Major Grateful Dead exhibit at Rock Hall

The exhibition “Grateful Dead: The Long, Strange Trip” opens April 12 at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in time for the 2012 artist inductions.

Highlights are to include five Jerry Garcia guitars, “finished and working manuscripts” for classic Dead songs, gear from the Owsley “Wall of Sound” PA system, and artworks such as Fillmore posters and album graphics.

The Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California-Santa Cruz “loaned a significant number of items” from its collection, the Rock Hall said. Rock Hall curator Howard Kramer said he had full access to the Dead’s warehouse.

Longtime Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart will perform at the exhibit opening. One of his psychedelic custom-painted drum kits will among the museum offerings.

The first major showing of the Grateful Dead archives at the University of California Santa Cruz was at the New-York Historical Museum in early 2010.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exhibition “Grateful Dead: The Long, Strange Trip” runs through December at the Cleveland, Ohio, museum.

Grateful Dead’s history a Society affair

Roll over Frederick Douglass and tell Abe Lincoln the news: the Grateful Dead have crashed Manhattan’s local history museum.

Dead heads are flocking to Central Park West this weekend as “Grateful Dead: Now Playing at the New-York Historical Society” debuts.

The exhibit comes almost exclusively from the Grateful Dead archives at the University of California Santa Cruz and is its first major showing. So what’s the Dead memorabilia doing way over there in Manhattan?

The historical society has your answer in one incredibly long sentence: “(The Dead) played in and around New York City on a regular basis, from early dates at Greenwich Village coffeehouses, impromptu performances in Central Park and at Columbia University during the 1968 Student Strike; to concerts at midsized venues, including the Fillmore East, the Academy of Music and the 46th Street Rock Palace in Brooklyn during the 1970s; and, ultimately, to performances at larger halls and stadiums such as Radio City Music Hall, Madison Square Garden and Giants Stadium.

“The Grateful Dead’s time in New York will be viewed in the context of cultural traditions and events unique to New York, but also as yet another stop on a long, strange touring trip that included dates in New York, San Francisco, and everywhere in between,” the museum explained.

Another reason: the Dead archive materials remain mostly warehoused in Santa Cruz, as the university prepares primo exhibition space as a permanent home.

Goodies on display include the band’s famed psychedelic concert posters, trippy set lists, album art such as the “American Beauty” cover, giant marionettes and other stage props, banners and crazy funky fan mail. Band documents include evidence of their early decisions to allow free taping by fans.

For those who want take-home, the gift shop is brimming with fun psychedelic stuff.

The Los Angeles Times tracked the Grateful Dead exhibit’s history, which starts improbably with Henry Kissinger, who gave a speech at the museum urging historians to look at the ’60s in order to understand the U.S. A former museum board member copped to being a Dead head and lobbied for a band exhibition as a follow-up on Kissinger’s advice.

The exhibition runs through July 4 — fittingly, as it’s a touchstone holiday for the band and its Uncle Sam.

More Grateful Dead content:

• Jerry Garcia biopic brewing in Hollywood
• Furthur adventures of the Grateful Dead family
• Furthur live on satellite radio; concert cancelled

The Velvet Underground, in person

Velvet Underground members Lou Reed, Maureen (Moe) Tucker and Doug Yule are reuniting, sort of.

The art rockers will discuss their music and history Dec. 8 as part of the New York Public Library’s “Live From the NYPL” series. The conversation wrangler will be rock journalist David Fricke.

The gathering of three Velvets is quite unusual — the Library calls it “unprecedented.” MIA is (to no one’s suprise) John Cale, who has performed with the band only a few times since the 1970s. Sterling Morrison and Nico have both died.

Update: View the session:

The The Velvet Underground probably wouldn’t have made it out of the underground without the artwork on its 1966 debut album by band backer Andy Warhol. That yellow banana and the rest of the artifacts connected with the band are celebrated in the new book “The Velvet Underground: New York Art”. The Velvet Underground book retails for $50.

