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December 29, 2005
I'm an Earworm!
Matthew Price in Albuquerque linked to my “Earworms of the Year” post, and then posted his own list of earworms - which included my song “Who Will Save Us from the Saved?”!
You can hear the song in its entirety on the tunes page.
Posted by gans at 12:53 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 26, 2005
Gans, Craven, RRE, et al. at MagFest '05
This just in from Jim Roe:
Hi All,
I have finally had some time to get the audio of the show finished and uploaded to the Archive. The recording came out pretty good. This is a great set with tons of talent- just look at the friends! Enjoy and Have a great New Year!
DVD to be done soon if all goes as planned!
www.archive.org/audio/etree-details-db.php?id=32089
Band/Artist: David Gans and Friends
Date: October 21st, 2005
Venue: Magfest, Music Hall
Location: Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park, Live Oak FL
Source: Audience Recording
Lineage: AT822>Sony DCR-HC85>Premiere Pro 1.5>SoundForge 8.0>dBPowerAMP
1. Going Down the Road Feeling Bad
2. Wild Horses
3. Sound Check Groove
4. Bubbles in My Beer
5. Catfish John
6. Midnight Moonlight
7. Mr Tambourine Man
8. Sultans of Swing
Featuring:
David Gans - Guitar Lead Vocals
Tim Carbone- Violin (Railroad Earth)
Joe Craven- Fiddle (DGQ, Joe Craven Trio)
Alan Dalton- Banjo
Andy Goessling- Soprano Sax (Railroad Earth)
Johnny Grubb- Stand-up Bass (Railroad Earth)
Josh Skehan- Mandolin (Railroad Earth)
Arvid Smith- Dobro, guitar (Tammerlin)
Annie Wenz- Percussion
Not for Sale
Posted by gans at 12:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Dems wise up for 2006
SusanG on dailykos cites this Boston Globe piece:
Democrats to woo voters on wage issueSusanG adds:Frozen minimum pay seen as spur
By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | December 25, 2005
WASHINGTON — New Year’s Day will bring the ninth straight year in which the federal minimum wage has remained frozen at $5.15 an hour, marking the second-longest period that the nation has had a stagnant minimum wage since the standard was established in 1938.
Against that backdrop, Democrats are preparing ballot initiatives in states across the country to boost turnout of Democratic-leaning voters in 2006. Labor, religious, and community groups have launched efforts to place minimum-wage initiatives on ballots in Ohio, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Arkansas, and Montana next fall.
Democrats say the minimum wage could be for them what the gay-marriage referendums were in key states for Republicans last year — an easily understood issue that galvanizes their supporters to show up on Election Day.
This seems to me to be a winner on all fronts. Besides being the right thing to do, it’s an opportunity to tie in bloated CEO salaries, benefit cuts, corporate tax breaks and other oligarchical schemes so dear to the (barely beating) GOP heart.Additionally, it will have the backing of John Edwards - who, with his theme of the two Americas - is the perfect (and popular) spokesperson for the issue.
And, later:
My only concern stems from the fact that although the minimum wage initiatives won “overwhelmingly,” they didn’t seem to have the intensity of the coattail effect the GOP claimed for the gay marriage initiatives last year, sweeping candidates in with them. Of course, this could be from conservatives over-attributing turnout to the “values” crowd; it’s hard to see how citizens could really care more about what’s going on in their neighbor’s bedroom than how much cash is in their wallets each pay period.
The Democrats are starting to wise up. The right has gotten very good at putting their “values” items, aka wedge issues, on the ballot to motivate their base. About fucking time our side got on that ball.
Posted by gans at 11:20 AM | TrackBack
December 25, 2005
A new front in the war on Christmas
I love this story by Joe Garofali in the Christmas Eve edition of the SF Chronicle:
Gift rift: Evangelicals split over plan to ban presents
Conservative religious leaders are so pleased with their campaign against the “war on Christmas” that they’re going to rev it up next year.Look for more lawyers ready to pounce on Christmas disses, they say, more teachers ready to tattle on silencings of “Silent Night” and more boycotts of stores for yanking the “Christmas” out of the season.
The whole thing is nothing but a Weapon of Mass Distraction hatched by the paid liars at Fox News to keep the mindless base enraged while the kleptocrats continue their mission of stealing America from its citizens.
Now the dreaded American Family Association wants to get a good deal more literal about this religious holiday:
The American Family Association is suggesting that adults buy nothing from stores for each other next year. Sliding an Xbox 360 to a child would be OK, said association president Tim Wildmon, but adults should funnel their consumer cash to a charity that helps the poor — preferably one friendly to “Christian values” such as the Salvation Army.
Good luck with that, Tim. You are going to run smack into the true religion of mainstream America: materialism.
I’m really glad to see these guys put their money where their moralistic mouths are (although I’d be interested in seeing how much Tim Wildmon and dad Donald give to the poor from their own personal fortunes), but what I’m really glad to see is another rift in the unholy alliance of corporatists and religionists that has taken my beloved country do far down the ugly, toxic and inhuman path we’ve been on for most of my lifetime.
