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David Lemieux article from the The Ottawa Citizen

 SAN FRANCISCO, California HEADLINE:What a long, strange trip it's
 been: David Lemieux has seen the Grateful
 Dead in concert 101 times, but he's not merely a Deadhead. These days
 the Ottawa native is chief keeper of the Vault, the
 extensive archive that holds the band's 15,000 tapes and 2,500 videos.
 His job? To preserve the Dead

 BYLINE Chris Cobb SOURCE The Ottawa Citizen

 SAN FRANCISCO, California - It is early evening and David Lemieux is
 driving across the Golden Gate Bridge into
 San Francisco. A Jerry Garcia rendition of Paul McCartney's Let Me
 Roll It fills the Subaru station wagon. ``I can't tell
 you how I feel, My heart is like a wheel, Let me roll it, let me roll
 it to you ... '' Jerry, who died more than five years ago,
 sounds good on this June 1978 recording from Berkeley, California.
 He's hitting the high notes and sustaining the longer
 ones, which was not always guaranteed, especially in the later years
 when his drug-ravaged body was barely functioning
 and he needed a prompter for lyrics he had been singing for more than
 three decades. Casual listeners would think
 nothing of Garcia singing McCartney. Deadheads, as the international
 legion of fanatical followers of the Grateful Dead
 are called, will greet and analyse it as a rare gem. And Lemieux, an
 otherwise regular guy from upscale suburban Ottawa,
 is quite definitely a Deadhead.

 The band's unique, eclectic blend of rock, blues, jazz, country and
 bluegrass has consumed many lives, Lemieux's
 included. If the Dead were the Pied Pipers, the Deadheads were the
 followers, trekking across North America and beyond
 to concert after concert, night after night. Deadheads come from all
 walks. They are Liberals, Conservatives, Republicans
 and Democrats. (Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore is a
 tie-dyed-T-shirt-wearing Deadhead.) ``Being a Deadhead
 means so much more than being a fan of the music,'' Lemieux explains
 with almost evangelistic passion. ``It has nothing
 to do with what you do for a living. It's about what values you have
 as a person -- compassion, environmental awareness
 and such. Deadheads are people who have been awakened by the music.''

 This Garcia-doing-McCartney tune on the car stereo is one of five live
 versions that Garcia recorded for a solo effort. It
 has been well preserved in the Grateful Dead's archive, which is known
 to fans as ``the Vault.'' Lemieux has listened to
 each version dozens of times, mulling them over and comparing their
 relative merits. But Lemieux is more than a fan, he's
 keeper of the Vault and if the Jerry Garcia box set he wants to
 compile ever sees the light of day, Saint Jerry doing Sir
 Paul will be a shoo-in.

 Through a mix of extraordinary good luck, hard work and persistence,
 the 30-year-old is at the centre of the musical inner
 circle of Grateful Dead Productions. He's still pinching himself.
 Lemieux produced Shining Star, a Garcia CD due out
 next week. It is his third compilation of Vault material. View from
 the Vault, the first volume of a video series he is
 producing, was certified gold last week. For a member of the
 fanatical, international Deadhead fraternity, it's an awesome
 honour. For a young, johnny-come-lately member of the 30-member staff
 at Grateful Dead Productions, it's an awesome
 responsibility. Lemieux, who quit high school to follow the Dead, isa
 proud member of both.

 On the Golden Gate Bridge, with the distant shadow of Alcatraz to the
 left and the mouth of the Pacific to the right,
 Lemieux chats non-stop about his life among the Dead and about his
 short but life-changing relationship with the late
 Dick Latvala, supreme Deadhead and original keeper of the Vault.

 The former Government of Canada archivist speaks of weekly visits to
 Garcia's widow, Debora  Koons Garcia,
 who married Jerry a year before he died and owns the rights to his
 solo recordings. As producer of Jerry's
 solo compilations, Lemieux must seek her approval for his selections.
 (Jerry's second wife, Carolyn Garcia, known as
 Mountain Girl, is the Deadheads' sentimental favourite and is still
 fighting for a $5-million share of Garcia's estate. She
 married Jerry backstage at a 1981 concert. Garcia had four daughters--
 Heather, Annabelle, Trixie and Keelin -- with
 three partners.) Lemieux describes the joy of working in the spartan,
 climate-controlled chill of the Vault, surrounded by
 15,000 audio tapes and 2,500 videotapes. Recordings date back to three
 shows in 1967; there are 20 taped concerts from
 the following year. Almost everything from 1970 is missing, but most
 tapes from 1972 to 1974 are on hand. The Vault
 contains 70 per cent of recordings from 1976 to 1978; 40 per cent from
 1979-82, most from 1985-86, but only 30 per
 cent from 1987. The final touring years, 1988 to 1995, are well
 documented. Missing tapes were given away or taken and
 not returned. The Dead were not always protective of their musical
 history.

