Jerry Garcia, “Junglescape,” 1992.
Jerry Garcia
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Josh Katz had his next big idea and all the elements in place to launch it.
The capital. The team. The tech. Even the eager customers.
A longtime player in the space where music and technology collide, Katz had already founded, built, and sold El Media Group, a Manhattan-based company that delivers new-generation Muzak to 5,000 luxury hotel, restaurant, casino, and retail brands. His Hospitality Audio outfitted NOBU, Four Seasons Hotels, Hilton, Marriott, and Tao Group with the audio and video systems to make their square-footage come alive.
And as 2020 arrived, Katz was ready with YellowHeart, which would bring public blockchain technology to the event-ticketing business. Finally, artists and their teams could identify, market, and sell directly to their fans by a set of rules that determined how tickets were sold and resold—and who shared in the profits. Performers could make sure tickets went to their real fans and also elect to earn a share of the scalping profits. And the whole thing would be transparent to everyone.
“It’s just a better system all around,” says Katz, who started in the business right out of New York University as a young assistant at Arista Records, fetching chicken-salad sandwiches for Clive Davis. “And the time had finally arrived.”
Then in March, Covid exploded. All live events were abruptly canceled. And with nothing on the calendar for who-knew-how-long, no one needed tickets, blockchain or otherwise. “It was an incredibly painful time for us,” says Katz, who had to lay off his tech and marketing people and throw the brakes on everything. “I didn’t know what we were going to do.”
Well, that’s where Jerry Garcia and NFT art come in.
Music industry entrepreneur Josh Katz.
Courtesy Josh Katz
NFT artwork was just then bursting out of the crypto gallery scene, unique digital assets, individually identified on a blockchain called nonfungible tokens, and quickly bearing stratospheric price tags. Everydays: The First 5,000 Days hadn’t yet fetched US$69 million, but things were already heading that way. So Katz and his tech team began to search for their own foothold in that world, some way to put their cutting-edge but dormant ticket technology to work in some other music realm.
“Jerry was making art his entire life,” Katz says. In 1992, three years before the Grateful Dead guitarist and music icon died at age 53, “he got an Apple computer and started making digital art.”
The Grateful Dead came off tour in June of 1995, and Jerry checked himself into the Betty Ford clinic. He’d been using again. He was supposed to be there a month, but he checked himself out after two weeks. He went home, and he didn’t tell anyone. On Aug. 6-7, he created two stunning drawings and was working on a third one. On the afternoon of Aug. 8, he left his home and checked himself into Serenity Knolls, a rehab center outside San Francisco. He went to sleep that night, and he never woke up.”
It was Garcia’s longtime friend and road manager, Steve Parish, who helped to find the drawings on the computer after the musician’s death. “These are native digital files,” Katz says. “In the world of NFT, that’s the most important thing. They are meant to be displayed digitally.”
It took some back-and-forth with Garcia’s family and the Garcia-estate lawyers, but they were all quite open to the idea, Katz says.
“My dad was a huge fan of computers and gadgetry,” says the late musician’s daughter, Trixie Garcia. “Something like blockchain would have really intrigued him. Jerry would value the freedom potential for artists.”
People attend the auction of the late Jerry Garcia’s guitar on May 31, 2017 in Brooklyn, N.Y.
ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
“Everyone wanted to find some way to share his art with the world,” Katz says. So the ticketing technology was quickly adapted.
On Aug. 5, 20 of his drawings will be displayed at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame under the banner “An Odd Little Place: The Works of Jerry Garcia (1992-1995).” Trixie and other family members will be there.
Seventeen limited-edition drawings from the last three years of his life are priced in the US$400-to-US$500 range “so fans can afford them,” Katz says. The three final works—“the Last 48 Hours,” as they are being packaged—will be auctioned individually. “They’re one of a kind, literally the last art Jerry Garcia ever created,” Katz says. He is expecting bids in the high six figures. “I’m thinking a million-ish.”
And now that Covid has eased—for the moment, anyway—and live events are coming back, Katz says he’s excited about pressing ahead with his original blockchain ticketing platform. But he’s now looking at the business potential in a broader way—as a platform for music, artwork, and who-knows-what-else.
“In the end,” Katz says, “it’s all about creating a transparent, symbiotic relationship between the artist and the fans—and the rest of us getting out of the way.”
Ellis Henican is an author based in New York City and a former newspaper columnist.