Update 12/26/05: “War on Christmas” quarterback (and, it must be noted, profiteering author) John Gibson engages in an epistolary debate on beliefnet with Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. An excerpt from one of Lynn’s letters:
America contains 2,000 different faiths and 20 million freethinkers, a rich biodiversity of theological and philosophical viewpoints. Unfortunately, a relatively small band of members of the Christian faith seem insistent on being officially, and always, on the top of the hill. We might call them “Christian Holiday Triumphalists.” They are not about to ever let another faith even come close to getting the acknowledgment their faith receives. If it is December, this is the time to celebrate “Christmas,” not anything else. They know that they are in the majority, and whoever dares to mess with them will feel their wrath.
Posted by gans at 2:22 PM | TrackBack
Earworms of the Year
A random listing of some songs I couldn’t get out of my head this year:
Chinito Chinito from Ry Cooder’s amazing CD Chavez Ravine.
Deal - Buddy Miller live at MagnoliaFest Midwest in Bean Blossom, Indiana, July 2005. Not on any CD that I know of, but I’ve scored a fine live recording of the Hunter-Garcia classic for the January 28 KPFA marathon.
Willie Taylor from Uncle Earl’s CD She Waits for Night.
This Land Is Your Land - Jim Page’s updated version from the Spirit of Guthrie tour (w/ Vince Herman and Rob Wasserman), documented on the CD In the Trees. I don’t think the CD is available in stores (yet?), but you can get it by contacting Jim Page directly.
That’s Gonna Leave a Mark - Ralph Roddenbery Band, Let it In. I’ve shared a stage with Ralph a few times in recent years, and I like what he does more every time. We’re doing a few dates together in January, which I’m really looking forward to.
Waiting for Jaden - from ALO’s most recent CD, Fly Between Falls
Rocking Horse - Donna the Buffalo, Life’s a Ride. DTB is just about my favorite band these days: great groove, great vibe at the shows, a spiritually positive (and decidedly non-hippie-dippy) message, and - most important of all - two great songwriters, Tara Nevins and Jeb Puryear. Jeb has an utterly unique and (to me) irresistible style; he’s one of those songwriters who creates a universe of his own right next to ours and sends these messages back to Earth for the good of us all. What I want from a band - jamband or otherwise - is music that speaks to the head, the heart, the soul, the gonads, and the butt. DTB does that. When I’m in the audience at a Donna the Buffalo show, there is no place else I’d rather be.
Warhead Boogie by Railroad Earth. I heard ‘em do it live a couple of times and found out it was an old song of Todd Sheaffer’s (from the From Good Homes days?). I was pleased to learn that it will be on their new live double CD, Elko, that’s coming out in January.
The Road - Russell Smith, from The End Is Not in Sight. I was a big fan of The Amazing Rhythm Aces back in the day, and I was thrilled to be on a bill with them at the Master Musicians Festival in Somerset, Kentucky last July. Russell Smith hasn’t lost anything off his wicked curveball over the years - he’s still one of the best songwriters out there.
Like a Rolling Stone - Bob Dylan, of course. I interviewed Greil Marcus about his book Like a Rolling stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. Greil’s take on things is always interesting, and I think he’s absolutely right that this particular song kicked a door open for all of us and changed the world for the better.
Just about anything by George Harrison. I got the Concert for George DVD a while back and was in tears just reading the booklet; the concert itself was profound, not just for the beauty of the music but for the power of the love for George expressed by each individual and by the magic they made onstage. Then in the fall, The Concert for Bangla Desh came out on DVD, and it was all George All the Time for another couple of weeks. I saw the film in the theater when it came out, and owned a low-fi VHS of it for a many years, but seeing it restored and hearing it w/ good sound, and watching the bonus material on the DVD (most notably a rehearsal of “If Not for You” w/ Bob Dylan and George, and recollections by the participants that were recorded recently for the DVD) was an awesome experience.
Grateful Dead, Live at the Fillmore 1969. Ten-CD set of a four-night run from the GD era that gave us Live Dead. The groupmind at one of its early peaks. Lovingly and brilliantly remixed by Jeffrey Norman, the boxed set was offered as a limited edition and the fools at GD grossly underestimated demand. But there’s a three-disc compilation from Rhino that you can get, and it’s well worth it. Coupled with the remastered Live Dead, you can get a good taste of what the Grateful Dead were all about before they started back in the country-folk direction w/ Workingman’s Dead. (Jeffrey Norman posted on DeadNet Central that he prefers the original Bob matthews mix of the 2/27/69 Dark Star: “…for the best mix of DS 2-27, go listen to your Live/Dead. It sounds great… I’m not being modest here. It has a certain smoothness and flow that I couldn’t recreate.”)
Posted by gans at 10:17 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Best Magnetic Yellow Ribbon Ever!
Proudly presented by Mary Tilson at a party in Oakland last night:
SUPPORT THE MAGNETIC RIBBON INDUSTRY
Right after I posted about this on The Well, Joe Ehrlich told me where to buy ‘em online.
