Check out my fast-paced video essay explaining the Grateful Dead brand in Jerry and his fans' own words!
Until recently, the music of the Grateful Dead seemed destined to become just a radical sidebar in the broader history of rock & roll. However, as VICE proclaimed in 2018, "While Deadhead culture has continued to operate as a diminished, but consistent, force since Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995, in the last several years, it’s seemed closer to mainstream acceptance than any time since the early 90s."
All of a sudden, their music has been thrust back into pop-culture, which made me think as a P.R. student: why is the Grateful Dead brand so relevant again in 2019?
Rallying a Tribe Around the Human Experience
Although they have a few solid studio albums in "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty," a real fan knows the band's best stuff comes from live recordings.
Other rock bands of the time, like Pink Floyd, settled into their grooves by pushing the limits of sound engineering in high-tech laboratories and touring strict setlists off of the albums. The Grateful Dead differentiated by flipping that model on its head. Over 30 years, the original core of the band is believed to have played 2,350 or more shows (New York Times)! They used their ever-changing setlists as a loose vehicle to riff from verse to verse and song to song. Essentially, the Grateful Dead tore down the walls of the music studio and exposed their loyal fans to the exciting, mysterious process of musical experimentation.
This free-form meant that fans would never see the same show twice; instead, the Deadhead was enticed to see more shows, wondering each time "I wonder what Jerry has up his sleeve tonight?". The Grateful Dead brought its repeat "customers" (that sounds weird, man) along on a long strange trip across the world and down the musical rabbit hole. Deadheads and the band formed a veritable roaming tribe.
As Christian DeGobbi, an IBM marketer, wrote in Forbes, an increasingly cluttered digital space and "The proliferation of marketing technology (martech) is undermining a much needed human-based marketing approach today." Likely, the band's prioritization of live experience is one of the things that makes them still so pertinent in 2019.
Brand Assets that Jam, too!
It doesn't take a trained eye to pick a Deadhead out from a crowd. He or she will be clad in some vibrant collage of tie-dies, dancing bears and skeletons. Adopting this look is like instant membership into the aforementioned tribe.
A traveler would be hard-pressed to stumble into a major city that doesn't have at least one Grateful Dead store, peddling primarily in tie-dies. In the beautifully simple words of one Reddit user, "Grateful Dead management own trademark rights... but those rights are pretty loosely enforced." As such, fiscally crafty Grateful Dead fans have little fear to create their own band merchandise.
Just as no two shows are alike, rarely will you find someone with the same Dead shirt as you. In large part, this is thanks to the creative anarchy created by the band's trademark enforcement practices, or lack thereof. Therefore, every unique Dead shirt succeeds by becoming a physical extension of every fan's unique personal relationship with the brand.
Riding the Digital Wave
"The music business had a spectacular run alongside the baby boomers," writes Seth Godin in his book "Tribes" (p. 93). Godin argues that the avalanche of digital music distribution caused labels to adopt a business model "of suing customers and yearning for the old days" (p. 94).
The Grateful Dead earn Godin's explicit praise because they've never been in the business of ripping off their Deadheads. Instead, the Deadheads have created a massive digital library of "ripped" Grateful Dead music.
Earlier I mentioned research done by the New York Times that tallied roughly 2,350 shows by the original iteration of the Grateful Dead. I was burying the lead. Of those 2,350 shows about 2,200 exist on tape.
This arsenal of recordings allowed the Grateful Dead to gain traction years later in a digital world. In the 2000s that meant fans were able to download their favorite concerts. In 2019, that means fans are streaming those entire concerts on platforms, such as Soundcloud and YouTube.
Now, let's reset the table to 2015 when pop music mega-star/guitar wizard/flat-out cool guy John Mayer joined forces with original band members Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzman and Mickey Hart to form Dead & Company, a revival band that is still touring today with huge crowds.
Add in Mayer's social media prowess (instagram live Q&As/guitar sessions, Hot Ones appearances, etc.), and it's clear that the pop musician's vitality offered a catalyst for the Grateful Dead's reintroduction to Millennial and Gen Z listeners. Remember, these new fans are able to take a deep dive into the digital archives, allowing them to discover their own favorite Dead shows.
With these new brand loyalists, the Grateful Dead aren't going anywhere, anytime soon.
Here's to the long, strange, continued trip.
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