David Lemieux on the Grateful Dead’s Precision, “Playing,” and ‘Pacific Northwest’

JPG: Now, when you go to Rhino for meetings are you pitching one specific thing and they have enough trust in you that if you took the time to listen and put the project’s concept together they’re on board or do you have a back up idea or two ready in case the original one fails to garner any enthusiasm?

DL: That’s a good question. Generally, I always do have backups, which is, for me, tough sometimes to pull the trigger on a project because it means that now we’ve got to wait another year for that other one to come out.

It’s the same thing with the Dave’s Picks. By the time I go to Rhino with these pitches I have put an incredible amount of work into them. Everything is extremely, methodically planned out, all the way down to if we did an 80 CD box set, would we do another?

Absolutely not. So, I know not to do that. If we did a ’77 last year and a ’78 the year before would we do another ’77, ’78 this year? No.

I know that there are certain things that they look for too, which is variety of music and variety of styles of box sets. What could be more different than a six-CD RFK ‘89 box set and a 19 CD set of 1973/1974; two incredibly different eras of Grateful Dead music, two incredibly different box set styles, sound quality, where the RFK ’89 was multi-tracked, this is from the two-track tapes?

By the time I’m pitching, I’m extremely confident this is the right time for that release. That’s an important thing to note that everything we do, it’s the right thing for that time. That’s why I say, would we follow up an 80 CD box set that was $600 or $700 with another one the next year? Definitely not. We would go smaller. We’d go with something that people can manage, both in terms of the amount of listening it would take and the cost. Also, for us a box set like that could take us 12 to 14 months. Do we have 12 to 14 months to put into that at the cost of all other things? And the answer is probably not.

If for some reason it’s rejected. And if it is, they generally have an extremely good reason for rejecting it, I will have a very good back up.

I always thought RFK ’89 was a really good pair of shows that should come out but I didn’t know how to do that. Is it a bigger box? Is it a smaller one? Then, as we were finishing production on the Cornell box a year-and-a-half ago in early 2017 and that came out around the 40th anniversary, that’s when Rhino decided that later in the year they wanted to do a smaller box, it was an easy thing. I always had those RFK shows in mind. From that became the Fathom Events screening, when we did in theaters last year was one of the RFK shows. Everything is incredibly planned out.

This is what I do. I spend a lot of time thinking about what are the next couple of Dave’s Picks going to be but I also spend a lot of time on other cool projects. Even Record Store Day, when we always do something neat on Record Store Day in April and we also do something cool for Record Store Day in November on Black Friday, that’s not necessarily going to be a complete show. It can sometimes be a re-issue like we did with the Fillmore West 2/27/69 on vinyl but, generally, we try to find some cool unreleased material. So, we’re just putting in a lot of work on Record Store Day in April and we’ve got a terrific idea that totally falls out of the scope of a box set for a Dave’s Picks but it’s incredibly cool music. I pitched that to Rhino recently and they got so excited about it, as did I.

It’s fun. I spend a lot of time before I get on that phone and pitch an idea.

When we do the Dave’s Picks we need to know quite a bit ahead of time because of artwork and production time. I have a call every week with Rhino about scheduling and what we’re working on. They always have a deadline date of when a show needs to be picked. I go right up until that last day because I spend every waking minute either doing something related to that release we’re working on or another release. By the time it gets to the pitch level, there’s nothing arbitrary left. It’s completely methodically planned out.

If Rhino rejects something, I almost put that on myself for not listening to the parameters. Last summer is when the parameters came out for Pacific Northwest, that it would be a 15 to 20 box. “We’re not going to do an 80 CD box set and we’re not going to an eight.” If I hadn’t been listening, and I clearly pay attention to what we’ve released in the last five or six years, I know it’s time to do a ’73, ’74 arrangement of the Dead. So, if I pitch something that’s identical to the last release but different shows, I’m not really doing my job in terms of collaborating with Rhino and listening to them.

JPG: Listening to this box set reminds me of getting shows from ’73 during my trading days and thinking how people talked so much about ’72, well, what about ’73? I know you’ve released other shows from that year but it’s nice to see it highlighted in a major way through this box set.