Posted by gans at 10:04 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 24, 2005
DG at the Kodiak 9/22 on archive.org
This recording has just been made available for download or streaming in various formats on archive.org. It’s one of my favorite solo shows of the year - well worth checking out.
David Gans
Thursday, September 22, 2005
The Kodiak, Rutherfordton NCOpening jam-> Return of the Grievous Angel, Lazy River Road, Falling Star, Jam-> Jackaroe, Our Lady of the Well-> When I Paint My Masterpiece, Like a Dog-> Terrapin-> San Rafael Swell-> Watching the Detectives-> Ship of Fools-> In Another World-> Kodiak jam
Surely You Jest, Pancho and Lefty-> P&L jam, Shove in the Right Direction, Who Will Save Us from the Saved?, Elvis Imitators, Sin City-> Dear Mr Fantasy-> Blue Roses-> Brokedown Palace, Loser, Down to Eugene, Rubin and Cherise-> The Minstrel
Sugaree
It was my first time at this venue, just a couple of miles from Spindale (where WNCW is based). There was a misunderstanding about the sound system, but the owner of the club got on the phone and the next thing I knew, speakers and amplifiers and cables were coming in from all over.
Smallish audience, but they really got into it and as a result, so did I.
Posted by gans at 10:28 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 21, 2005
Onward, Christian Soldiers
Yesterday was a good day for the forces of rationalism.
The judge in the Dover PA intelligent design trial issued a brilliant, thorough, and scathing decision in favor of the plaintiffs (and against the fabulists). Read the whole thing here (PDF).
A few excerpts and comments, gathered from a variety of blogs and news stories:
CNN quotes the decision:
We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents….georgia10 comments on dailykos:To be sure, Darwin’s theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions….
Having read my share of dry judicial opinions over the years, I can tell you that Judge Jones III’s verbal smackdown of “intelligent design” is a welcomed breath of fresh air. His opinion spans 139 pages of pure, razor- sharp analysis. It’s beautiful. It’s scathing….Here are some facts you don’t hear about from the ID supporters:
1. The board members wanted a 50-50 ratio between the teaching of creationism and evolution in biology classes (p. 95)
2. The President also wanted to inject religion into social studies classes, and supplied the school with a book about the myth of the separation of church and state. (p. 96)
3. Another board member said “This country wasn’t founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution. This country was founded on Christianity and our students should be taught as such.” (p. 102)
4. At a meeting, a board member’s wife gave a speech, saying that “evolution teaches nothing but lies,” quoted from Genesis, asked “how can we allow anything else to be taught in our schools,” recited gospel verses telling people to become born again Christians, and stated that evolution violated the teachings of the Bible. (p. 103)
5. Other statements by board members included “Nowhere in the Constitution does it call for a separation of church and state,” and “liberals in black robes” are “taking away the rights of Christians, ” and “2,000 years ago someone died on a cross. Can’t someone take a stand for him?”
All this evidence was presented, and yet the defense still claimed that “intelligent design” was secular and they wanted it taught for secular purposes. They perjured themselves time and time again on the stand in an attempt to inject their religious beliefs into the public school system. Judge Jones, in the most riveting part of the opinion, calls them on their bullshit.
Kevin Drum pulls these two excerpts from the decision:
….The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.….Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board’s decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
In other news, President Bush enlists in The War on Christmas! Courtesy of The Poor Man:
PRESIDENT BUSH. Last night [… blah blah blah everybody who thinks I shouldn’t wipe my ass with Constitution wants to gay marry Osama on a pile of aborted fetuses blah blah -ed. …]And so I’m just going to keep doing my job, David. You can keep focusing on all these focus groups and polls and all that business. My job is to lead, to keep telling the American people what I believe, work to bring people together to achieve a common objective, stand on principle — and that’s the way I’m going to lead. I did so in 2005 and I’m going to do so in 2006.
Thank you all for coming. Happy holidays to you. Appreciate it.
I love the first comment on that entry: “The War on Christmas has become a quagmire.”
Posted by gans at 9:29 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 18, 2005
Cat love
It was a great day to stay indoors. I was scheduled to play the Marin Farmers’ Market, but the weather was just too nasty.
I wandered into the living room at around 5:30 and found Groucho and Hugo snuggling.
Posted by gans at 5:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 16, 2005
The Invitational 12/15/05
David Gans & Friends
Thursday, December 15, 2005
The Invitational at the Hotel Utah, San Francisco
Personnel: DG & Chris Rowan, guitar and vocals; Josh Zucker, bass and vocals; Josh Kaye, keyboards; Adam Perry, drums.
Surprise guests: Tony Perez, sax (all of main set); James Nash (the Waybacks), mandolin (Yellow Submarine to end of main set)
P&L Jam (without Chris)
I Should Have Known Better
I’ll Be Back->
Things We Said Today
She Loves You
Here, There, and Everywhere
No Reply
In My Life
Yellow Submarine
A Hard Day’s Night
Travelin’ Man
Jackaroe
Mr Tambourine Man
Far Away
Shove in the Right Direction
~
Psycho Killer->
Jam (DG, Josh, Josh, and Adam)
Chris Rowan and I have bonded over Beatle songs, and that repertoire was the centerpiece of this show. But this band that fell together almost by accident turned out to be a formidable improvisational ensemble.