 There is little archived film of the early shows, except for outtakes
 from The Grateful Dead Movie, which was shot over
 four nights in 1974. From 1988 onward, there are 75 complete shows
 plus other peripheral video. Drummer Bill
 Kreutzmann calls the video and audio archive the ``family jewels,''
 but it is also the Dead's insurance policy and cash cow.
 Between music and merchandise, it is estimated the group grosses about
 $60 million a year. Half that wouldn't be bad for
 a band that ceased to exist half a dozen years ago.

 The dream job has its pressures. Even the most easygoing of aging rock
 legends are notoriously protective of their
 reputations. And while they were once indifferent about their old
 recordings, today band members are anything but. The
 ``family jewels'' have yielded more than 20 compilations. The annual
 flow of four Dick's Picks -- named after Latvala, the
 original archivist -- and various other audio and video compilations
 will continue for years. And then there are the
 Deadheads, who, like rare wine experts, examine every nuance in every
 release from the Vault, making vigorous use of the
 Internet and the unofficial Dead magazine Relix to opine on the most
 arcane of points. ``There are pressures,'' says
 Lemieux, waving three bills at the Golden Gate toll attendant. ``But
 when the demands get heavy at work, I remind
 myself: `Hey, you listen to Grateful Dead music for a living and they
 pay you well to do it.' That never fails to put things
 in perspective.''

 This is the Vault of the Dead. It's a simple, climatically sealed
 enclosure at Grateful Dead Productions in Novato, a
 half-hour outside San Francisco. The nondescript headquarters is a
 vast warehouse that also features a recording studio,
 merchandise operation, boardroom and business offices. In the
 mailroom, Jerry Garcia still has a slot for the mail he
 continues to receive. (The letters are forwarded to his estate.)

 The Vault is about 20 by 12 metres with a four-metre-high ceiling.
 Inside, a small cluttered table sits on an old throw rug,
 the only covering on the concrete floor. Seating accommodation is an
 old brown armchair, beige faux-suede futon and a
 grey, comfy chair. A stylized neon version of the Dead's skull and
 roses logo is pinned to a wall above a reel-to-reel tape
 machine. Like most people who spend their working lives in an office
 or cubicle, Lemieux is surrounded by mementoes.
 One wall features a post-election photograph of Prime Minister Jean
 Chretien, hastily cut from the Ottawa Citizen. On
 another wall, near an encased gold record that Lemieux received for
 his work on So Many Roads, a 1999 Dead box set,
 are Lemieux's university degrees -- a BA in history from Carleton, a
 Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Studies from
 Concordia and an MA in film archiving from the U.K.'s University of
 East Anglia.

 In an office in another part of the building, Lemieux has stuck
 half-a-dozen other newspaper pictures of Chretien. In each
 caption, he has changed the prime minister's name to ``Poutine'' in
 deference to Rick Mercer, of This Hour Has 22
 Minutes, who asked George W. Bush at an election event last year if he
 planned to continue good relations with Canada
 and ``Jean Poutine.'' 'It's also quite funny explaining to Americans
 what poutine is,'' Lemieux explains. A little shelf space
 in the Vault is reserved for an Ottawa Senators shirt, cap and a small
 replica Division Championship banner. Lemieux
 keeps inline skates and a hockey stick at work and enjoys scooting
 around the yard working on his game. The Senators
 are his team and he often rushes home to listen to live broadcasts on
 his computer. For a fix of the real thing, he settles
 for the San Jose Sharks, an hour or so away.

