Grateful Dead host drags skeletons from closet MUSIC

David Gans, in his home recording studio in Oakland, Ca., on Wednesday Feb. 16, 2011, as he prepares for his annual Grateful Dead Marathon show at Berkeley radio station KPFA. He plans to sit at a booth at the radio station and play and talk everything Grateful Dead for 16 hours straight. Gans looks through a recently released box set of the Grateful Dead's first five albums, which were released on vinyl. less David Gans, in his home recording studio in Oakland, Ca., on Wednesday Feb. 16, 2011, as he prepares for his annual Grateful Dead Marathon show at Berkeley radio station KPFA. He plans to sit at a booth at the ... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Grateful Dead host drags skeletons from closet 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

What shall it be, Europe '72 or Greek Theatre '81? Or how about the longest-ever version of "Dark Star," a spiraling 47 minutes in Rotterdam on May 11, 1972?

It will probably be all three, plus a lot more from the whirling, twirling, multihued, mind-altering Grateful Dead archive when the world's No. 1 Deadhead sits down in a radio studio today to play 16 hours of the Bay Area's favorite psychedelic band.

In his 25th year of Grateful Dead marathons on KPFA, 94.1 FM, David Gans of Oakland hopes to raise $50,000 for the struggling Berkeley radio station. But more important, he hopes to bring joy to millions of Deadheads - a subculture that's bigger now than when lead guitarist Jerry Garcia was alive.

"It's music that makes people dance, cry, think," Gans said this week as he waded through thousands of tapes, CDs and LPs in preparation for the marathon. "To play the Grateful Dead for 16 hours is not a tiring job. It's actually very energizing. I could go even longer."

Gans will sit in the studio from 9 a.m. today until 1 a.m. Sunday playing live Grateful Dead songs and interviews. There's no advance plan. Like a Dead show itself, the show will evolve spontaneously in tune with the listeners' collective mood.

Food for body and soul

There will be munchies. Many of those will come from perhaps the world's No. 2 Deadhead, Bob Jaffe, owner of Grand Bakery in Oakland. He'll bring cookies, cakes and other treats Garcia would have appreciated to keep Gans nourished during the marathon.

Jaffe has been a Deadhead since his first show, in Glen Falls, N.Y., on May 8, 1980.

"The music is great, but it's the sense of community that's kept me a Deadhead," he said. "It's everyone - doctors, lawyers, artists, bakers, the dregs of society. We're all over the world. We're everywhere."

The Grateful Dead performed from 1965 to 1995, when Garcia died of a heart attack at age 53 and the band broke up. Since then, the surviving members have spawned new bands, including Ratdog, Furthur and the Other Ones, and dozens of Dead-inspired bands have helped fill the void for fans.

A new generation

As a result, younger music-lovers - many of whom were toddlers when Garcia died - have flocked to the Grateful Dead and its offshoots, creating a new generation of Deadheads, said Mark Pinkus, senior vice president at Rhino Records, which holds the license for the Grateful Dead properties.

"The Grateful Dead have as diverse an audience as any band has ever had," he said Friday. "You've got young fans as well as people in their 60s and 70s who've been listening since the 1960s."

Grateful Dead record sales have declined along with the rest of the record industry, but generally the band is more popular than ever, Pinkus said. A recent Rhino offering of four new live albums sold out before Rhino even announced what shows would be featured. The Grateful Dead's Facebook page has almost a million fans.

Gans said his weekly Grateful Dead radio show, which is syndicated on about 60 radio stations, attracts regular listeners from India, Hanoi, France, an aircraft carrier in the Caribbean and elsewhere around the globe.

"Why has the Grateful Dead held up? Because the music is that good," Pinkus said. "Garcia and (lyricist Robert) Hunter were as good songwriters as Lennon and McCartney."

Active Deadhead scene

Nicholas Meriwether, the Grateful Dead archivist at UC Santa Cruz, described the Deadhead scene today as "more diffuse, because there's no Dead shows for people to gather around, but it's much, much more active than when the band was actually touring."

"You have more people today who've seen shows of a Dead-related nature than have actually seen Jerry," he said. "That is remarkable."

The appeal, Meriwether said, is the "transformative nature" of the Grateful Dead, particularly live. At a typical Dead show, some people would dance like spaghetti on the concourse, others would stare at their hands for four hours, others would plant themselves by the stage, transfixed by Garcia's finger-picking. There was something for everyone.

Sampling of all eras

As every Deadhead knows, the band itself went through dozens of transformations. There was the folksy phase, culminating with "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead," then came the jazz fusion period of "Blues for Allah," followed by the "disco dalliance," as Gans put it, in the late 1970s; the power rock period, when the band sold out 90,000-seat stadiums; and finally, at long last, Top 40 success with "In the Dark."

Gans plans to play a sampling from all the Dead eras today. The marathon will include a few complete shows, some standards like "Truckin' " and "Touch of Grey," as well as a few special treats for Deadheads: something from the Europe '74 tour and a sneak preview of singer-guitarist Bob Weir's collaboration with the Marin Symphony.

"And, of course," he said, "it wouldn't be a Dead show without 'Dark Star.' "