I’ve been working with bassist Josh Zucker for several months, after I heard him backing the Rowan Brothers at Sweetwater earlier this year. Adam was the drummer on the Guilty Pleasures tour last May. I’ve known him online for a few years but had never heard him play; he delivered the goods handsomely with G.P., and he demonstrated his big ears and sensitive touch last night. Josh Z. brought Josh K. to the September 29 Invitational (also with Chris Rowan), and he fit right in with no rehearsal at all. And this time, Josh Z. invited his friend Tony Perez to play sax with us. I thought we’d have him in for some of the rockin’ stuff and a jam, but it felt so good with him on the opening jam that I asked him to stay for the rest of the set.
This was a good night for me as a guitarist. I’ve been growing steadily more competent and confident over the last few years, but this year I’ve taken it to the next leval as solo player and as an ensemble player.
The loop is hard to use in ensemble situtations, because music played by multiple humans is elastic in both micro and macro ways. (At the last Invitational, I did a couple of loop jams with Kurt Ribak on bass; we had a little trouble locking in because the sound on stage wasn’t very well-adjusted, but once we got that figured out we did pretty well playing with the machine.)
The opening jam began with me alone, using a theme I have developed coming out of “Pancho and Lefty” over the last couple of years (hence the title “P&L Jam”). The other players drifted onstage and joined the party one by one, each locking in w/ the loop. Once we had it going on, I turned the loop off and we continued playing live.
I used the loop in a whole new way in the post-Psycho Killer jam last night: I got a fat overdrive sound and used the volume pedal to create extended, swelling tones, and looped a more or less random period of that work; then with the loop playing back, I overdubbed more upswelling notes, some overlapping and some more or less in sync, some in harmony and some in close dissonance. All the while the live musicians were jamming along in the groove we had made together. After a while I bent over and faded the loop out while the band continued, and I rejoined them on live guitar for the rest of the jam.
Adam posted a comment in the WELL this morning: “Josh Zucker had never even heard ‘Psycho Killer” before, so the actual song was pretty much a delightful mess, but the jam (probably 20 minutes of weirdness) was something I seriously need to hear again. Truly spacey but only boring for maybe two minutes of the twenty.” It was a joy to play with Adam again. I want to get that quartet together again ASAP - Josh, Josh, Adam, and me - and get James Nash in, too, if he’s available.
A friend of Bob Cogswell (Todd - I don’t know his last name) came with a PZM and made a recording from the balcony. The sound system at the Utah isn’t so great, but the recording will give us the gist of it. I’ll get it mastered after my busy weekend of gigs.
Posted by gans at 3:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
More from "The War on Christmas"
Bill O’Reilly, the emotionally-stunted creepazoid of Fox News, has teamed up with another of that network’s paid liars, John Gibson, to gin up yet another Weapon of Mass Distraction: “The War on Christmas.”
Gibson calls it a “Liberal Plot”; I call it something to do with the fact that we are not a Christian nation.
The campaign is just pathetic in its irrationality (which renews my hope that the loathsome fuck’s head is just gonna blow right off some day soon), but it has inspired some amusing responses. Here’s the latest brilliant sendup, from Rosa Brooks in the LA Times:
THE WHOS down in Who-ville
Were a tolerant lot:
Who Christians, Who Muslims — a Who melting pot
Who Hindus! Who atheists! Who Buddhists, Who Jews!
Who Confucians, Who pagans,
And even Who Druze! The Who 1st Amendment’s Establishment Clause
Said, “No creches in courts,” and the Whos loved their laws.
Because somehow … they worked. The Whos rarely fought,
Mostly, each Who did just what he ought.
Every Who down in Who-ville
Loved the Consti-Who-tion a lot.
But the O’Reilly, who lived up in Fox-ville,
Did NOT!
Read the whole poem
There has to be some way of quietly standing up to the hysterical and irrational emotionalism of the far right. The more you listen to the likes of O’Reilly, the more you see that they are emotionally arrested, broken souls who project their fear into the world; others, not so unfortunate, take advantage of these mentally ill megaphones to enact their own evil agenda while the sturm und drang occupies the spotlight.
Update 12/17:According to the Plano (TX) Star-Courier, O’Reilly told a big-ass lie about a school in that town yesterday, and the school is not amused:
…O’Reilly said, “In Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas, the school told students they couldn’t wear red and green because they were Christmas colors. That’s flat-out fascism. If I were a student in Plano, I’d be a walking Christmas tree after that order….”Richard Abernathy, an attorney for Plano ISD, sent an e-mail asking that O’Reilly correct the statement. The Plano ISD sent an electronic newsletter to parents stating that the statement was false. A statement is also posted on the school district’s Web site.
“What he said is not true,” Abernathy said. “We don’t prohibit kids from wearing red and green, yellow and purple. It doesn’t happen.”
