Dick Latvala; Grateful Dead Tape Curator

Among the legion of fans of the Grateful Dead--the long-lived band that became an emblem of the psychedelic ‘60s--Dick Latvala may have been the most envied “Deadhead” of all.

As the band’s official archivist, Latvala had the ultimate Deadhead fantasy job: organizing and preserving the legendary group’s thousands of hours of concert recordings.

The band, which broke up after the 1995 death of guitarist Jerry Garcia, put on 2,500 concerts during its 30-year run. Latvala culled through the vintage recordings made by band members to produce “Dick’s Picks,” a compact disc series available only through mail order that is considered an essential item for die-hard Dead fans.

An intrepid collector of Dead recordings even before he became the group’s archivist--he had tapes of about 900 concerts--Latvala died among his tapes at his Petaluma home Friday, 10 days after suffering a heart attack and lapsing into a coma, said Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally. He was 56.

A self-described hippie, the Berkeley-born Latvala considered the archival post his first, and only, real job and said it made him “one of the luckiest persons on the planet.”

“He had the job that every Deadhead wanted,” said Barry Smolin, host of the Grateful Dead-oriented KPFK-FM show “The Music Never Stopped.”

Latvala’s path to his unusual career began in San Francisco in 1966 when he attended his first Dead concert. Like thousands of other fans, he joined the band on its long, strange trip, attending concerts and making his own tapes of the performances.

In the late 1970s, he started performing odd jobs for the band. One day, after several years as a gofer, he was in the Dead’s office in Marin playing a tape for someone when bassist Phil Lesh came in. Lesh listened for three hours, during which Latvala kept saying, “I sure hope someone’s taking care of these tapes, because they are important.”

But no one was in charge of the tapes. The next day, Latvala was offered the job.

By then, many of the recordings were 20 years old and falling apart. Crammed in a tiny vault in the band’s studio, they were in no particular order and many were mislabeled.

By all accounts, Latvala was the perfect man to bring order to the chaos.

Latvala could recite the set list of hundreds of Grateful Dead shows. He could hear a few notes and tell what concert the number was from. He was always prepared to argue until the wee hours about Dead lore and minutiae, from what was the best show to the impact of changes in staging. And, according to McNally, Latvala was “beyond meticulous--he was maniacally, compulsively organized.”

In 1993, after five years cataloging the contents of the Dead’s vault, the first “Dick’s Picks” was released. It featured the Dead’s Dec. 19, 1973, concert in Tampa, Fla., given at the end of what many fans consider the group’s peak performance years. No. 4 in the series, released in 1996, was the recording of what Latvala considered one of the most legendary of Dead shows, the 1970 Valentine’s Day concerts at the Fillmore East. It was, like most of the Dead’s concerts, previously heard only on collectors’ tapes.

One million copies from the 14-installment series have been sold to date, without the benefit of traditional advertising.

Latvala rarely talked with band members about what to release. Nor did he tell them, or Dead fans, when they would be issued. McNally, the Dead’s publicist, only knows that the 15th release in the series is due out sometime next month.

Latvala called his job of choosing from among the thousands of vintage recordings “torture central.” The potential for offending the cult known as rock ‘n’ roll’s most dedicated fans was perhaps the least pleasant aspect of his job.

“You’ve got a bunch of picky Deadheads all over the planet saying ‘This is good and this ain’t,’ ” he once said in an interview with the Sacramento Bee.

“I’m just another picky Deadhead, trying to do the best I can.”

Latvala is survived by his wife, Carol; his son, Richard, of San Francisco; his mother, Sylvia Latvala, and two sisters.