Ottawa Deadhead became the Grateful Dead's archivist

David Lemieux is not the Deadhead you'd expect.

At 55, the clean-cut Carleton University graduate looks nothing like the tie-dye-wearing, long-haired stereotype. Yet for more than 25 years, he has been one of the most powerful voices in Grateful Dead history—the archivist and legacy manager who decides which shows get released, which merchandise gets approved, which Dead-related projects move forward.

It began at 14 in Manor Park, when his older brother Jason brought home a stack of records. Among them was a copy of Skeletons From the Closet, a 1974 compilation. "We put it on at my mom's after school, and we couldn't believe how good it was," Lemieux recalled. A trip downtown to Rideau Street record shops followed. He found Workingman's Dead at Record Runner. "I got the bus home, put it on and I was like, 'You've got to be kidding. This is the best music I've ever heard.'"

At 16, he attended his first in-person Grateful Dead show on March 26, 1987, in Hartford, Connecticut. By 1989, he was attending 25 to 30 shows a year. Between 1987 and 1993, before university intervened, he had caught 100 Dead concerts in North America and Europe.

Lemieux earned degrees in history from Carleton, film studies from Montreal's Concordia University, and film archiving from the University of East Anglia in England. On a whim—and with a California trip already planned—he emailed the band's archivist, Dick Latvala, asking to visit the Dead's vault. He was invited. A thank-you email, with a postscript offering his services if they ever needed cataloguing help, led to a phone call. He was offered a three-month contract.

Those three months aligned with a turning point. Latvala died of a heart attack in 1999, and Lemieux was asked to stay. "Things had to get done," he said. "It was typical to be out feeding the cats, cleaning the bathrooms, getting lunch, and then you're producing records." Within four months, he was doing both.

When the Dead struck a licensing deal with Rhino Records and the vault moved to Los Angeles, Lemieux chose to return to Canada instead. He was about to buy a house in Old Ottawa South when a January snowstorm made it impossible to drive. He bought a home in Victoria instead and has remained there since.

His work now includes producing four Dave's Picks vinyl releases per year—seven of which have earned Grammy nominations—plus a yearly multi-album box set, a daily satellite radio show, and oversight of branded Dead merchandise. When Bobby Weir, the band's guitarist, wanted to give him an official title in 2010, Lemieux suggested it simply: "legacy manager." The name stuck.

At a recent talk at the National Arts Centre during the Ottawa Jazz Festival, the event sold so well organizers moved it from the smallest venue to the more spacious Azrieli Studio. In a tailored suit jacket and button-down shirt, he subtly repped his fandom with lightning-bolt buttons and dancing-bear socks.

With the deaths of Jerry Garcia in 1995 and more recently Bobby Weir, the Grateful Dead is down to two surviving members—drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart. Yet the vault remains vast. "We've released 60 Dave's Picks," Lemieux said, "and at the pace we're going, we still have 1,400 shows in the vault that are unreleased, of which hundreds of those are of the quality we want. That tells me we've got literally decades of this."

Retirement is nowhere in sight. "I really have no desire to retire," he said. "I really love what I do and I don't want to stop doing it."