Abernathy’s e-mail stated, “The District does not prohibit students from wearing red and green and it has not done so in the past. Demand is made that you retract the statement in a similar segment.
“Your use of the word ‘fascist’ is pejorative and inappropriate in this context,” Abernathy states. “Your slur smacks of McCarthyism and represents yellow journalism at its best….
Posted by gans at 12:50 PM | TrackBack
December 15, 2005
Interview with David Dodd
David Dodd, editor of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics, interviewed on KPFA 11/2/05. Edited for broadcast on Grateful Dead Hour programs 898-901.
Four segments of MP3 here.
Posted by gans at 4:08 PM | TrackBack
Interview with three Grateful Dead tapers
I interviewed legendary GD tapers Barry Glassberg, Jerry Moore and Rob Bertrando between sets at Cal Expo on June 9, 1990. I’ve posted MP3s of the 21-minute conversation here.
Update 12/16/05: In a comment below, Sean Cribbs points to a photo of Moore (center), Bertrando (right), and yet another legendary taper, Louis Falanga. Sean adds, “Pictures of Jerry’s microphones and personal cover art are hosted at moxiefactory.com/jc .
Another taper summit. Left to right: Jerry Moore, Dick Latvala, Bob Menke, and ??
Posted by gans at 4:05 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 14, 2005
Bob Dylan: XM Satellite Radio DJ
XM Satellite Radio carries my radio show, the Grateful Dead Hour on “Deep Tracks” Channel 40.
Today I read that they’ve signed up a new DJ: Bob Dylan! His show debuts in March.
Worst radio voice ever, quite possibly, but I predict he’ll have a kick-ass playlist.
So what if Sirius has Howard Stern? I’m thrilled to be on the same channel as Bob!
Posted by gans at 2:13 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Best news story of the year
Daring rescue of whale off Farallones
On the front page of today’s San Francisco Chronicle, the amazing story (by the excellent Peter Fimrite) of a brave humanitarian act.
A humpback whale was discovered by fishermen trapped in a tangle of crab pot lines and struggling for her life. A rescue party cut her loose - and the whale, obviously understanding what they were doing, held still while they worked and then made what appear to be several gestures of gratitude.
At least 12 crab traps, weighing 90 pounds each, hung off the whale, the divers said. The combined weight was pulling the whale downward, forcing it to struggle mightily to keep its blow-hole out of the water…. Moskito and three other divers spent about an hour cutting the ropes with a special curved knife. The whale floated passively in the water the whole time, he said, giving off a strange kind of vibration. “When I was cutting the line going through the mouth, its eye was there winking at me, watching me,” Moskito said. “It was an epic moment of my life.”
“It felt to me like it was thanking us, knowing that it was free and that we had helped it,” James Moskito, one of the rescue divers, said Tuesday. “It stopped about a foot away from me, pushed me around a little bit and had some fun.”
Read the whole story, please. And look at the photos.
Posted by gans at 9:02 AM | TrackBack
Further reflection on Tookie
My question to all who cheered the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams:
How exactly is your world improved by his elimination?
Posted by gans at 9:00 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 13, 2005
"Spring" cleaning
After two weeks of getting nothing done due to illness, I got my energy back in a major way and I’ve been on a cleaning and throwing-away binge for days.
It started with the t-shirts in my bedroom closet. They’re on shelves, and the shelves were just a jumble of knotted, crumpled fabric. So I pulled every damn shirt down and tossed out more than a hundred of them. I also reduced by stash of sweatshirts from a dozen to four, deleted a few shirt-type shirts, threw away a pair of jeans w/ a loose button that I’ll never get replaced, and tossed several pairs of shorts and some worn-out socks.
Then I went into my office, aka entropy city. I’ve been at it for days in there. I have been accumulating sheets of cardboard and corrugated paper for decades, just in case I needed to mail something. I’ve got letterhead from jobs I left 25 years ago and magazines I wrote for 20 years ago; magazines with Something About Me in ‘em that I needed multiple copies of (why? elephino!); computer cables for interfaces that have been obsolete for a decade; nonfunctional digital tape recorders; documentation for software I replaced years ago; software I haven’t used since I had a black and white monitor; a basket full of rubebr stamps that my dear deceased business manager loved to use but which i haven’t touched since she went on sick leave and never came back.
I’ve had books stuffed into shelves all over the place, in among the cassettes and VHS tapes, with no rhyme or reason; CD racks that hold two dozen disc, whose contents would all be more appropriately stored with the larger collections; little wire baskets full of nothing in particular; a couple hundred Priority mail labels with my return address printed on them, which I haven’t used in years; a stash of labels for the postage meter I returned two years ago; a big cardboard rack with 32 compartments - designed to hold stacks of letter-size paper - more than half of which were filled with nothing in particular.