DL: I totally agree about ’73. My first contract with the Dead was in early 1999, and it was a three-month contract. At the very end of it Dick [Latvala] came up to me and said, “You’ve been here three months and you never asked me for anything. Is there a particular show you want?” He was probably expecting me to choose a classic show that other people have been talking about but there’s no good tape of it. This is when a lot of material still did not circulate in any kind of quality, certainly not good quality, maybe audience tapes.

I’ll never forget this. I was coming back to California five weeks later and I told Dick that and I gave him a handwritten piece of yellow legal pad with a list of 10 shows from 1973 that did not circulate, primarily September through November. I didn’t think anything would come of it because it’s the Vault and Dick’s a busy guy…I thought maybe if he made me one set of those 10 shows I would be in heaven.

So, five weeks later I’m in California working for Phil [Lesh] at the Warfield Theatre. He was doing the Phil & Friends shows with, I think, Jorma, maybe Prairie Prince and Steve Kimock, really good band. I was in the recording truck outside the Warfield and Dick came up to me and said, “That list of tapes you gave me…No worries” and he hands me two boxes of DATs, 20 DAT tapes, all 10 shows, both sets of all of them. These are shows that didn’t circulate. He then pulls his glasses down, looks me in the eye and said, “Don’t let these out.” “Dick, I wouldn’t do that.” Then, he looks at me deeper in the eye, “But if you do, don’t tell them where you got them,” and he gives me a wink.

Even then, in 1999 I really appreciated 1973. To get all these great shows it really opened my eyes. Back then, I had all the classic ones that we already knew like Kezar Stadium, 2/15 and 2/9/73, RFK, of course, some of the Winterland. So there wasn’t a lot. Right around then was when Dick’s Picks 14 came out which was the two shows from Boston (11/30/73 and 12/2/73), which straddles in the middle of our box set here, halfway between the Vancouver ’73 and Vancouver ’74. So, I’ve been a big fan of this is my point for a long time. I really love this era.

I listen to Grateful Dead music from all eras, even when I’m working on stuff. We just released the ’83 Boise, Idaho (“Dave’s Picks Volume 27”) and I’ll be listening to a ton of ’83 for a few months, and I’ll listen to some early ‘90s and some late ‘60s.

I can’t really think of anything in particular that at this moment that I really want to hear because I want to hear so much. I can’t decide between a ’69 and a ’70 and a ’77 and an’83, ’89 and a ’92. When I can’t decide what to listen to and I’ve got a couple hours to listen to a show, I generally go to this era, ’73, ’74. I find very, very pure listening out of it. The Dead really could do no wrong in this era. It’s a really fun time for me to hear it.

JPG: That brings me back to something I wanted to bring up earlier that made an impression on me in your video introducing Pacific Northwest. You used the word “precision” as in the precision in the jams, particularly that “Truckin’”> “Jam”>“Not Fade Away,” and I’ll even include “Goin’ Down The Road Feeling Bad” when it went to that transition as well yet, at the same time, there’s also the precision in the playing of a lot of shorter songs, too, like “Beat It On Down the Line,” which clocks in at less than four minutes. I don’t know if each version did that but I made a note of one that did. It’s interesting to hear it played in such a compact manner and to hear the changes of shorter numbers during the first set to the expansiveness of the second.

DL: Exactly. Like you say, you’ve got these precision songs like “Beat On the Line.” It’s incredibly tight and they nail the changes perfectly. It’s like a song like “Big River.” All these little songs are played incredibly well and yet they could still then pull off a jam like…that “Truckin’”>“Jam” is…I mean, I can’t think of…in music, period…I’m left speechless by that “Truckin’”> “Jam” from Portland because it’s that unbelievable and the kind of stuff they’re doing during it.

Likewise, the long 47 minute “Playing in the Band” from Seattle ’74, they hit virtually every theme they could possibly hit in their entirety. So, you might have a “Playing in the Band” from ’74 that has this incredible X Jam or this incredible Y Jam. The Seattle one hits all of those jams that they might have hit through at ’74 and they don’t just tease at them. It’s not like, “Let’s try 30 seconds of this…” They do a full blown X Jam and then they move on and they kind of go spacey for a bit and they come back and do another completely 1974-defined jam and they do it in its entirety.

I’ve known this “Playing in the Band” for many years. As we were working on the box, I was listening to it many many times. I really couldn’t believe how good it was because it gets a rap, “Well, it’s long, but is it good?” The answer is, “Yeah, it is good. It really is that good.”