nuclear attacks on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6th and 9th, 1945. In the fullness of time, these dates have become further personal commemorations of grief and remembrance. Garcia died August 9th, 1995, and Dick on August 6th, 1999.
The days of late July and early August hold a pall for what remains of our tribe; remembering Dick's birthday, July 26; the day Dick slipped into a coma, July 27; Jerry Garcia's birthday, August 1; then all the rest of the days we held hospice vigil over Dick until August Sixth; and all the grief we feel for Garcia on the Ninth.
Life goes on, and this chapter is about the artifacts. Like the ten days of Dick's deathwatch, the days following his passing there was also a stream of visitors to the house. One afternoon many of us were sitting around in the park-like backyard, and John Cutler, who had been the band's last soundboard master and key figure in the Dick's Picks decisions said to the group, "Who's got a really good picture of Dick?" Well, I did. I went over to my room in Carol's house and got it. Everyone agreed that it was the perfect picture; a head shot of Dick sitting in his chair at the Hawaii house with his head down, eyes closed, wearing a New Riders t-shirt and with white earphones. Obviously, if you knew him, he was listening to the Grateful Dead. Cutler took the picture with him, and I didn't think about it for a while.
Then one day I got a letter from the Grateful Dead organization with a waiver for me to sign for the use of that photo, and a check for $500.00! Dick's Pick Volume 15 had been issued, and the liner notes, with the picture, were dedicated to Dick. In my peculiar life had appeared an undeserved claim to fame; my name in the acknowledgements for "Photography". But I hadn't taken the picture. It had been Bonnie Bartman. I sent her the $500.00 but it was too late to correct the credits.
So that could be a package deal for the Estate Sale; that photo, framed and matted, and a copy of Dick's Picks Volume 15, where in the liner notes my name is forever inscribed. I'll autograph it.
The "Dick's Picks" series continued on after his death until there were 36 in all. Then the torch was passed to a worthy successor, David Lemieux, to continue the work Dick had started in the series of releases, now more than 30, "Dave's Picks", which continues to this day. All that knew them both Dick and Dave agreed that he was the perfect choice.
Not for sale. Uncle John's Garage Sale is just the name of the book.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com
This is my shrine of Grateful Dead tickets, backstage passes and laminates over many years. It's my Golden Road in a nutshell.
My first experience with the Grateful Dead was in 1969. My girlfriend and I had just moved to the Bay Area and we lived in a communal house in Oakland. A friend's ex-wife, Annie Hatch, had a dream to convert an old movie theater at the north end of the bay into a music venue. It was a worthy low budget endeavor and several of us from the commune; Gary Cohen, John Cole, Jim Hatch and myself volunteered to get a new stage built before the opening night; November 15, 1969. The first show was a benefit for an anti-nuclear organization, the August Sixth and Ninth Committee, and the band that offered to play was the Grateful Dead.
The huge San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers drain California's central valleys and join in a vast delta. Seagoing freighters travel up and down the largest channel all the way to Stockton, 80 miles east of the Golden Gate Bridge. The water's course cuts through the landscape at the 1000-yard wide Carquinez Strait, before entering San Pablo Bay, the large northern lobe of the San Francisco Bay, at Crockett.
Crockett had been a company town for C & H Sugar; C & H signifying California and Hawaii. Years later we lived on the Hawaii's Big Island when there were still huge sugarcane fields. There was a constant flow of burned and cut cane hauled to the local mills, crushed and turned into raw molasses, then trucked and loaded into ships in Hilo Bay for the thousand mile voyage across the Pacific Ocean, into San Francisco Bay and to Crockett, to be offloaded at the C & H refinery. It could have been just as aptly named "The Crockett & Hilo Sugar Company".
The town surrounded the dock and factory where the raw molasses was refined into household white, brown and powdered sugars. The workers' housing and storefronts included a small movie theater, sitting at the corner of Star and Second Street almost underneath the huge steel girders of the south anchorage of the Carquinez Bridge. In keeping with the Hawaiian theme, it was called the Lanai Theater.
Our job was to extend the movie theater's narrow stage out to 16 feet all the way across the room, a bare minimum for a fully equipped rock band of the day. As I remember, the work took place over a couple days and on the night of the show, our crew and some guys we didn't know were warming our hands over a fire in a steel barrel in kind of a utility shed behind the theater. I think those other guys were Grateful Dead roadies. They could have been band members for all I knew, warming up their fingers. There wasn't much of what you could call backstage there and I couldn't have picked members of the band out of a lineup. We passed around a whiskey bottle and a few joints.