For twenty years now I have been printing extra copies of the cue sheets for my radio show and storing them in one or more of those compartments. Once or twice a year I’d take a hundred or so of the oldest sheets and move them over into the compartment that held printed-on-one-side paper that I can use for printing nonessential documents (e.g. WELL topics to read in the bathtub). I’ve got reels of tape that belong to other people, the contents of which I’ve already digitized and burned to CD for them, but for some reason I haven’t returned the reels.
I found an ancient box containing the floppy discs and documentation for Microsoft Excel, which I haven’t used on any of my computers in probably five years.
You get the picture?
I have already filled up the trash can and the recycling bin, and we took half a cubic yard of t-shirts, sweaters, etc. to various charitable outlets on Sunday.
I now have a thousand sheets of printed-on-one-side paper ready to reuse. I will from now on only print enough cue sheets to meet my needs; it occurs to me that this computer I have in my lap has the entire 20-year run of the show for on-demand printing should the need arise.
I have collected all the books from all four corners of the office and stacked them on top of the filing cabinets, where the behemoth paper- compartment thingie dominated the room for a decade. I will organize the books by various appropriate criteria and take about a third of them over to KPFA when I go in to do my show; I will leave them in the lobby, and most of them will be gone by the time I leave the building two hours later. I will put some of the bound galleys of Grateful Dead-related books up for sale on eBay and give some of the proceeds to Rock the Earth and to a friend of mine who lost her job and her health insurance just as she began being treated for cancer.
I’m in the process of retrievinng all the posters and photos from their dusty sanctuaries behind bookcases, in closets, and over there by the printer. I may try to sell some of the David Lance Goines posters I bought in the ’80s. I may try to sell some of the Herb Greene and Jim Marshall photos I have accumulated over the years. I’ve put up a few collectibles on eBay, and there will be many more in the weeks to come.
There’s more.
I haven’t said a word about the CDs, which are far and away the biggest problem.
Posted by gans at 10:35 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
December 12, 2005
Bay Area gigs December 15-18
Coming events: I’m on tour in the Bay Area this weekend, and the ticket prices are way affordable (i.e. $0) at three of these gigs!
Thursday, December 15, 9:00 pm: The Invitational, with David Gans, Chris Rowan, Joshua Zucker, Josh Kaye, and Adam Perry. Hotel Utah, 500 Fourth Street (at Bryant), San Francisco. $7. 415-546-6300. Chris’ big brother Peter has promised to drop in, too!
Friday, December 16, 7:30-9:30pm: DG, Mario DeSio, and Jeff Pehrson at the Nomad Cafe, 6500 Shattuck Ave. (at 65th St.), Oakland CA. Free, but you have to buy something!
Saturday, December 17, 9:30 am to 1:30 pm: Grand Lake Farmers’ Market, at Lake Park and Grand Avenues (across from the Grand Lake Theater) in Oakland. Free!
Sunday, December 18, 9:00 am to 1:00 pm: Marin Farmers’ Market, at the Marin Civic Center in San Rafael CA. Free!
My performance schedule is always up to date at dgans.com/gigs.html
Posted by gans at 8:07 PM | TrackBack
The death penalty: I'm against it
Here in California, we are plunging toward another rendezvous with destiny: Stanley “Tookie” Williams is scheduled to be executed tonight. The newspapers have been filled with bloodthirsty op-eds demanding closure on behalf of the victims’ families, and on the other side of the question we’re seeing stories of redemption: the founder of LA’s Crips gang has remade his life and become a powerful and effective advocate of choosing not to live the gangsta life.
My position on the death penalty is simple: I want the power of the state to be strictly circumscribed, and the right to take a life falls outside what I think should be permitted.
As he so often does, my friend and neighbor Jon Carroll makes my case eloquently in today’s column:
I think subjective judgments about character are not really relevant in death penalty cases. To believe that they are relevant is to believe that uncharismatic, untalented, surly and/or mentally retarded death row prisoners are not worth saving, while a really cool guy is. Are we saying that it’s OK to kill sneaky little weasel-faced people and not OK to kill handsome, intelligent, well-muscled people? It’s fine to construct a hierarchy of character if one is, say, choosing a mate or a president. It certainly may be more convenient for advocates if they choose a guy who can speak well for himself and has done many useful things. But that’s not the point.The death penalty is wrong because the state (which is to say: us) should not be involved in killing people, particularly in cold blood. To kill people because they killed people — it doesn’t make any actual sense. A society should be slightly more civilized than its sociopaths. Revenge is an understandable emotion. Greed is an understandable emotion too, but stealing is still not legal. The death penalty does not deter and it does not cure.
I do believe people can change and souls can be redeemed here on Earth. But I don’t know enough about Tookie Williams to know if that’s what is happening here.
All I need to know is, the state should not be in the business of killing people. Period.
There is also the plain fact that courts and juries have sent innocent people to the Chair many times, and that matters, tool. Mark Fiore makes this point in his animated op-ed, Pokie the Punisher.
Update: Schwa denies clemency with the blandest of statements.
“After studying the evidence, searching the history, listening to the arguments and wrestling with the profound consequences, I could find no justification for granting clemency.”
