JPG: I was just rereading the article that Dean wrote about the Betty Boards and as a fellow Head, it blows my mind that it’s taken all these years for them to finally acquire the Betty Boards. It’s just an amazing the story, the tale of the tapes.
DL: Yeah. As a Deadhead and an archivist…it’s funny, I really don’t look in the past at those types of things. It’s totally understandable why it didn’t happen in 1988 and why it took so long from 2013 when discussions really started. I feel that in this case, everything happens for a reason. They’re all back and that’s the important thing. I’m hoping, my fingers are crossed, that everything that came back is release-able. The storage conditions on some of these tapes, we’ve heard the stories, like a goat barn and stuff like that. Is it all releasable? I don’t know. Both Jeffrey and Dave Glasser have done substantial assessments of a lot of the tapes and so far, so good.
JPG: I read how Rob Eaton baked the tapes in order to repair them. Other people made copies of other original tapes. Now, what you’re working with are original masters? You’re not using the copies?
DL: We’re definitely working with the master tapes. What we acquired, what came home were the master tapes, what we’re using for production are always the master tapes. It’s very rare that we would use anything but the master tapes on something.
JPG: The reason I asked about the timetable on this is that in the past we had talked about the planning and work on a major box set release can be close to a year in advance. This seems to be extremely quick for you.
DL: It is and it isn’t. We had a good feeling this was going to happen going back to early September. So, for instance, Nick Meriwether has been working on the ideas for the liner notes back in September. That’s always a big part of it. He kind of knew that that was going to happen. We’d already been looking for archival elements from the archive at UC Santa Cruz as well as photos and items like that. When it came time to, as we say, pull the trigger on something and that goes back to mid-October 2016. That gave us all of November, December, January, February into March. Package design had just been finalized pretty much including booklet. It’s a good five month production schedule, which for something like this it’s pretty normal, actually. It comes out in May. The lead time is usually a little more planning. We would have probably planned it starting back in May of last year. It wasn’t the case this year but we’re totally fine with it. Certainly, nothing suffered in the project. We had plenty of time to do everything we needed to do.
JPG: Years ago, I traded for soundboards of Boston, Cornell and Buffalo ‘77. Were they some version of the Betty Boards? Were other soundboards circulating at the time?
DL: The boards that you got, those are absolutely from the Betty Boards. Absolutely they are copies of the Betty Boards for sure.
JPG: So, the box set is a cleaned up version and sounding fantastic?
DL: Yeah, they’ll be all cleaned up They’re restored properly. These are like a typical Dave’s Picks that comes from everything that we do. Master tapes cleaned up, restored. The whole bit.
JPG: I swear that when we were talking about Cornell years ago, I don’t know if you were just trying to be evasive about things but you weren’t too enthusiastic about wanting to release it because everybody already has it and there were all these other things to put out. Was there any particular thing that changed other than you got the Betty Boards to use now?
DL: No, I think it was more a case of realizing that there was a very good chance that we would never get to release that and coming to terms with that. My attitude was more, “We have plenty of great stuff to release.” It was the kind of thing where I didn’t listen to Cornell as much as maybe some Deadheads would have because we couldn’t release it. It was more a case of being aware that there was a very high likelihood we would never get a chance to release it. So, we focused on the things we could release, which are pretty darn amazing anyway. Think of the stuff we’ve released in the last decade or so — the Hartford show, the Richmond, Virginia show, the five shows in the May ’77 the first box set and on and on. So, we’ve released some really, really fine, fine music.
JPG: Now do these Betty Boards fill holes in the Vault where you guys didn’t even have a good copy?
DL: …We didn’t have in any format. We had stuff like DAT copies but those were just reference, if anything.
That’s a hole where our tapes in the Vault went May 1, May 3, May 4, May 11…so, we were missing May 5th, 7th, 8th 9th. Another good example, tape traders from back in the day, we all had these incredible tapes from April of ’78, April 6th and 7th and 11thand 12th and 14th, 15th, 16th. We never had any of those in any format. And then April 18th, starting in Pittsburgh, we have every show for the rest of that tour for April and May of ‘78. We were always missing that first chunk of the first leg of the spring tour of ’78, April 6th to April 16th we were always missing. So, those came back.
Likewise, a lot of the January ‘78…it’s a pretty darn impressive collection of music. It was not only some big hole in the collection but it was holes that included some of the best music. It wasn’t just missing shows, it was missing depth shows. Think of the summer of ’76 — and there’s some pretty good shows in the Vault — but there’s also some pretty good shows missing from the Vault that have now been returned. It’s things like that.
We certainly filled some holes that were glaring. It’s very similar to what happened when we got the Houseboat Tapes where the whole summer of ‘71 was missing and, all of a sudden, virtually overnight they all returned. And that’s July through August of ‘71. Lots of other stuff returned as well. The Berkeley Community Theater ‘72 stuff, some spring tour ‘73, some alternate copies that sound phenomenal, December ‘71. Quite a bit of cool stuff came back.
JPG: Now, Betty Cantor-Jackson did other recordings. Did you acquire everything such as studio recordings or Jerry Garcia shows in the deal?
DL: No, just the Grateful Dead. We didn’t acquire any Jerry solo material. No other bands.
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