In 1982/3 I was working in Vancouver as a projectionist at an independent cinema called the Savoy. Many of my friends, who used to be into psychedelic rock, had converted and were in punk bands such as the Pointed Sticks, K-Tels and Modernettes. I used to hang out with them at the Smilin' Buddha, sporting long hair and Dead t-shirts to test the cool of punks who didn't know me. But I longed to meet Deadheads.

I answered an ad in Rolling Stone for a 1983 Grateful Dead calendar and the person vending them -- another Greg -- Greg Comforto, said they didn't have anyone distributing them in Vancouver, did I want to buy a quantity? I drove down to Seattle, where he was located, bought a bunch, put a want ad for a couple of weeks in the Georgia Straight, Vancouver's entertainment paper, and called myself Easy Wind. I'd rented a postal box for a year, but after several weeks of no orders, I gave up and piled the calendars under my bed.

I should mention, Greg gave me my first tapes, of Vancouver '73, my first show. I managed to persuade the Savoy to run the Dead Movie. That pretty much stiffed, but I did see there were some Deadheads around. About this time my milkshake addiction lead me to meet some Deadheads working at a White Spot restaurant -- Shauna Boulter and John Grant. They introduced me to one of their friends, Richard Sheehy, he of the fantastic tape collection.

My new friends were going down to San Francisco with several other people to attend the New Years run and they invited me to join. I'd seen the band in Seattle a few times and even in Portland, but this seemed like a really radical concept. Of course I went for it.

When I came back I was involved with Shauna's sister, Linda. Linda moved in with me and, along with Richard, I had the team for my new project. It was to be a Dead fan publication -- a Canadian one.

Over The Border was another attempt to meet local Deadheads, and in that it was big-time successful. It was also conceived as a way to petition the band to return to Vancouver. Going all the way to Seattle was a pain. Vancouver has always had an umbilical connection to San Francisco so it never even occured to me that when I asked for them to play Canada they would end up in Toronto.

In the commentary during the radio broadcast of the 1984/5 New Years show, Father Guido Sarducci and Jerry Garcia mention Canadians and how patriotic they are (funny, that's how Americans look to us). This possibly was a result of reading the OTBs we were sending the Dead office. One aspect of Over The Border was an attempt to gather an archive of Grateful Dead's visits to Canada. This might seem a little motherland obsessed, but really it was just a way of reducing the size of the job, knowing there had only been a few shows north of the 49th parallel.

At the Savoy they told me about the Hells Angels movie that was coming out. They'd been offered it, but after the Dead movie'd done so poorly, they were wary. However, my boss there gave me the phone number of the distributor and even let me use his phone which had recording capability to do an interview about it.

About this time Richard came on board. No only did he know the material inside out, he could write reviews that read like the best of the rock and roll press.

Linda was working writing copy for an ad agency. Her ability to twist and spin the English language was a huge plus. Plus, at the agency they didn't realize she was doing all our typing and a lot of photocopying and image reduction.

I wrote, edited, I guess, was art director, and with Linda did layout and paste-up, took the stuff to the printer's and stuffed envelopes.

We were always on the verge of going under financially, though we stuck to a policy of not accepting advertising. A certain amount of the money for each issue came out of our own pockets. We always used all the material we had. Issue two didn't have enough to fill the last page so I just decided to leave it blank. This provoked a letter from a guy in Toronto named Joe Pauker, criticising us for not putting some kind of graphic on that page. He was right, of course, and from then on OTB would pay special attention to the visual. Joe stayed in touch with us and eventually started a fanzine of his own.

As the first issue was coming together, the year rent on my postal box was ending, so I decided to see if maybe a letter had come in after I'd last checked it. Surprise! There were about a dozen orders for calandars. Of course all the Deadheads had been slow in responding. We sent them their cheques back, plus a free (year old) calandar, and issue one of Over The Border. This was the beginning of our mailing list.

Originally conceived as a quarterly, OTB ended up coming out every month and a half. We put out twelve of them, and had the cover of issue thirteen when we called it quits.

Linda and I had been exposed to Seva while covering the June 1984 Toronto show, and, seeing as how we were planning to go to Nepal anyway, ended up being the first non-medically trained volunteers. That's another story.