Update: Another Schwa quote:
“Is Williams’ redemption complete and sincere, or is it just a hollow promise?” Schwarzenegger wrote less than 12 hours before the execution. “Without an apology and atonement for these senseless and brutal killings, there can be no redemption.”
How does a guy who maintained his innocence from the start plead for clemency from a system that demands a confession?
In the WELL, where I hang out with a lot of smart people in a variety of professions, we have a criminal defense lawyer raging bitterly about the use of “jailhouse snitches” in trials:
I fucking HATE jailhouse snitch convictions. Jailhouse informants should not even be allowed to testify unless the judge informs the jury both before and after the testimony, and again at the end of the trial, that those asshole rats have “a motive to lie,” as some requested defense jury instructions say. They only do that regularly in Canada. But in federal court you can sometimes get a milder instruction — BUT ONLY IF YOU ASK FOR IT. Having read many, many trial transcripts over the past 20 years or so, it seems to me that too many so-called defense lawyers are too ignorant or too chickenshit to at least ask for such an instruction.
On that basis alone, the death penalty should be eliminated. Too many people with too much to gain from pressing ahead despite doubts, coercion, and exculpatory evidence.
Again, I don’t know the details of the Williams case so I can’t decide whether or not he deserves to die. But I know I don’t want the state deciding that. Put him away for life if that’s what the jury decides, but that should be the limit of what is done in our name.
As my friend Emily said, “the state should not have the power to kill people until/unless we have a perfect justice system.”
Posted by gans at 8:50 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 9, 2005
Ann Coulter: The Thin White Puke
Scene from a Canadian bookstore
Update: I just noticed that another of the books on the “Jerks” table is How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a parody of the famous (in the ’40s and ’50s) Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People. My fifth-grade teacher read excerpts from the parody aloud to us. We thought it was pretty funny, if I recall correctly.
This is the same teacher who was gravely offended when The Beatles stormed the shores of America. He put a newspaper photo of the “moptops” on the bulletin board and sneered mightily at the name “Ringo Starr” - but I suspect he knew the battle was lost already. Ol’ Mr. Cowen was a Goldwater Republican, but this particular class of American pop kids went totally potty for The Beatles, and I suspect most of us turned out to be liberals, if not libertines.
Posted by gans at 8:19 AM | Comments (16) | TrackBack
December 8, 2005
Gans books at powells.com
I just signed up as an online partner of powells.com, the online storefront of the great Portland bookstore.
I ego-surfed (natch) and discovered that they have all my books there, including used copies of the out-of-print titles.
Playing in the Band: An Oral and Visual Portrait of the Grateful Dead
Conversations with the Dead: The Grateful Dead Interview Book
Talking Heads: The Band and Their Music
Not Fade Away: The Online World Remembers Jerry Garcia
Posted by gans at 11:39 PM | TrackBack
Greil Marcus-Jon Carroll interview (1997)
When Greil Marcus’ book Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (later reissued as The Old, Weird America) came out in 1997, I invited the author to appear on Dead to the World to talk and play records. Our mutual friend, San Francisco columnist Jon Carroll, got his advance copy and emailed me just to say he thought the book was wonderful. The light bulb went off over my head and I asked Jon if he would like to interview Greil for DTTW. Both men liked the idea, and the resulting conversation - recorded on May 3, 1997 in my living room and broadcast on KPFA on May 7 - was magnificent. The musical examples are terrific, too.
Prompted by a conversation in the WELL, I ripped the interview and posted it. You can download the 22 segments (totaling an hour and 56 minutes) here.
(If someone can teach me how to set it up so the files will stream in order, please email me and I’ll make it so.)
Posted by gans at 11:14 PM | TrackBack
Bear vs. the War on Some Drugs
Bear (ne Owsley Stanley) has written about drug prohibition and offers “maybe the only published plan for a controlled and intelligent legalisation.”
In the effort to “control” drug use, the approach taken on an international scale has been to prohibit even the use and possession of many materials. This model is the “American” one. That this approach is a failure has been widely noted by many prominent and even conservative commentators. The use of substances which alter in various ways the conciousness of man, is an extremely ancient and established practice, in spite of the belief of those who feel their moral views are the ones which should be imposed on all humanity.
Lots of other interesting comemntary on that page.
Posted by gans at 6:33 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Garrison Keillor vs. The War on Some Drugs
The War on Some Drugs is irrational, inhuman, morally and logically indefensible, and unamerican. It’s exactly like the opposition to gay marriage: you can’t get anyone to make an argument that doesn’t eventually circle back on itself. How exactly is “the institution of marriage” harmed by allowing two people of the same sex to participate in it? How exactly is marijuana more dangerous than alcohol?
To me, the bottom line is the right to be left alone. Seems to me that is one of the cornerstones of liberty.
