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Making Millennial Magic: John Dwork's Big Plans

by Dean Budnick

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John Dwork is a man in motion. The guiding spirit behind Dupree's Diamond News and the Deadhead's Taping Compendium (along with Michael Getz) is also the publisher of "In da Groove" a free in-concert handout and an active ritualist. While he is excited about all of these aspects of his life, he is particularly effusive about a big millennium event that he has helped to put together in Portland, Oregon - through his Peak Experience Productions company - which will feature String Cheese Incident, Calobo, Zen Tricksters, Keller Williams and a few bonus bands to be named later. The following interview touches on all of these matters, including a update on the status of Dupree's. If you wish to learn more about the big doings in Portland on Dec 30 and 31 visit the String Cheese Incident web site at http://www.stringcheeseincident.com or call (503) 232-4098. For signed copies of the Deadhead's Taping Compendium feel free to call 1(800)-278-3332.

DB: I know you are quite excited about the concert you have coming up in six and half months. Tell us how that came about.

JD: I've been producing concerts for twenty-something years now. I was very lucky to have been mentored directly by Bill Graham. I was at a Kaiser New Years show, and I was so blown away by the attention this guy paid to detail, that I walked up to him in the bar and said "Bill, you don't know me but I certainly know you. You've completely changed my life. Can I by you a drink?" And in the middle of everything he focuses down on me and says "Sure kid." So I sit down, buy the guy a drink, we start to talk, and he ends up having a bond with me. Over the next year every couple of weeks he actually calls me, and we spend a half hour to an hour on the phone talking about concerts and being good people and trying to make people happy and create community, and trying to keep ritual and magic in people's lives. That had a huge effect on me. The idea was that a concert can be more than an opportunity to make money, it can be magic. So for the last twenty years I've been producing concerts with that goal in mind, trying to create community and magic.

DB: What was the first show you promoted?

JD: It all started in college sometime around 1979. The first show I put on was 2/13/79 at Hampshire College. We did a light show choreographed to the music of 2/13/70 {editor's note for the uninitiated- this is the date of a legendary Dead show}. Everyone was blown away, myself included. We thought "Wow, we're really onto something here." So we started doing these wild parties with lights and eventually it evolved into costumes, spoken-word, multi-image and live music. We did a number of these but not full time because it's a different thing when you do it for love.

DB: And now more than twenty years later you've planned something pretty big. How did that come about?

JD: The big question was what can we do with this big New Years which has so many spiritual and social ramifications. The idea was to create an event that was more than a concert but an actual ritual, and not just one that would be presented to people but one that people could actually participate in to make it really meaningful to them. So a variety of families are all getting together this New Years in Portland, Oregon to produce an event that is not just a great concert but a giant ritual that will allow all people who want to make something much deeper and spiritually adventurous and exciting and rewarding than what is typically available. There is this idea that the Grateful Dead taught us that we could turn concrete coliseums into temples of divine light and that is what we are going to do. The event will be at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland which is a beautiful building, and we are going to create a two-day festival in which we will build a giant ritual which peaks at midnight. We are going to retell the classic wheel of time myth, taking the myths surrounding time and humankind's relationship with time and recasting them in contemporary terms. Everyone who comes will have the opportunity to be part of this ritual, this giant passion play. The whole festival is going to be designed to tell the story of our greater lives and the things that should be important in our greater lives- to recast our relationship with time in a new and different way.

We used to go to Grateful Dead concerts and depend upon the band as to whether or not the event would be a truly magical one. Of course there were exceptions along the way. At the second Field Trip in '82, the Grateful Dead didn't play very well. But Ken Kesey's clan made the event into such a magical thing, one of the highest events I've ever gone to, and everybody who went was blown away because it was so magical. The idea is here is the same. It will not just be if the band is hot it will a great show and if the band is not than it won't. We are going to have wild things- we're going to have a whole family room with entertainment for kids, and all sorts of interactive happenings for people to be part of, really cool things for sale and really cool things for free. There has been a remarkable coming together of certain families of people. Many of these people learned about how this magic was possible through the Grateful Dead experience but have many more interests than that.

Right now I feel that a very interesting thing happened. New generations of people are coming together with a new awareness. There's a new level of magic that's happening all over the place. People are really getting inspired by music, and it's a direct result of everything that's come before all being synergized together. There's this incredible new energy as bands are combining music from different cultures and different styles of music together. Maybe karmically its a natural balancing force with someone like SFX buying so much of the concert industry and corporatizing it. So now our concern is what can we do to preserve the soul of the thing that is so magical for us. We should be able to go to concerts and feel that they are experiences that inspire us and let us go home skipping in the streets. So while most New Years concerts are basically just parties, we going to take it farther. We are going to have 200 people who are going to be group leaders to help design this ritual, this rock and roll ritual, and we're going to have a critical mass of people in the room in costume. When you walk into the room it will be like walking into a Fellini film. Plus, in terms of the music it's going to be a damn fine concert.