Inside, the refreshments were wholesome hippie style baked goods; blueberry muffins and banana bread; juices and lemonade, served up by volunteers including my girlfriend Patti and Sandy Schiller from the commune. The auditorium was cold as there was no mechanical heat in operation, so they relied on the crowd's body heat to warm the room. Sure enough when the music started everybody warmed up just fine, as it doesn't take much to get a Grateful Dead audience to start dancing. The show went on for two glorious hours, capping my first rock and roll adventure in the Bay Area.
Well, the following year I met Dick and Carol. They had arrived just at the point when our original Oakland commune had grown beyond capacity and people were choosing up teams to split up into new houses. Patti and I spotted Dick and Carol and immediately said to each other,"Let's get them". They had recently arrived from Hawaii where they came into contact with our extended commune on the Oahu's north shore. They joined our sub-tribe and we made plans to get a house in San Francisco. In the next year and a half, Patti and I had a son, Johnny; Dick and Carol got married; and they had their son, Richie. By 1974, our game plan there in San Francisco had run its course, and there was a diaspora of our SF family. Many of us moved to Hawaii's Big Island; first Roger and Bonnie Bartman, then Dick and Carol, then Patti and I.
Now, everybody my age in the sixties and seventies had at least one friend who became a serious fan of the Grateful Dead. Most of us had at least one friend who became rather enthralled, and many of us had friends who became completely obsessed Deadheads. I fall somewhere in the middle of that scale; Dick Latvala was on the extreme far end of that scale. He dedicated his entire life to the appreciation of Grateful Dead music.
At our San Francisco commune, Dick and Carol took charge of the house's musical system. At first they provided a mixed playlist of great rock, but more and more of it was live Grateful Dead as Dick discovered the world of bootleg concert tape traders. He began a collection there that became legendary. After he moved to Hawaii, he spent every waking moment listening, evaluating, documenting, reviewing and archiving the traded abundance of taped concerts for their musical quality but also, since there were multiple tapers at any given show, each with a little different equipment in a little different location, he noted the recordings' different technical qualities; hisses or buzzes, ambient sound near the microphones.
At some point, in the mid 1980's, Dick and Carol moved back to the mainland and settled in the Bay Area again. To shorten a very long story of which I don't know all the details, Dick got hired by the Grateful Dead to be an all round gopher at the band's Front Street studio in San Rafael, and to organize the band's unruly storeroom of soundboard tapes, making it into what became known as The Vault.
Carol got hired also to work in the Grateful Dead ticket office. In the meantime, I moved from Hawaii to Southern California, and went to work for a big skateboard company, Powell-Peralta. During those years, 1986 through 1991 any time I wanted to attend a California Grateful Dead concert, Dick and Carol would arrange tickets and often backstage passes.
By the time I left the skateboard company, Dick and Carol had separated and divorced as were Patti and I. Carol was living with her boyfriend in Marin County, Dick was living with his second wife in the Berkeley Hills. I ran into an old flame, Katie, and moved in to a studio apartment next to hers in the Rockridge district of North Oakland, near the Berkeley city line.
Some months later, Dick called me up. He said he was breaking up with wife #2, that he needed to move out now, and did I want to be roommates? I wasn't getting anywhere with Katie so we agreed to get an apartment in Richmond, where we stayed for a few months until we found a house in Petaluma, Sonoma County, North of Marin County. That was 1993.
On Halloween that year, the band released the first live Grateful Dead recording: Dick's Picks, Volume 1. Dick had become a key player in the Grateful Dead organization. Volumes 2 and 3 took more than a year to be "picked", since every member of the band had veto power. Phil Lesh was particularly hard to please. Volume 2 was released in 1995, just a few months before Jerry Garcia's death in August. Garcia's death emptied the cup of new Grateful Dead music and Dick's role became even more important: all further releases of Grateful Dead music would have Dick's fingerprints on it. In the next 4 years, there would be 13 more releases under the series named "Dick's Picks".
Just before Garcia's death, Carol was able to swing the purchase of the house next door to Dick and I in Petaluma. She had just moved in weeks before when the news came that Jerry had been found dead. In a fateful window of time, Carol had used her inheritance to make the down payment and had a good solid job with the Grateful Dead for the previous 10 years, to qualify for the loan. A month later, she had no job; there was no Grateful Dead and the ticket office was no more; no tickets to be distributed.
