In grade school I took piano lessons for a while and played the trumpet in junior high, but I’m certainly not a musician. What I am, however, is a passionate music listener and have been as far back as anything I can remember in my life. That passion for listening to music increased as I got older and led me to open a record store from 1973-1976 and to become a DJ on the first progressive FM rock station in Kansas City at that same time. It was during this period that I first began to appreciate the Grateful Dead. Although I had bought their first album in 1968, I didn’t care for it and still find it the least enjoyable of all their subsequent releases. I saw the Dead for the first time in Des Moines, Iowa on June 16, 1974. I continued to see the Dead about once a year when they would play in Kansas City. But there were a few years when they when they didn’t come to town. Despite that my appreciation of their music was continuing to grow as I began listening to bootleg LPs and a few cassettes. By 1985 when I had seen them twelve times, I managed to get tickets to their 20th anniversary shows in Berkeley, California, and this is when I really “got it.” I understood that their music was all about dance…perhaps even the cosmic dance of the universe! And the combination of the delightful community of Deadhead listeners dancing to the unique improvisation of the Dead’s music made it clear to me that I needed to see more…much, much more of the Grateful Dead. I had completed my MBA in 1984, and at the three Berkeley shows in 1985, it became clear to me that not only the Dead’s music was improvisational but their behind-the-scenes business organization must also be improvisational in order to have successfully navigated the challenges of the music industry for twenty years. The Dead had always run their business their way, Corporate America be damned! So I knew then that there were business lessons from the Grateful Dead that needed to be studied and shared, and I was the one to do that. And I realized needed to see more Dead performances not only to feed my passion but also to gain a better understanding of the lessons I intuitively knew were there. This was really the beginning of my own “long strange trip.” That epiphany at the Berkeley shows led me to quit my job, go back to school and earn a PhD in Business so I could gain a deeper understanding of business theory and terminology to be able to explain what was unique about the Dead’s business. And of course, I increased the frequency of seeing the Dead to about fifteen shows a year…as part of my research! I also began to connect with Dead insiders and knowledgeable outsiders, and I started interviewing them. When I finished my PhD, I began teaching and continued seeing the Dead. I also began to incorporate what I was seeing in the Dead into my teaching and scholarly writing, and all of this was aimed at writing a business book about the Dead. To make a long story short, I wrote down all my thoughts and observations and interviews into what ultimately became Everything I Know About Business I Learned From The Grateful Dead: The Ten Most Innovative Lessons From A Long Strange Trip, which was published in November 2011. Since then I’ve continued to expand my thoughts and beliefs about the Dead’s business side, written more articles and met annually since 1999 in Albuquerque with a group of mostly academics also studying the Dead from various perspectives. And this is where I met my co-author Bob Trudeau who suggested this current book. As much as I know about the Dead and their music (which isn’t much compared to some of my Deadhead friends) this current book project has been a very special and illuminating experience. My appreciation for the Dead’s music and performance history has increased dramatically. Listening to a particular song from its debut to final performance, and studying the lyrics has been far more exciting and heart-warming than I ever expected when we started. This band, which I’ve had the greatest passion for since 1974, has shown me an even deeper level of musicianship, song writing skill, and brilliant improvisational performance ability in performance after performance after performance. Bottomline: The Grateful Dead changed my life in ways I would never have imagined, and it’s all been good!
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