Grateful Dead scholar in heaven at UC Santa Cruz

The ultimate job in Dead-dom is in Room 1370 at McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz. The door is marked by the steal-your-face logo, and superimposed over it reads the name Nicholas G. Meriwether, Grateful Dead Archivist.

Meriwether, 45, was chosen from among 400 applicants after a national search announced by Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show." But when that office door opens, the scene is not what you'd expect. There aren't concert posters on the walls, there isn't music playing, and the archivist isn't in tie-dye and Tevas. Sitting at a laptop is a pin-striped Princeton man, the son and grandson of professors at the University of South Carolina.

Meriwether, who holds a master's degree in library and information sciences (MLIS), had been offered a tenure-track position at that other USC himself. He declined that and put his house on the market to move across the country to a rented, student-size apartment in nearby Bonny Doon to assume a staff position for which he has to help raise the money to sustain.

So the first question is: Why?

"This archive now represents the single greatest treasure trove for the study of the 1960s, the counterculture and bohemianism in America," says Meriwether, who describes his role as "intellectual control over the entire archive."

The second question is: How many Dead shows has he seen?

The answer is 88, not counting 60 more solo and ancillary shows by band members. That figure won't impress the pilgrims, but you have to take into consideration that he got a late start. He was introduced to the Dead by a college roommate from California and attended his first concert during his sophomore year. It was Nov. 10, 1985, at the Meadowlands. "I walked into that and I thought, 'This is the most remarkable testament to the repudiation of what passed for mainstream America's description and discussion of the '60s,' " Meriwether says, as if winding up for a lecture. "You walked into a Dead show and here was palpable proof that the mainstream discourse about the '60s was wrong."

By the time he got his honors degree in history, he had all the Dead albums, live and studio, several hundred concert tapes, and admission to a doctorate program in history at the University of Cambridge in England.

His dissertation was titled: "The idea of Bohemianism in American history from 1950 to 1970." It was a broad topic - 20 years broad. He came to San Francisco in 1990 to do field research and has since edited five volumes of "Dead Letters: Essays on the Grateful Dead Phenomenon." He has one book on the Dead in print and three more under contract. His fourth project, when he gets to it, is his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge.

"There are many more accomplished Grateful Dead scholars than I am," he says. "We've got memory psychologists who write about the Dead. We've got cultural psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, ethnomusicologists and musicologists. The scholarly approach to the Dead is unparalleled."

Two interviewed

Meriwether was among only two candidates that UC Santa Cruz considered seriously enough to bring in for an interview. Though the Grateful Dead donated everything in its warehouse, the band did not donate any money to curate or exhibit it. The archivist's salary comes out of the budget for the university library.

"We are still fundraising for an endowed position," says Christine Bunting, head of Special Collections & Archives at the university. "We are trying to raise $1 million."

Part of the archivist's job will be to raise funds, which is partly why Meriwether got it. "He was the best candidate because he met all the academic criteria," Bunting says. "He had a great knowledge, and he was the most persuasive about how he thought the archives could be promoted."

Meriwether arrived with his own Grateful Dead archive amounting to 6,000 CDs; 12,000 books; 50 boxes of papers; and 400 posters. There isn't room for it at home, so he's planning to donate it to the collection when he finishes his books.

"Now that I am working in the world's greatest archive of Dead materials, I don't need that stuff anymore," he says. The only thing he isn't donating is his collection of concert T-shirts that he's having made into a quilt as soon as he can find a seamstress.

As interesting as what the archive contains is what it doesn't - recordings from the vault. "The music is not part of it. The music still belongs to the band members," Bunting says. There are no instruments or personal effects of the musicians.

Corporate papers

What it does contain are corporate papers. "Materials include more than 600 linear feet of business records," Meriwether says. "That would include everything from minutes of board meetings to gig contracts to negotiations with record companies. It also includes 12,000 letters from fans, often heavily decorated."

Plus there are tickets, posters, photographs, films, stage props and even the office furniture from band headquarters in San Rafael. Asked why the band's conference table and chairs are of utmost importance, Meriwether seems slightly insulted.

"That would be like asking 'does the Hemingway museum need his typewriter?' " he says. "It's a hand-carved conference table around which a great deal of history occurred. Would you want the conference table from Yalta?"

The primary musical history is in the form of unreleased concert tapes from the private collection of Dick "Dick's Picks" Latvala. Five hundred reels are kept in a windowless room that is locked and alarmed in McHenry Library.

If you want to see some of the glamour in the collection, head to Manhattan, where the first look at artifacts from the collection are on display at the New York Historical Society until Labor Day.

The Dead Central multimedia museum at UC Santa Cruz will not open until the fall of 2011, when the renovation of McHenry Library is completed. "I can imagine foot traffic for the exhibitions we mount being quite high - many, many thousands of people per year," Meriwether says.

Meriwether has already mapped out the first 15 or 16 shows - five years' worth. That is quick work for a man who has only been on the job since mid-May.

"I've been studying this for 20 years," he says.

E-mail Sam Whiting at swhiting@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page F - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle