Living Off the Dead
OFFICIALLY, the Dead have been dead for more than three years-but it seems that Grateful Dead direct sales may live on and on.
The durable rock band itself passed on Aug. 9, 1995, when Jerry Garcia (a.k.a. the Fat Man or, mostly, just Jerry), the band’s hirsute, nine-fingered leader, was found dead in a Forest Knolls, CA rehab center at age 53. Like Volkswagen Beetles, though, Grateful Dead icons like skeletons, dancing bears and tie-dye have transferred from counterculture to commercial culture. “We’re selling more now than we did in 1994 and 1995-by far,” says Gregory Burbank, national sales director for Grateful Dead licensee Liquid Blue.
Currently, dozens of online and catalog retailers are peddling everything from tie-dyed Grateful Dead Beanie Bears (named for such famed Dead song personas as Jack Straw and Sugaree) to “Dead Tread” sandals (which leave a skeleton imprint) to collectible watches and even a 17.5-inch stuffed gray-haired Jerry Garcia doll from Gund. New products-mouse pads, “Steal Your Face” car emblems-appear more frequently than Elvis sightings.
“It’s big,” says Margie Vigneri, owner of online retailer Stella’s Peace Emporium (www.toketime. com), referring to the still-booming Dead market. “It just seems to be gathering more steam, kind of like Elvis.”
Why? For one thing, Deadheads have money. Most early Deadheads, for instance, are now income-earning baby boomers who, like pilgrims with relics, buy Dancing Bear stickers to add political correctness to their Jeep Cherokees. Many later Deadheads, likewise, have been what one older fan calls “Club Dead,” self-consciously hip college-age kids with lots more disposable income than their Deadhead predecessors.
What’s more, the Dead culture merges perfectly with online marketing. In its 30 years of touring, the band gathered legions of “tourheads”-fanatics who would spend entire summers following the band from site to site. Gradually, every Dead concert-particularly in the past 15 years-became a tent city of tie-dyed retailers, selling, variously, drugs, stir-fry, T-shirts and concert tapes.
During concerts in the mid- to late-’80s, “suddenly there were a lot of young kids who seemed to have a lot of cash,” says 35-year-old Dead fan Marge Gale of Portland, OR. “You could feel the change in the people who sold stuff [in parking lots]. They usually did really well.”
Today, many Deadheads still aren’t ready to let the party end. Thanks to the Web, they haven’t had to. Coincidentally, Garcia’s death marked the explosion of the Internet, the marketing/info-swapping medium of choice for the Deadhead demographic. Just as concert parking lots once teemed with station-wagon entrepreneurs, the Web has been teeming with dozens of self-made Deadhead retailers. One online entrepreneur, for instance, sells homemade cassette labels for $1 per sheet; jewelry seller Jenn’s Gems and Hippie Essentials (www. jennsgems.com), advertisesitself as having “launched” out of a backpack at a Dead concert. As far as Dead merchandise goes, says Burbank, “the average online store does the same as a retail store.”
The biggest “entrepreneur” in all this, moreover, has been Grateful Dead Productions itself. The Novato, CA company (www.dead.net) started out in 1973 to produce Dead concerts. Fourteen years later, it decided to cash in on parking-lot marketing as well. By launching licensing/product distributor Grateful Dead Merchandising, it confiscated “unofficial” Dead memorabilia from parking-lot vendors (hence earning the nickname “Dead Police” among concertgoers) and replaced it with its own. In fact, the year before Garcia died, non-ticket sales added up to nearly a third of the $50 million generated by Grateful Dead Productions.
Today, by promoting a band that no longer exists, Grateful Dead Merchandising still brings in tens of millions of dollars through licensing fees and wholesale and direct sales. (A company spokesperson would not specify revenue). The 5-year-old “official” print newsletter/catalog, the Grateful Dead Almanac (accessible at dead.net), went online about a year ago and offers everything from T-shirts (60 varieties) to CDs to $25 stuffed Rasta Bears.
Granted, the Grateful Dead Merchandising customer file is still small-about 250,000. But it seems Dead loyalty never ends. Free mail subscriptions to the Almanac have actually grown from 90,000 to 100,000 since Garcia’s death. Moreover, “we do not share our mailing list, and we do not send out direct mail,” says a Grateful Dead Productions representative. “It’s all word of mouth.”
So who’s buying this stuff? Oddly, the Dead’s most-excuse the pun-diehard fans aren’t necessarily the ones forking over for the merchandise. Citing the band’s message of sharing, peace and diversity, many are turned off by the whole idea of commercializing the Dead. “The era is gone,” says one Portland, OR Deadhead named Lang, who’d followed the band for more than 20 years. “The 1970s were more casual,” he says of the parking-lot scene. “People shared a lot more, and money wasn’t the driving factor. It definitely got worse in the mid-’80s. It was sickening.”
Most often, then, the everyday Deadhead memorabilia buyer tends to be “Club Dead”: young adults, male and female, who also load up on incense, candles, cute frames, and often, so-called “tobacco” products, like bongs and water pipes. One retail Web site (www.insaniteesonline.com), for instance, tends to sell just as many “Contra-Beanies” (bean bag toys in drug shapes, like “Hempy” the pot leaf or “Doobie” the joint) as it does Grateful Dead Beanie Bears, according to Jeff Campbell, manager of the Michigan retailer Insani-Ts.
Occasional buyers, too, include former medium-to-heavy tourheads, with 50 to 75 concerts in their past. They don’t buy regularly, but “they tend to spend money and they show up around Christmastime,” says Vigneri of Stella’s Peace Emporium. Oregon Dead fan Gale, for instance, recently purchased a Grateful Dead CD case and some toothbrushes for a gift.
“It’s very much dropped off,” she says of her Dead purchases. “But I still pick up some CDs now and then.”
All of which is apparently enough to keep the Dead phenomenon from dying.
“It does continue to pick up steam, thank God,” says a spokesperson for Grateful Dead Merchandising. “There has been increased demand each year for new licensed products. New companies come to us all the time.”
Marketing-wise, the Fat Man still rocks.
WHILE DEADHEAD MARKETING data is still hard to find, Dead data is not. That’s due to the Deadbase, a printed compendium of songs, “setlists” (concert programs) and statistics that dissects the Dead world with a precision Donnelley Marketing could admire.
>From 1965 to 1995, the Dead played 37,118 numbers at 2,318 concerts, >choosing from 453 different songs. The Deadbase, created primarily by >volunteers and by primo Deadhead John Scott ([email protected]), not >only lists every setlist, but cross-references songs to datesand venues; >shows how and when certain songs fell out of or into favor, and lists >timings for each song. Thus one learns, for instance, that the band played >”China Cat” 527 times over 26 years, but played “Lucy in the Sky” only 12 >times in 18 months, between March 17, 1993 and Dec. 16, 1994.
Who cares? Well, the average “serious” Deadhead does, a person who is statistically male, 30.8 years old, who has attended 74.3 shows.
Because fans were allowed to tape concerts, this average Deadhead owns (usually via trading) an average 1,000-plus hours of concert tape. Thus, the Deadbase helps not only in labeling bootlegged tapes, but in figuring rarities and bragging rites. (Example: How often did the band play “Box of Rain” as an encore?)
Currently, the Deadbase is a 608-page manual selling for about $40 by mail, although Scott plans to create an online database search engine. Volunteers are welcome.