The talk is sold out, alas (tickets “may” be available at the door).

Meanwhile, fans can revisit the band’s formative years with the short-but-sweet audio documentary series “Psychedelics” from Seattle’s KEXP. The series, which just wrapped, covers the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, the Velvet Underground, the Beatles, Sly and the Family Stone, Pink Floyd, the Orb, Spiritualized, the Flaming Lips and Animal Collective.

The Velvet Underground radio docu covers the band’s history, starting with Warhol’s traveling multimedia experience “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” Reed recalls: “It was an interesting conglomeration. We were known all the way downtown, and then a lot of the uptown people came to it.” Cale says, “It was an attempt to be revolutionary. It was an attempt to combine both the avant-garde and the commercial.”

The Velvets, positioned as an East Coast answer to the California psychedelic bands, turned to heroin, not LSD. The band’s songs such as “Heroin” and “Waiting for the Man” generated some minor media shockwaves at the time, when drug references almost always were cloaked in rock music. The street-level reporting in Reed’s lyrics had nothing to do with peace and love, but plenty to do with reality.

Their early music was darkly experimental and trance-like, largely due to Cale’s interest in the droning musical styles of India and Tucker’s primitive drumming style, oriented more toward Africa than U.S./U.K. rock. This before the music of Ravi Shankar and other world musicians was widely heard in the West.

Listen to the the Velvet Underground radio documentary, which runs 10 minutes.

Psychedelic Beatles rarities up for auction

What appear to be the rarest and strangest of all Beatles album pressings are coming to auction next week.

The story begins back in the twilight of the vinyl era. A Capitol Records employee who worked in the label’s Toronto pressing plant killed time by making multicolored vinyl records, colorful psychedelic things. Among them, appropriately, were the psychedelic classics “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Revolver.”

Canadian collectors Akim Boldireff and Aaron Keele bought the vinyl beauties from the ex-record presser, who apparently kept them in a closet. They said the presser had access to the original plates of the Beatles records.

Keele told the Vancouver Sun: “The real thing that makes this fascinating is that they were pressed at the original plants, using original stampers with the catalogue number of the original release as issued and created by Capitol Records.”

The eBay sale might have gone relatively quiety, except for the Guardian newspaper in Britain, which decided to dub them “the rarest Beatles albums ever.”

(This days after bestowing the title on an in-house version of “Sgt. Pepper” that had Capitol execs’ faces replacing the 1960s celebrities’ mugs found on the famed cover.)

Here is the Guardian’s description of the eBay goods:

“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on bright baby-blue marble vinyl, the 1967-70 greatest hits compilation on swirled blue-and-white vinyl, and a translucent blue LP with side A of “Revolver” and side B of John Lennon’s “Plastic Ono Band” album. However, the most beautiful item in the collection is the Beatles’ “Love Songs” anthology, made with gold vinyl. This is streaked with an abstract expressionist rainbow, like an explosion at a paint factory.

Opening bids for each of the albums is $1,000, but this being the Beatles, look for soaring values. The fun starts on eBay on Nov. 10.

Psychedelic era through the looking lens

Two new books of photography have touched down to transport us back to the glory days of psychedelic rock.

Jim Marshall has been snapping the stars since before Dylan went electric. He’s published several excellent collections of his intimate work, and now comes “Trust: Photographs of Jim Marshall,” another gallery of up-close-and-casual shots of rock gods such as the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, Jim Morrison … all with notes from the photographer.

Meanwhile, Zeppelin gets another going over in “Led Zeppelin: Good Times, Bad Times: A Visual Biography of the Ultimate Band,” just out in hardback. There are more than 200 photographs, about half of which have never been published. They range from the band’s first performance (as the New Yardbirds) in 1968 to the last (?) show in 2007.

Photographs © Jim Marshall from the book “Trust: Photographs of Jim Marshall”