 The Vault is hardly palatial but Lemieux loves working among the
 ghosts of this most remarkable musical and cultural
 phenomenon. He casts back and recalls his first encounter with the
 band -- a teenage obsession that would propel him to
 101 Grateful Dead concerts -- 96 in North America and five in Europe
 -- and land him here in Northern California where
 his idols became his employers. David's older brother, Jason, started
 it all in 1984 when he brought home a greatest hits
 album. David, a 14-year-old Manor Park lad with a head full of Police,
 T-Rex, David Bowie and Pink Floyd, was hooked
 after a few listens. ``It was like nothing I'd heard before,'' he
 recalls. ``It was incredible.'' Mainstream radio stations rarely
 played the Dead because their rambling songs weren't delivered in
 three-minute, radio-friendly packages. (The Dead
 would only have one Top Ten hit, a radio-friendly length Touch of Grey
 in 1987.) So what if the band first performed 15
 years before Lemieux was born? And so what if they were the same
 generation as his parents? ``I was beginning to get
 into music,'' he says, ``but not music that was mainstream. I'd call
 it misfit music, stuff that lots of my friends heard and
 said, `Yuk, what's that?'". Lemieux discovered that a couple of his
 14-year-old buddies also had older brothers who were
 into the Grateful Dead and they all had concert tapes. ``They made me
 my first bootleg tapes,'' he says. ``Before I knew it,
 I had a collection of 30 or 40 live Grateful Dead tapes. By 1986 I was
 trading tapes myself. I had two tape decks and
 traded through Deadhead magazines.''

 The Grateful Dead were unique in many ways but especially in their
 egalitarian philosophy toward concert performances.
 Unlike any other rock band of the past 30 years, they encouraged fans
 to record their concerts and even provided a
 special section for fans with tape machines. The band asked only that
 the tapes be copied and traded freely among other
 fans. It was, and is, a remarkable worldwide honour system. By
 conventional business models, it was a recipe for fiscal
 suicide, but then the Dead were anything but conventional. They
 eventually got rich anyway.

 ``Through 1985-86 I became a huge fan,'' Lemieux recalls, ``but I
 never even imagined I would get to see them live.'' It
 seemed less likely after Garcia got sick in 1986 and slipped into a
 coma. Perhaps it was Garcia's near-death experience --
 he had several -- but Lemieux suddenly grew determined to see the band
 in concert. He called the Dead hotline daily for
 news on Garcia's health and tour prospects. The line was updated by
 Eileen Law, a Dead employee since 1970 and now
 the band's paper and picture archivist. Law's voice was a source of
 comfort for the teen. Fourteen years on, Lemieux still
 gets a kick out of being her colleague.

 In the spring of 1987, Garcia was in better health and the band went
 on tour. Lemieux mailed off for tickets for two
 concerts in Hartford, Connecticut. He was only able to obtain tickets
 for the first, but it was enough. ``I remember
 holding  he tickets when they arrived,'' he says. ``I couldn't believe
 it.'' He and a friend planned to make the trip by train, with a
 stopover in New York City. Lemieux's mother had other plans. ``Being
 the greatest mom in the world, she drove us to
 Hartford.'' Lemieux remembers everything about March 26, 1987. ``I
 couldn't believe I was sitting in a Grateful Dead
 show ... A year later I got the tape of the show and wore it out.''
 Lemieux's mother, Pat, also remembers it well. ``There
 was no way I would let him travel all that way. So I drove them. I
 didn't get to see the show because it was sold out. I
 didn't realize back then that the Grateful Dead had taken over his
 life, but I was never too worried. Mind you, I was a bit
 ignorant. I didn't know what went on in those concerts except that
 they all wore tie-dyed shirts.''

 Ignorance was bliss. Dead concerts never had the reputation for being
 dens of iniquity but the band began life in the
 1960s when LSD was still legal, pot smoking was a mass pastime and
 mushrooms were magic. Dead concerts were a
 venue for all that but, says Lemieux earnestly, the biggest high was
 the music. ``I used to see people made so happy by
 the music and dancing their asses off -- as I used to -- that you
 would swear they were dosed but weren't. ``I remember
 coming out of one show, after the band had played a song they hadn't
 played in 18 years, people were hugging each
 other. It was like everyone was on Ecstasy, but they weren't.''

