The Wheel Keeps Turning: How a Deadhead Ended Up Supporting Jerry Garcia's Website

I saw my first Grateful Dead show on October 22, 1989. I was hooked immediately and over the next six years I caught 18 more shows before Jerry died on August 9, 1995. Like a lot of Deadheads, that loss hit differently than losing a musician usually does. The Dead weren’t just a band. They were a community, a practice, a way of moving through the world.

I’ve followed the music in every formation since from the post-Jerry years through all the various configurations that carried pieces of that thing forward. But what I didn’t expect was that the Garcia universe would eventually become part of my professional life too.

In 2001, I joined Musictoday, a Charlottesville-based music industry company that handled e-commerce, fan clubs, and ticketing for some of the biggest names in music. By 2003, I was Director of Project Management, and one of the projects on my plate was migrating the Grateful Dead’s e-commerce store onto the Musictoday platform. This was a genuinely big deal, the Dead had one of the most passionate and loyal fan bases in music, and getting the digital commerce experience right mattered. It was the first time my love for this music and my professional life converged in a real way.

I left Musictoday in 2005 and eventually founded Storyware. And somewhere along the way, the wheel kept turning.

Inheriting a Legend

Since 2018, Storyware has been the technical steward of jerrygarcia.com, the official website of Jerry Garcia and home base for one of the most dedicated fan communities in music. We didn’t build the site. We inherited it, earned the trust to run it, and have kept it healthy and evolving ever since.

jerrygarcia.com isn’t a simple tribute page. It’s a full-featured fan platform with a searchable archive of hundreds of live shows, a member community with user accounts, favorites, ratings, photo submissions, and social connections, all built on a deeply customized WordPress foundation. There’s a lot going on under the hood, and keeping it running well means knowing this specific site, not just WordPress in general.

Seven years in, that knowledge runs deep. Every quarterly upgrade cycle, every PHP version jump, every plugin change gets tested against the full picture of how jerrygarcia.com actually works from member registration to show comments, photo submissions, and the fan dashboard, all of it. That institutional knowledge is part of what we bring, and it’s not something you can hand off to a new vendor on short notice.

Long-Term Stewardship in Practice

The most meaningful parts of a long partnership rarely make headlines. It’s the hosting migration that happens without the audience noticing, the email deliverability issue that gets resolved before it becomes a crisis, the plugin audit that catches a vulnerability before it causes damage, the domain renewal reminder that keeps a legendary site from going dark by accident. None of it is glamorous, but all of it matters.

Over seven years, Storyware has handled all of it: a full infrastructure migration from MediaTemple to Cloudways, multiple PHP upgrades, recurring platform compliance work across Meta and Google, GA4 migration, GDPR policy integrations, and steady feature and content support for the Garcia estate and Red Light Management.

We’ve also extended the platform in meaningful ways from adding new guitar profiles to the site’s iconic Guitars section to improving mobile commerce UX, building out a Partners page, and helping transition users away from a deprecated Facebook login with clear, fan-friendly communication.

The Playlist

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably at least a little curious about the music. Here’s a Spotify playlist I put together of some of my personal favorites from Jerry’s catalog, a mix of Dead classics, solo work, and some of the deeper cuts that have stuck with me for 35+ years. Put it on and let it run.

The Through Line

From the rafters of a Dead show in 1989, to managing the band’s e-commerce migration in 2003, to overseeing the technical infrastructure of jerrygarcia.com, I didn’t plan any of this. But I’m genuinely proud that the music that shaped so much of who I am has stayed woven into the work.

What jerrygarcia.com represents to its audience is consistency and care, a place where the legacy is treated with the seriousness it deserves. That’s the standard Storyware holds itself to on the technical side. Seven years, one client, and a platform that keeps running, keeps improving, and keeps serving the fans who care about this music.

The wheel keeps turning.