So in this book of a mock garage sale, what artifacts do I have to show for all this?
Over my bed is a display of Grateful Dead tickets, backstage passes, laminates and stuff. Here's a complete list of what's up there:
First of all, there's a bumper sticker that I thought was very cool. It says "Muchas Garcias", in small print it says "Two Gippies from Gila", (an Arizona joke). I've also got a t-shirt with the same image on it. That should go with the display.
Going along chronologically, here's the list of tickets, ticket stubs and backstage passes and "All Access" laminates from mostly Bay Area concerts from 1989 to 1995
Ticket stub from 12/30/1989 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Fancy ticket stub from 12/31/1989 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Two ticket stubs and two backstage passes 2/25/1990 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass from 12/3/1990 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass from 12/30/1990 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Fancy ticket stub from 12/31/1990 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass 10/31/1991 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass 12/30/1991 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass 12/31/1991 Oakland Coliseum Arena
Backstage pass 5/11/1991 Shoreline Amphitheater
Ticket stubs to see the Dalai Lama at UCSB. April 7, 1991
Wristband from Electric on the Eel 8/10 1991, French's Camp
Ticket stub from 2/22/1992 Oakland Coliseum
There was a most memorable concert, I can't pinpoint the date except that it was before we moved in together. Dick invited me to come along with him to a show at the Oakland Coliseum. He had a mission to accomplish and he would need a little help. I was going to take some acid and Dick knew very well my capabilities in this condition would not be a problem, more likely an asset.
This was a last minute thing, and Dick didn't have a ticket or a backstage pass for me to get through security at the backstage entrance into the Coliseum. Dick had a way about him and a habit of befriending the lowest man or woman on every totem pole. So he was well known to these security guards, who in their position had heard absolutely every possible yarn about why someone should be let in without the right stuff. He promised them sincerely that by the end of the first set he would have me back there with a ticket and pass, and they let us in. Dick went off into the coliseum leaving me at a known location, and after a half hour he came back with both.
The ticket was a regular unused General Admission ticket, but the backstage pass was a little unexpected. Apparently they have a number of backstage passes printed for each occasion, and they are still distributing them for various reasons up to and even during the show...and some times they run out. So there is somebody who is in charge of the passes that has a backup of generic looking passes, and the security guards knew that this particular generic was the wild card for the night. No problem, promises had been kept, and everyone was satisfied.
Inside there was dazzling spaceship of technology with lights, vu meters, equalizers and giant 16 track tape recorders. Our job was to take the master tapes from the Oakland Coliseum to the Front Street studio in San Rafael, across the bay some 30 miles. The only reason he needed me was that he couldn't carry all those 10-inch reels of 16 track recordings by himself, and he knew that I would enjoy the mission.
The people inside passed out stacks of open reel tapes in their boxes. We each carried a stack. I was enormously happy floating along with that "permanent grin" characteristic of a good trip. As we were walking through a back corridor of the coliseum toward the parking lot, we came to a place where there were some white trailers. Lo and behold, there was Jerry Garcia standing at the corner of one of the trailers smoking a cigarette. We stopped and Dick chatted with him while I stood there mute, dumbfounded and star-struck; grinning and nodding, hugging the tapes of the concert we had just witnessed, still warm from the equipment that recorded them.
My most meaningful backstage pass is this simple blue and white silhouette of a skyline and some pyramids, the generic pass that I was wearing when we came across Garcia. That was my closest encounter with him unless he was one of those guys around the fire in Crockett, 1969.
One full unused ticket for 12/31/1991 Oakland Coliseum Arena, and one with the stub torn off
Two stubs from 12/12/1992, Oakland Coliseum Arena
Ticket stub from 5/21/993, Shoreline Amphitheater
Backstage pass from 1/26/1993, Shoreline Amphitheater
Backstage pass from 5/22/1993, Shoreline Amphitheater
Ticket stub for Timothy Leary 3/2/1994 at Campbell Hall, UCSB
A laminated pass that let us get through the backstage security at the Memorial for Bill Graham at Golden Gate Park, 11/1/1994.
...and some tickets and stubs are buried and I don't want to take the display apart to find out.
In 1993, after Dick and I became roommates again, I started getting his extra guest laminate, so I didn't need backstage passes anymore. Displayed here are the last six "All Access" laminates the band put out. On their backs, they say "Dick Latvala, Guest". After that I don't have backstage passes because I didn't need them, and I only have tickets and stubs for benefit concerts where it just wouldn't be right to get in free.