 The concerts never started on time, but eventually the band would
 meander onto the stage and tune their instruments.
 ``During that tuning time you would hear little phrases of songs and
 you'd turn to someone and say `Hey, they're going
 to do Shakedown Street' or whatever. Then they'd kick into the show
 and all was right with the world for the next three
 hours.'' Band members rarely communicated with the audience, except
 through their music. Lemieux recalls one 1988
 show in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin.``They had to tune up for seven or
 eight minutes after the first song. Jerry went up to
 the mike and said `Professionalism folks.' It was the only thing I
 ever heard Jerry say in more than 100 shows. Bob Weir
 would say at the end of a set `We'll be back in a bit' and
 occasionally at the end of a show say `Thank you, good night.'
 But that was it. It was all about the music. ``As I've got to know
 them, I realized they are just regular guys and, like most
 people, don't have a lot to say to strangers.'' Lifelong friendships
 were formed at Dead concerts. Fans who snapped up
 tickets for a run of shows in a town would invariably sit in the same
 seat each night. ``I made some very good friends
 over three-or four-night runs,'' Lemieux recalls.

 Lemieux's obsession peaked in 1990, during his final year at Rideau
 High School. He was working, borrowing money
 from family and, when he wasn't driving around North America,
 occasionally attending classes. That summer, he joined
 the tour in Eugene, Oregon, drove to Kansas City and literally
 followed the band from concert to concert. It was enough
 to satisfy any Deadhead. Two days after the summer tour, keyboardist
 Brent Mydland died of a drug overdose. Lemieux
 did not need to be convinced that the Dead with a new keyboard player
 was a must-see. He caught the band in Ohio that
 fall and, feeling less and less enthusiastic about school, headed to
 Paris and London for more concerts, financed by work,
 family and a newly acquired credit card. By this time, Vince Welnick
 was official keyboard player with Bruce Hornsby
 sitting in on a semi-regular basis. ``The Dead were playing really
 well in '90,'' says Lemieux, by way of explaining his
 European jaunt. ``I heard that the place in Paris -- the Zenith --
 only held 5,000, so I couldn't miss it. About 4,500 of the
 people in the audience were American. After the London shows, I came
 home and went to Rideau for one day and
 decided that school just didn't cut it.''

 Although he did not graduate, eventually he settled down. In 1991, he
 was accepted into Carleton's mature student
 program. ``I took a Film 100 course and by the third or fourth class,
 the academic study of film began to fascinate me. I
 learned you had to get away from subjective terms such as `like' and
 `don't like.' '' He joined the Independent Filmmakers
 Co-operative at Arts Court and took courses on film and sound editing.
 In 1995 he headed to Concordia to study film
 history. While there he won the Cinema Prize, awarded to the most
 outstanding student graduating in the program. He
 made an eight-minute, 16-mm film on the closing of the Montreal Forum
 and called it Thank You For a Real Good Time,
 which is the refrain from the Grateful Dead song Loose Lucy. The
 soundtrack featured the Dead, of course. ``It was a
 way for me to pay tribute to two big parts of my life that were
 passing,'' he says. ``Jerry had died six months before and
 the Forum closed in March 1996.'' After two years in Montreal, and
 armed with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he began
 work on a Master's degree in film archiving at the University of East
 Anglia in England, the only school in the world to
 offer such a program. Preserving and restoring old film was a key part
 of the course. Lemieux had deliberately set out on
 a road away from the Dead. Unplanned circumstances would lead him
 back.

 on July 21, 1998, Lemieux sent an e-mail to Dick Latvala, legendary
 keeper of the Grateful Dead's archives. The MA
 student, who was then working at the British Columbia Archives,
 explained how a visit to the Vault would benefit his
 studies. ``I can think of no better archive to study than the Grateful
 Dead's sound archive,'' he wrote. ``In addition to any
 film/video holdings in the Vault, the various formats of audio
 obviously offer challenges relating to preservation and I
 would be very grateful if it were possible to arrange a visit. ''
 Latvala had an uneasy relationship with computers and
 Lemieux did not hear back, at least not right away. ``I wanted to meet
 Dick,'' recalls Lemieux, ``because he had the dream
 job. But when you don't get a response to e-mail after a couple of
 days, you assume you're not going to get one,'' he adds.
 ``So I forgot about it.''

 Three months later, the day before Lemieux was to leave for a planned
 vacation in California, the phone rang. It was
 Latvala with an invitation. A few days later, Latvala introduced
 Lemieux to John Cutler, the Grateful Dead's long-time
 producer and recording engineer, who spent a few hours showing him
 around. The two chatted and got along well.
 Lemieux returned home and sent thank-you e-mails to Latvala and
 Cutler. While Latvala received ``a Deadhead letter,''
 Cutler's note was a little more businesslike. ``At the bottom, I wrote
 `If you're ever interested in hiring a video archivist,
 please give me a call.''' Lemieux spent 10 minutes deleting and
 reinstating the sentence before hitting ``Send.'' ``I decided
 I was never going to see those guys again, so why not?'' A week later,
 Cutler invited him back for an interview. ``He
 wanted the videos catalogued,'' says Lemieux. ``He didn't know how
 much of a Deadhead I was, but he knew that I knew
 the music and the principles of film archiving.''

