How This Got Started
By Valerie J. Nerini
My friend Howie died.
His absence is why Jam Band Graveyard exists. You’ll find him in The Graveyard—and if you knew him, you already know why he deserves to be there. If you didn’t, I hope what’s there helps you understand why he mattered, and why sharing stories about the people you’ve lost matters, too.
I’ve been part of this community long enough that losing people in it isn’t new. I’ve also heard the stories—from fellow members of the jam band family, about people they lost and wish I could have known—people I’ll only ever know through what others carry of them. Those stories live in me. They’re part of why this needed to exist as a place, not just as a feeling.
Who I Am in This Community
Music has always been where I find home. The jam band community is where I fill my cup—in the lot, in the venue, in the people who keep showing up run after run and understand something about being alive that’s hard to put into words. I’m jamily. That’s not a credential. It’s just true.
I’m also an end-of-life doula and a funeral professional. I’ve sat with people who are dying and with people who are grieving. I’ve watched families navigate funeral arrangements without knowing their rights, and I’ve seen what it costs—financially and emotionally—when people don’t have information they were entitled to have.
I’m not all focused on death. I’m also a celebrant and a wedding officiant. I love living life and celebrating it, too—including joining people in the moment they choose each other, on the lot or off it.
That combination—being deeply inside this community and knowing this terrain professionally—is what JBG is built on. The Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule and the broader landscape of end-of-life planning resources are the foundation. My role, and JBG’s, is to take what exists and make it genuinely accessible—presented in plain language, in a context that feels familiar, for people who need it to land rather than just exist. Knowing this community means knowing how to make that happen.
When JBG Became Real
Jam Band Graveyard became official on August 9, 2023.
You might recognize that date. August 9 is the anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death. I knew we were in the Days Between, but that morning it hadn’t fully registered.
I’d been debating creating this nonprofit for a while, but that day I felt overwhelmingly compelled to finally take the next step. I still wasn’t sure whether it should be The Jam Band Graveyard or simply Jam Band Graveyard, so I bought both domains.
And then I got a text: “Can you believe Jerry’s been gone for almost 30 years?”
Do I believe Jerry himself had something to do with my feeling almost possessed to bring this project into existence? I don’t know—but I don’t not believe it.
At first, I thought maybe I’d make stickers and hand them out at Dick’s. But on August 28, 2023, James Casey died.
I never met James, but I love his music and I’d been lucky enough to see him play with TAB and Lettuce. Having just created this thing, this vessel for our community, handing out stickers felt misaligned with the moment.
So, in honor of James and with the help of a couple friends, we installed our first luminary labyrinth on the astroturf soccer field at Dick’s on September 2, 2023, during the Phish run.
That was one of the first moments JBG showed me what it could actually be.
From the outside, people might call some of this parasocial. But that word doesn’t fully account for what this community is. We don’t just listen to the music. We build lives around it. We see the same faces, return to the same places, carry the same songs, and feel the absence when someone is no longer there. Loss here is real. So is remembrance.
That’s part of what JBG was built to hold.
Our Inevitable Death
For years I’ve been doing this work beyond JBG through my death-positivity practice, Our Inevitable Death—hosting Death Café-style gatherings, Death Over Dinner events, speaker programs, and workshops where people decorate their own cremation containers.
I’ve watched people arrive at these workshops not knowing what to expect and leave with something made by their own hands—a container decorated with whatever matters most to them. That’s the conversation this work opens. The events create space for people to sit with death in ways that feel human rather than clinical, personal rather than institutional. That work continues.
Gathering people around the reality of death—in ways that are honest, communal, and sometimes even joyful—is the same impulse that created JBG. The community just needed its own home for it.
Burn Me With My Stubs, Please
This is my cremation container.
It’s an alternative container that I’ve been covering with ticket stubs for years now. It started in the studio space where Our Inevitable Death ran workshops, where others came to do this same work alongside me. It now lives in JBG’s office.
Nearly every surface is covered. Phish. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Little Feat. Billy Strings. Dead & Company. Goose. Besides various flavors of jam, there’s a solid showing of opera, punk, R&B, ska, rap, and house music. Stubs from years and years of showing up to get more down, tiled onto the vessel that will one day hold what’s left of me after I turn into a tiny ball of energy and fly on up to that Soul Planet, or whatever it is that comes next.
If you’ve ever thought about what you’d want—what would make something like this feel like yours—that’s exactly the conversation this work opens.
I’m not sharing this to be striking. I’m sharing it because it’s the most honest answer I know to the question of what planning ahead actually looks like when it belongs to you. It doesn’t have to look clinical. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s version of it. It can look like your life.
That’s what JBG is trying to make more possible for more people.
The People I Never Got to Meet
One of the things about being in this community long enough is that you start to carry people you never knew—people who died before you found each other, or whose paths just never crossed yours. I’ve heard enough of their stories that they feel present to me anyway.
Some of that carrying is collective and recognizable. Some of it is deeply personal. Both matter.
I never had the chance to dance with Emily Rose Wilson, but I truly believe she brought some of the most authentically wonderful people into my life—people who knew her and who now know me. When I dance with them, people who miss her so much, her presence is palpable. The Wilson chant makes me think of her, and I know her friends are, too. She’s in The Graveyard—and she’s still out there, in neon yellow stickers making their way around the lot and into the world.
Every Party Time, I think of Marty—Matthew McKalips, “Marty” to everyone who loved him. He’s there in that song (and perhaps even occupying someone’s pocket). That kind of carrying is something this community does better than almost anywhere.
I know Jodi Edgette through a dear friend who carries her—someone who knows what Jodi’s presence meant during the pandemic, when she was holding community together for people who needed it. I met that friend the way you meet people in this scene: a stranger, a hand extended, a Dead & Co show. Strangers stopping strangers, just to shake their hand. Jodi was part of why that friendship matters.
I think of Jeffrey Emblidge. I think of his parents.
These aren’t the only ones. Reading submissions for The Graveyard, I’ve gone in looking for one thing and found something else entirely—a story I didn’t know I needed, a person I’ll carry now. That’s part of what Jam Band Graveyard does.
That’s part of what Jam Band Graveyard is for. Keeping people present. Making sure the stories get told and held somewhere, so the community that loved them can find them again—and so that people like me, who arrived too late, can still know something of who they were.
The tributes, the rights education, and the encouragement to plan ahead and share those plans all rest on the same belief: this community deserves more guidance, more clarity, and the empowerment of knowing its rights when death leaves people facing hard decisions.
JBG isn’t mine. It’s ours. I built the structure, but the community fills it. That’s always been the point.
— Valerie, Founder of Jam Band Graveyard