Right now we're putting everything in place, with the tickets and hotel rooms and airplane reservations. Then what we're going to do next in the middle of the summer is to take this framework that we have and fill out this ritual. Over the course of the summer, there will be somewhere on the String Cheese web site where you will be able to go to see how the whole ritual is developing and how you can actually be part of it. People can say "Wow, I can really identify with the Trickster archetype and I'm going to be help to be part of the team to create the ritual based around that." And let me tell you the half an hour between eleven thirty and midnight, the last half hour of the millennium we're going to have the most unbelievable r ock and roll ritual. It's going to be like all of the Grateful Dead New Years rolled into one. We're going to have costume and floats and huge light show on multiple screens all over the place. All sorts of guest starts and special surprises. And the beautiful thing is we're doing this all for ourselves. What we're trying do is make this event so that it has the same type of impact that Bill Graham's New Years Eve had on people like myself

DB: It should be quite entertaining. I'm already hearing buzz and it's still more than six months away. Anyhow, let's jump to another on of your projects, when will the next Compendium appear?

JD: The Deadhead's Taping Compendium, Volume Two is coming out in August. It covers the era from 1975-1985. Needless to say it's an extremely interesting era due to the evolutions in the Grateful Dead's sound and the changes that result from the band members' own personal transformations and those of the scene. It's really a new epoch when the Dead came back after taking 1975 and their sound has changed.

DB: I'll tell you I was very impressed with Volume One, but some people I know who hadn't even seen the book said "Why do I need that if I already own Dead Base?" What would you say to them?

JD: First of all imagine if there was a review of every show listed in Dead Base, and each was written by a Grateful Dead scholar. But the Compendium offers other things too. For instance Michael Getz and his team has identified the sources of most every tape in circulation. In some cases we even discovered the genealogy, we actually found out who the original tapers were. Back in the old days before the taper section started sometimes there was only a single taper. Well we sought those people out and found out what equipment that were using. Additionally there's a history of the development of the recording of the Grateful Dead. I went and interviewed all of the key recordists both inside and outside the organization to create an in depth oral history, which traces its evolution. We interviewed not only the sound men but also the tapers, and we found out how they got in their equipment as well as the experiments they made in recording techniques. You can see the evolution from the crappy cassette decks through the DAT decks and that's really a fascinating story. We found people who bought equipment and customized it to augment the sound, and they came up with elaborate ways to get their materials into the show. We also have an interview with Betty Cantor-Jackson, who talks about how her tapes came into circulation. Not only that but we have dozens and dozens photos of the Grateful Dead never seen before. In the first book we have photos of the band with their original light show behind them in 1967, photos taken during the recording of Live Dead, a photo from the Aoxomoxoa session with Phil on acoustic stand-up bass and more. We have plenty more along these lines in the second one, mindboggling stuff. And then there are recommendations as to what tapes you should get from each year. I also want to say that this is not just the work of Michael Getz and I, it is the work of hundred of serious Grateful Dead scholars who have spent large portions of their lives pursuing this music and accurate knowledge about it. These people have all joined forces to collaborate on this. I think this is the largest study of the music of any one particular groups that's ever been done.

DB: While we're on the topic of collectives devoted to the music of the Dead, could you tell me about the status of Dupree's?

JD: I think a lot of people at this point know that two years ago I filed a lawsuit against my partner when I found that a large sum of money, perhaps in excess of $200,000 had been inappropriately spent. When that happened my staff all got together and we were shell-shocked. We felt as though we had cancer. Here was this incredible project that had given focus to the Deadhead community and given a voice to that community especially in that challenging time in which us Deadheads had to deal with Jerry Garcia's death. We discovered not only was that money inappropriately used but we had enormous debts that were never paid. The staff rallied under extraordinary circumstances and we put out several wonderful issues. Not only that we've also had to weather divorces, sickness, and the deaths of family members. Needless to say we've been extraordinarily taxed. In the face of this over the past winter we decided that Dupree's needed to be on hiatus. So at the moment we've taken a breather in order to recover. Also this book project has been beyond taxing- I am now in the process of finishing Volume 3. The goal is to get back together again at the end of the summer and reconnoiter and see what we can do. The phone is still on in our offices, and we're still processing mail. We're still there, it's just that in dealing with these extraordinary challenges we've taken a giant little vacation. I would also like to say that people including Sherry our editor and myself have put tens of thousands of dollars into the publication which we never expect to see back, in order to keep the thing going. I'll tell you I think our staff deserves a giant roaring round of applause from the Deadhead community at large for having somehow managed to put out issues in the face of dealing with all this.

DB: In the interim, I know that you have some new faces working with you to create "In da Groove."

JD: When Dupree's Diamond News started out it began as a freebie and it really brought focus to the community. In the spirit of that I've started "In da Groove" which is an eight page free flyer which is handed out in concert nationwide. The goal is to support the jam band community It has interviews with bands, CD reviews and so forth. We've covered moe., String Cheese, Strangefolk, Deep Banana Blackout, the Disco Biscuits and more. It's a good adjunct to Jambands.com and it's a wonderful thing to read while you're sitting inside with friends waiting for the music to start. If people want to volunteer to hand this out in concert- sometimes we can get them free passes- they can contact shady@ulster.net. People so far have loved it.

Once more, to learn more about the big event in Portland visit http://www.stringcheeseincident.com.