 Lemieux was born in New Jersey when his father worked for the United
 Nations. It was a retro stroke of luck that
 eliminated immigration and work permit hassles. He began work Feb. 1,
 1999. During his four-month stint, he set up an
 archive and created a database. He was preparing to return to his job
 at B.C. Archives when he first learned of the
 Grateful Dead employment philosophy: Nobody lobbies for jobs in the
 organization, but if you happen to be around
 when something needs doing, you're likely to get to do it.

 Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh, rejuvenated with a new liver, was
 putting together a band, Phil Lesh and Friends, and
 performing around San Francisco. Cutler asked Lemieux to help out with
  the mobile recording equipment. Lemieux returned to B.C.
 after the shows only to be invited back for more. On July 30 he was
 packing for San Francisco when a friend called to say
 that Dick Latvala was in a coma. ``I didn't realize how serious it
 was,'' Lemieux says. ``I just thought he'd get out of it''
 Latvala died of heart failure a week later, shortly after his 56th
 birthday and around the fourth anniversary of Garcia's death.

 Lemieux was invited to the wake, emceed by long-time Dead friend Wavy
 Gravy, of Woodstock fame. Music was played
 by former Dead drummer Mickey Hart, rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, several
 members of Weir's own band, Ratdog, and
 others. ``It was a good send-off,'' recalls Lemieux. ``Dick was a good
 guy and every day I worked with him was
 memorable. Every morning he'd say `Well David what do you want to hear
 today?' He would pull something good off the
 shelf, put it on and leave the room. Then he'd come back and ask me
 what I thought.''

 Tragedy of one sort or another has punctuated the Dead's history. But
 by now they knew the show must go on. On the
 last night of the Lesh tour Lemieux was offered a permanent job as
 trainee engineer with archival duties. He packed some
 T-shirts and jeans and moved to California in September 1999, not
 quite knowing what had hit him. The Grateful Dead
 were never rock stars, they were cultural icons. It was never just
 about the music, although music was obviously at the
 root of it. Garcia, the musical and spiritual leader, was not a guitar
 hero in the Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix sense, but his
 skill at blending numerous musical styles into a distinctive, often
 deceptively simple sound earned him the respect of his
 contemporaries.

 The Dead did not use a playlist. At the end of one song, they would
 decide what to play next. They could shift
 effortlessly from down-home country twang to Detroit soul. ``It's
 honest music,'' says Lemieux. ``It's not formulaic and
 that's always been its great appeal. In the early '80s there were all
 these bands that were nothing but formula. The roots of
 the Grateful Dead are blues, folk and bluegrass and they were pioneers
 of the psychedelic rock movement, which was
 truly honest music. ``I found it especially appealing that you could
 hear two versions of the same song played a week
 apart and they were completely different. That's why Dick's Picks are
 so appealing: We aren't simply rehashing the same
 thing.'' It's true, however, that the Dead were never able to
 replicate in the studio what they did on stage. Long essays have
 been written on the subject. ``Some of their studio albums sound
 incredible,'' says Lemieux ``but it never came together in
 the studio the way it did live. It was like the very best jazz
 musicians of the 1950s. They always knew what the other guy
 was going to do.''

 Dick Latvala met Phil Lesh in 1985 and told him the band was crazy not
 to have someone looking after the concert tapes
 stashed away for anyone who asked. ``Dick truly believed it was an
 important historic collection,'' says Lemieux. ``He
 was the first person to recognize its importance. That was eight years
 before the first Dick's Pick.'' The band figured there
 were so many tapes traded freely that the material in the Vault held
 no commercial value. It's not like they were hungry.
 The band was playing stadiums and making big money. Garcia was still
 performing, albeit between stints in detox. In the
 early '90s, they played to seven million people and earned more than
 any touring band that decade other than the Rolling
 Stones. Reaction to Dick's Pick One -- Latvala's first choice from the
 archived concert tapes -- began to convince the band
 they had been wrong. While Deadheads may own numerous versions of any
 one song, they buy Dick's Picks for the
 quality of the recordings, liner notes and photographs. Even still,
 non-Deadheads might wonder ``why bother?'' Lemieux
 has an answer.

