“The music never stopped”: naming businesses as a method for remembering the Grateful Dead

Abstract

Memorialization on the cultural landscape is a common method of celebrating the legacy of an event or person significant to the history of geographical location. The Grateful Dead is a band that continues to define the ideals of the late-1960s San Francisco Sound through their music's creative freedom and inclination toward experimentation. Although the original lineup of the Grateful Dead is no longer intact, the spirit of the music they created and their psychedelic appeal has been preserved on the cultural landscape. Despite differing reasons for naming their business after the band, hundreds of business owners in the United States have collectively preserved the Grateful Dead's presence on the cultural landscape. In this paper we explore the distribution of businesses in the United States with Grateful Dead-related names, and how the presence of these business names enriches the cultural landscape with the memory of the band's music as a product of the iconic San Francisco Sound.

‘To us it’s still Boundary Park’: fan discourses on the corporate (re)naming of football stadia

“…This was illustrated in our group discussion with Bolton fans, who talked about how younger supporters will ask older family and friends about the Burnden Aces song, thereby facilitating the endurance of this historical point of reference. Such findings echo work on music fans, who have been shown to preserve, pass on and co-create memories through graffiti (Alderman, 2002b) and the naming of businesses (Gunderman & Harty, 2017). Whatever the focus, it is evident that fans can be active co-creators of particular cultural geographies; inscribing memories of clubs, stadia, bands or artists into their everyday cultural landscapes and the places they visit.…”

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“…Ultimately, from this information, Savage and Brown were able to create musical maps of Taiwan. Going a step further, Gunderman and Harty (2017) focused their study on the memorialization of the Grateful Dead on the cultural landscape of the United States through the naming of businesses. They asked business owners why they chose to reference the band in the naming process and then documented the geographical locations of these businesses on a map of the United States using GIS.…”

“…This article intends to provide a mapping framework in a case study format that accounts for the music-centric landscape of a city. The value of this article is multidisciplinary and has strategic implications in several fields of study including, but not limited to, popular music studies and musicology (Cohen 2012;Wienhold and Robinson 2017), music and urban geography (Krims 2007), urban studies (Markusen 2006;Blessi et al 2012), cultural geography (Carney 1998;Hudson 2006;Gunderman and Harty 2017), ethnomusicology (Lu 2011;Savage and Brown 2014), tourism (Bahair and Elliott-White 1999), arts management (Brooks and Kushner 2001), music entrepreneurship, music consumption, and marketing. It means to fill a need in the academic literature treating the live music sector with a visualization framework for mapping a musical landscape revealing its insights and challenges.…”