The first one I got is my favorite, a golden key inserted into a blue and white globe; my key to the Grateful Dead World, Summer 1993.
Next the next one just says 1993 on a stone carving with an Iguana lounging.
The next one says Spring 1994, Steal your face with sunburst on a Greek column.
The next one says Summer 1994 Skull in a diving mask scuba gear,
The next says Summer 1995, Bald eagle with red, white and blue shield
The very last one was for the fall and winter 1995, a Butterfly fantasy. By winter, there was no Grateful Dead.
Another artifact that I have is the cassette tape of the 1969 Crockett Grateful Dead Show. Dick gave me this tape. This cannot be sold KAPU! Dick was vehement that none of us would ever sell our bootleg GD tapes for money. This was his personal ethos and the rule among of his tape trading friends. Tapes could only be traded for other recorded tapes, traded for blank tapes, or given away. This tape should go to a worthy Deadhead for free.
In 1997, I went to Southern California to build an elaborate skateboard park and when I was done with that, I was visiting my friend Doug Hechter and playing with his new Macintosh computer. We cooked up a logo that would symbolize Dick and his work to anyone who knew about Dick's Picks. The image was that red and black Ampex box with the outline of a reel-to-reel tape. Any GD taper would know what that signified immediately. We screwed around with the image and found that if we distorted the reel-to-reel tape image, it began to look like an alien's face. Underneath I wrote "They Keep Coming"; that's the image on the back.
I have two shirts remaining. A medium, which is Carol's, that I ended up with somehow, and a large, and somewhere I have another large that was the original prototype, different than all the rest with no copyright notice.
In 1999, I was living next door to Dick at Carol's house. We had the back fence down so that the two backyards were one. Dick had a couple of friends living with him, Joanne and Don. It was akin to our old commune. When I came home from work one day in July. Everyone was gone to the hospital except Joanne. She was waiting for me with the news of what happened. Dick could not be wakened that morning. He was usually a very early riser, but this day Joanne and Don realized he was still sleeping at 9:00am. When they tried to wake him up, he would not and they realized something was wrong. At the hospital they determined that he had had a heart attack during the night that cut off circulation to his brain long enough to do permanent damage. He was determined to have no brain function, and there was nothing to be done. We set up a hospice in his living room and played Grateful Dead music constantly as would have been his wish, and let him drift away. Friends and family came to sit at his bedside and say goodbye over the next ten days until he was gone.
There's an odd coincidence in the name of the anti-nuke organization from the Crockett show: It was the August Sixth and Ninth Committee; so named for the horrific nuclear attacks on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6th and 9th, 1945. In the fullness of time, these dates have become further personal commemorations of grief and remembrance. Garcia died August 9th, 1995, and Dick on August 6th, 1999.
The days of late July and early August hold a pall for what remains of our tribe; remembering Dick's birthday, July 26; the day Dick slipped into a coma, July 27; Jerry Garcia's birthday, August 1; then all the rest of the days we held hospice vigil over Dick until August Sixth; and all the grief we feel for Garcia on the Ninth.
Life goes on, and this chapter is about the artifacts. Like the ten days of Dick's deathwatch, the days following his passing there was also a stream of visitors to the house. One afternoon many of us were sitting around in the park-like backyard, and John Cutler, who had been the band's last soundboard master and key figure in the Dick's Picks decisions said to the group, "Who's got a really good picture of Dick?" Well, I did. I went over to my room in Carol's house and got it. Everyone agreed that it was the perfect picture; a head shot of Dick sitting in his chair at the Hawaii house with his head down, eyes closed, wearing a New Riders t-shirt and with white earphones. Obviously, if you knew him, he was listening to the Grateful Dead. Cutler took the picture with him, and I didn't think about it for a while.
So that could be a package deal for the Estate Sale; that photo, framed and matted, and a copy of Dick's Picks Volume 15, where in the liner notes my name is forever inscribed. I'll autograph it.
The "Dick's Picks" series continued on after his death until there were 36 in all. Then the torch was passed to a worthy successor, David Lemieux, to continue the work Dick had started in the series of releases, now more than 30, "Dave's Picks", which continues to this day. All that knew them both Dick and Dave agreed that he was the perfect choice.
Not for sale. Uncle John's Garage Sale is just the name of the book.
Copyright © 2022 John Oliver
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All Rights Reserved
mail@unclejohnsweb.com