Time Travelers Antique Mall in Springfield is as much an experience as it is a store. It is a 13,000-square-foot building, packed wall-to-wall with anything and everything one can possibly imagine. Reed Lucas, the co-owner of Time Travelers, says, “We are a collection of about 53 individual business owners that are dealers at our antique mall, and they scour the entire Pacific Northwest and even into Northern California for retro vintage antiques.”

One such dealer is Mark Kronquist, who found and acquired the massive Grateful Dead vintage collection of lifelong camp follower and sound technician, Philip Zzaza. Though he wasn’t a Deadhead himself, Kronquist says “it’s cool, and it’s history.” As a fourth generation Oregonian, he knew the significance that the Grateful Dead has to Oregon — performed 10 times in Eugene — and he knew just where to take it. 

Zzaza’s collection, which he had been building since he was 13 years old, is now entirely for sale at Time Travelers. Coincidentally, Time Travelers acquired and staged this collection August 9, the 30th anniversary of frontman Jerry Garcia’s death.

Head to the antique mall’s hall of music, which Lucas (who is a musician himself) calls “The Experience.” There, you’ll find this Grateful Dead collection featuring many rare and one-of-a-kind gems from the band’s history. These include ticket stubs from many original Grateful Dead concerts dating as far back as 1971, T-shirts, books, magazines, postcards, original bootlegged zines about Grateful Dead news and original concert posters. One of the posters is from their 1990 Europe tour and never made it into circulation, making it a one-of-a-kind, extremely rare piece.

The highlight of this collection is the over 1,000 cassette tapes recorded directly from Dead shows from the late-1960s through the 1990s. Unlike most music acts, the Dead encouraged and supported bootlegging and sharing their concerts. As a jam band, their music relied mostly on improvisation and playing where the vibrational grooves took them. Therefore, no two concerts were ever the same regardless of the setlist. 

Deadheads would record their concerts and trade them among one another in order to experience as much of the music as possible. Zzaza, however, recorded more than most. “When most people were going on their first dates, he was going to his first Dead concert,” Kronquist says. According to Lucas and Kronquist, Zzaza had been a “camp follower” of the Grateful Dead since he was 13, which means that he camped around and followed the band for most every concert he could until the late 1990s. 

Eventually, after spending enough time with the band and going to enough concerts, he became an occasional sound guy for their shows. Lucas says most of these cassettes came about when Zzaza “would plug into the decks and get the recording straight off the soundboard.” 

While many of these tapes were his own recordings, he also had traded concert sets, marked by the original hand-drawn designs on the labeling paper from the fans who had them first.

When Time Travelers acquired these items, Lucas says, “We received feedback from some of the people who had the biggest knowledge about what to do with the collection.” He says he got help from members of Eugene’s huge Deadhead community on how to ethically handle a collection with so much value, while still respecting the Grateful Dead’s rules and intentions when it comes to bootlegging. 

The biggest thing he learned is that the Dead allowed bootlegging and sharing, so long as the recordings were not sold for profit. 

As a result, Lucas is charging only for the cost it takes to process and display them. Every single cassette tape, regardless of the year it was recorded, is $5. These include several Eugene shows that were recorded at Autzen Stadium. He says he’s already had a customer buy a tape from the concert where he met his wife. 

Lucas says the Deadhead community also taught him that “we can’t record the tapes and release them online or anything like that, even though there might be some just incredible concerts. So what we decided was, well, let’s make sure we make it available to the Deadhead community here in Eugene and Springfield.”  He says if you make an appointment with him, you can pick one cassette a day to record for free, so long as you bring your own sound equipment. 

Lucas clarifies that “Grateful Dead fans probably aren’t going to find a ton here that they don’t already have, because a lot of people who are interested in listening to the tapes, they’ve traded until they’ve had all the ones they want,” he says. 

“But for people who have never experienced the Grateful Dead, there’s something different about hearing analog tape.” With this vintage medium, he says, “You get that warmth that you maybe wouldn’t get from a digital recording.”

“The Grateful Dead had two homes,” Kronquist says. “Eugene and San Francisco.” Kronquist says that Zzaza’s family debated donating this collection to Goodwill, or even McMenamin’s Portland Barley Mill Pub (which is known for its Grateful Dead memorabilia). In the end, he says they decided they wanted the collection to go to the people who would appreciate, understand and have full access to it. 

“I’m a finder of interesting things,” he says. “This stuff just seems to cross my path, and I bring them to the places they belong.”

Time Travelers Antique Mall is open 11 am to 6 pm Monday through Saturday, and noon to 5 pm Sunday, at 2020 Main Street, Springfield. For more information, visit TimeTravelersAntiqueMall.com. For questions or to book an appointment with Reed Lucas to record a cassette tape for free, call 541-357-5468.