Since 1990?  How Did This Happen?

Believe it or not, the OG Blue GD Songbooks have been around for over 35 years, which is longer than the actual Grateful Dead played.  I put the OG Jerry book together in 1995, so yeah.  It's hard to imagine the Dead scene without the books.  But there was a time!

It all began during the Summer Tour of 1989.  I was a college student (the names here are withheld to protect the innocent) who spent summers on Dead Tour because of course I did.  While my classmates were toiling away at internships and low wage summer jobs or summering in the Hamptons, you could count me as one of the MANY cooler toting purveyors of Sammy Smiths on the lot in whatever unsuspecting American city that happened to impose itself upon any given day.  And if you saw the band play in 1989, well you know why.  YOW!

Wherein the Purple Double Decker Cult Bus Inspired Creation of The Book
Credit where credit is due.  I liked to set up next to the big purple double decker 7 Tribes cult bus to sell beers because they were notorious for regular live music and dancing shows that attracted a thirsty crowd.  Believe me THEY NOTICED and sent one of their cult leaders to guilt and berate me into moving elsewhere.  "Why sell beer?  How unoriginal.  So many people sell beer!" 

I had to agree.  Beer was barely covering costs, mostly because I was drinking the profits.  (Lot Business Tip: Never sell a substance you also consume in quantity).  I'd bought a couple of those faded out photocopies of that lyric book we all had back then with the very small type, obviously on their 10th generation of photocopies, full of typos, and looked very much like the person transcribing the lyrics heard completely different songs than the band was actually playing.  Probably due to the influence of psychedelics...or possibly the lack thereof--who knows.  

"You know, I've thought about putting together a really good songbook.  One that has the chords and the right words," I replied.  He rolled his eyes and walked away.   Oddly enough, I bought an HP Laserjet 9000 printer from them back in 2022 responsible for thousands of copies of the books, so....I guess the wheel is turning and you can't slow it down!  So to the purple bus cult leader, I say thank you! 

The Humbling Beginnings
After getting flooded out at Alpine Valley to end the early summer 1989 tour, I went home....where I was not just a college student. I was a college student who was an editor at the college newspaper and for some reason had access to the college newspaper offices over the summer wherein I had use of desktop computers (in 1989 when no one else had them yet) with Pagemaker desktop publishing software AND an HP Laserjet 2000 with extra toner at my disposal.  If I recall correctly, I was not given such access in summer of 1990, so perhaps they regretted doing this....

So me and my lovely GF at that time spent late June and most of July of 1989 in the basement offices of our college newspaper and its considerable publishing resources transcribing as correctly as we could the words to every Grateful Dead song we could find.  OK, we did our best.  Which was better than what was out there, but still a long way to go.

Sometime during the last week of 1989, we finished what we thought was the hardest part: typing it all in.  Little did we know this was just the beginning.  We hadn't even considered small details like binding or even cover art and time was running short.  Our target was the August 4-6 shows at Cal Expo in Sacramento and we were in freaking OHIO and July was rapidly coming to a close.  That was 3 days minimum in the World's Smoothest Dark Blue 1976 Chevy Malibu Boat Car.  No way we were missing those shows no matter what!

Some Important Caveats on Life in 1989
Keep in mind through all of this: we're talking about 1989.  There were no cell phones, only land lines. This was PRE-INTERNET.  Like it wasn't even anything anyone was talking about yet outside of Stanford and Columbia computer science labs.  Map meant Rand-McNally Atlas--hopefully from the last three years.  There was no Amazon, no eBay.  We had the freaking Yellow Pages and a phone connected to a chord.  We got the set lists from Dupree's Diamond News handed out on the lot every show.

So please don't judge me on today's technological standards!  Figuring out things like binding and covers and printing for a couple of 20 something Deadheads was like deciphering the Book of the Dead in the original Egyptian.  We couldn't just Google it as Google was still a decade away and the guys who invented it were still selling T-Shirts and acid on Dead Lot.

The First(ish) Edition
The editing was...cursory at best.  The typos were plentiful.  So many of the lyrics were so wrong...but they were better than before.  The printing was exquisite for the era.  Each of the 100 of these books was a laser printed original.  The cover was a rough hand drawing and I don't even remember what it said.  The only binding we could come up with was a 3 hole punch and three individual ring binders on each book.

If you have one of these, I'll buy it off you.  I still have the original files but I can't even find a computer that can open them.  They are literally in WordPerfect 1.0, DOS, and Pagemaker 1.0.  This was before phones and pictures were taken with cameras containing film that had to be developed and most of us just took the pictures and never got them developed because....hippies.  So I don't even have a photo of one of these!

Well, we made it to the scorching hot Cal Expo shows (which describes the shows as well as the 100F+ weather) and sold about five of them before switching to selling lemonade instead so we'd have gas money to get back to Ohio.  It turns out that actual books require both a nifty cover with some quality artwork AND actual binding before people will buy them....contents be damned!  I'm pretty sure the copies I sold were just used to photocopy by those who purchased them so they could put covers and binding on them to sell.

When I got home from California, I found a better drawing and got a print shop to bind the other 95 copies....many of which I sold when, in October of 1989, some friends called me collect from a telephone booth in Hampton VA on my friend Cliff's landline in Ohio to shriek hysterically about how the boys had just pulled out Help>Slipknot>Franklin's and they were going to play Dark Star tomorrow.  Ten hours later, the World's Smoothest Dark Blue 1976 Chevy Malibu Boat Car deposited me, the books, and Cliff in front of Hampton Coliseum.  Where, indeed, people actually bought quite a few books with a decent cover, nice crisp printing, and real binding and yes, the Boys brought out the Dark Star and lifted the Mothership into low orbit.

To Be Continued When I Find the Time.....Thanks for reading this far!