Hank Harrison Donates His Grateful Dead Collection to the Archives

Publisher Hank Harrison has donated his entire Grateful Dead/Warlocks/pre-Warlocks research collection to the University of California at Santa Cruz, where the official Grateful Dead archives now live. Harrison—the Dead’s original manager and the father of Courtney Love—was a key part of the Dead’s team as they transitioned from The Warlocks into the Dead (a five-year-old Courtney Love appears on the back cover of Aoxomoxoa ). Harrison’s collection includes original taped interviews, letters, documents, notes, lyrics, poems, handbills and other artifacts from the band’s early days. It also includes photographs and 16mm film plus reel-to-reel board and studio masters from Phil Lesh, Owsley Stanley, Robert M. Petersen, Jerry Garcia, Sarah Garcia, David Frieberg, Esther McKernan, Joe Navokovich, Neal Cassady and hundreds of others.

A statement from his camp reads, “Harrison’s material is not massive in quantity, but each item is important and very much sought after by the University archives.”