 ``Take Truckin', a song they played for 25 y years. It started as an
 acoustic song on one of their acoustic albums, American Beauty.
 If you listen to Ladies and Gentlemen The Grateful Dead, it evolved
 into a powerful rock and roll number and became an open-ended song --
 four or
 five verses, an instrument break and a four- or five-minute jam before
 it came back to the final verse. That was by 1971.
 ``By 1972, Truckin' became a show-stopper they would often take into a
 30-minute improvisational jam based on the
 blues, rock and roll and country aspects of the song. You would never
 know what was coming next. ``They wouldn't want
 to get bored with it ... so they would try and outdo themselves.''

 There are 20 Dick's Picks available, soon to be 21. Amazon.com lists
 67 Dead albums, including some tribute
 compilations by other musicians. As Jerry Garcia once said: ``We're
 like licorice. If you like us at all, you really like us a
 lot.'' Lemieux's duties have changed significantly since he started
 full time at Grateful Dead Productions. His former
 boss, John Cutler, left to work with bassist Lesh who is, temporarily
 at least, estranged from the rest of the band. The rift
 was exacerbated when Mickey Hart speculated to a reporter that it was
 because Lesh got ``the liver of a jerk.'' All of this
 sounds like a typical family fight that may, or may not, be resolved.
 With Garcia gone and everyone working on solo
 projects, the impetus to mend fences depends on a mutual desire to be
 friends rather than any need to be workmates. So
 that leaves engineer Jeffrey Norman and Lemieux in charge of the Vault
 music. Norman, who has worked on many
 high-profile albums with the likes of Huey Lewis and the News, Bruce
 Hornsby, John Fogerty and Santana, is Lemieux's
 boss and has the only other key to the Vault. Lemieux so impressed
 guitarist Bob Weir he gave him a wonderful
 endorsement in a recent interview with Relix magazine. ``There's a kid
 who's working for us who knows our material. It's
 scary is all I can tell you. And he's not a `get-a-lifer' either. I
 don't know where this guy came from ... he must have rolled
 off a cloud and landed in our Vault. Nobody's gonna replace Dick but
 this kid, David, is gonna take a little of the sting
 out of his passing.''

 So what's it like working in the Vault? ``As cliched as it may sound,
 every day is a holiday,'' Lemieux says with a laugh.
 ``Monday morning is always a thrill. ``I get to listen to this great
 music. There are six or seven albums every year and
 video. I always have at least two projects to work on. I've got the
 new video in my briefcase now. I'm an archivist, a film
 enthusiast and a Deadhead. I married my passions.'' Lemieux says the
 transition from ultra fan to workmate happened
 surprisingly quickly. ``I work for them,'' he says. ``I worked closely
 with Mickey Hart every day for a month or two and
 then with Bob Weir when he worked on his album here from last February
 to May. You get to see the other side, not the
 performer but the meticulous, creative side. They cease to become
 idols and instead are just very interesting people. They
 are no better than anyone else but they have an incredible talent that
 most other people don't have.'' Still, Lemieux
 remembers being nervous at his first meetings with Hart, Weir,
 Kreutzmann and Lesh. But their manner, he says, was
 quickly disarming. ``When people meet big stars, they often say `Wow,
 they are just regular people.' Of course, they are.
 The Dead, as rock stars, didn't let fame go to their heads.''

 Lemieux never met Jerry Garcia, but he is ever mindful of his
 presence. ``It's like a huge, very cool, very good conscience
 looking over you. ``Every decision I make I think `What would Dick
 think of it,'`What would Cutler think?' `What would
 Jerry think?' Jerry took a great interest in his music. I think about
 that a lot. I love having some autonomy, but it's a great
 feeling having to answer to people who aren't even here.'' Lemieux
 falls back on his Vault couch and says he re

 realizes his job with the Dead will end some day. And he misses
 Canada. ``I tell people I've peaked as both a Deadhead
 and an archivist,'' he says. ``As much as it's probably the best thing
 I'll ever do, there are other things that appeal to me,
 such as teaching, taking my PhD and getting back into film. But my
 future for the next few years is here... as long as
 they'll let me stay.''