‘War on Drugs:’ A Foul Tragedy
By Garrison Keillor
In These TimesWe Democrats are at our worst when we try to emulate Republicans — as we did in signing onto the “war” on drugs that has ruined so many young lives. The cruelty of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 is stark indeed, as are the sentencing guidelines that impose mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug possession — guidelines in the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act that sailed through Congress without benefit of public hearings, drafted before an election by Democrats afraid to be labeled “soft on drugs.” As a result, a marijuana grower can land in prison for life without parole while a murderer might be in for eight years. No rational person can defend this; it is a Dostoevskian nightmare, and it exists only because politicians fled in the face of danger. That includes Bill Clinton, under whose administration the prosecution of Americans for marijuana went up hugely, so that now there are more folks in prison for marijuana than for violent crimes.
Read the rest. Keillor makes a very good case for the ugliness of this unholy war.
Posted by gans at 10:30 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
December 6, 2005
"Insider" my ass
I posted this on rec.music.gdead just now, so I might as well post it here, too.
JonP wrote:
Why do you think that david gans has been posting her nonstop since this started?... Damage control for gdp..I wouldnt be surprised of they asked him to do it...
They didn't.
I don't know how many times I have to say it: I am not an insider.
The truth is, I don't really need to suck up to them to do my job. Back in the '80 and '90s when GDP was rolling in money, they didn't "need" the GD Hour to help them sell tickets, and many powerful insiders (John Cutler and Dennis McNally, to name two) didn't particularly want my help in selling records, or anything else either.
For example, when Arista hired me to make a promotional interview disc for "Built to Last," Cutler wouldn't even let me use the GD studio to do interviews. He did let me use one half-decent microphone for the Garcia interview, but I was on my own aside from that. McNally never sent me press releases, invited me to press events, facilitated interviews w/ Jerry, etc.
Dick Latvala was happy to make music available to me for the radio show, consistent with his generally kindhearted nature and his desire to get the music out into the world - but he was fucked with mercilessly by crew people (and especially Cutler, who didn't have the balls to get in my face so he abused Dick emotionally behind my back) - to the point where I stopped asking Dick for music for several months at one point because I couldn't stand what it was doing to him psychologically. Peter McQuaid intervened, took me and Dick out to lunch one day, and told Dick to stop letting the hecklers interfere with our mission.
So I was never inclined to suck up to anyone; oftentimes it was all I could do to keep from spraying gunfinre.
Nowadays the relationship is much more professional on a certain level, because David Lemieux and Jeffrey Norman are sane, professional, decent guys who appreciate the value of the GD Hour. I haven't asked David for any unreleased material for quite some time, for a variety of reasons - one of them being that I have access to tons of great material that is already outside the vault. Amusingly, I've gotten plenty of shows directly froom archive.org - or CDs from Charlie Miller as he prepared them for upload to the archive.
I have also given Charlie quite a bit of music to post on the archive and asked that my name not be attached to it.
So the bottom line is, STFU already about me sucking up.
I''m here to serve the music, and always have been. I'm not terribly sentimental about the GD organization, because although they have allowed me to earn a good living promoting their music, and I have gotten a great deal of satisfaction from the job over the years, for most of my tenure on the periphery of the scene I've had to fight one fuckhead or another just to do my job. It's left me profoundly unsentimental about the "family," believe me.
Posted by gans at 3:10 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack
GD Download #8
Today is the release date of a double-barreled download: a single disc from 1970 (mostly 2/4, with one song from 10/5 and two from 12/31), all mixed from 16-track; and what looks like the complete show (on two CDs) of 12/10/73 in Charlotte NC.
I listened to all three discs last night, and it was the perfect antidote to all the non-musical GD traffic that's been careening through my brain of late.
At this moment I'm listening to the jam in Good Lovin' from 12/31/70 - an airy, subued affair that seems somewhat unusual to my ear. This is the sort of collective, structural, melodic jamming I came here for. Hard to imagine that this one is going to wind up anywhere near the Booklyn Bridge (see 4/17/71), but who the hell knows?
The other 12/31/70 item here is the only electric Monkey and the Engineer in GD history (aside from that entirely forgettable attempt w/ Bob Dylan in LA in 2/89. Great fun. Weir's spoken intro reminds me that I was in my parents' apartment in San Jose on 12/31/70, watching this show on Channel 9 - at least for a while. I wouldn't go to my first GD show until March 5, 1972; this might have been the first time I ever saw them - no, I must have seen the movie Petulia by this time. I also must have been on my way out to a party or something, because I don't remember much of the broadcast. If only I'd stayed home and watched the rest! Anyway, Jeffrey Norman's mix is wonderful and so is the music.
Okay, Pigpen is into his improv now - a key phrase of this rap, "One monkey don't stop no show," is the title of a song that was popular around that time.
Highlights from the main part of the 1970 disc include a soulful Black Peter; a powerful Me and My Uncle (this song eventually became so routine that it's hard to find anything memorable about any latter-day performance, but in this era the song has some real menace and narrrative power); and a terrific St Stephen-> Not Fade Away-> St Stephen (the thing I remember best from last night's audition is the transition back into St Stephen) into Midnight Hour.
I need to go back and listen to 12/10/73 a few more times, but the things that stuck with me from the first hearing include: a sweet, meditative Playing in the Band jam (characteristic of the '73-'74 era, although without the meltdowns that marked some - but this is not a complaint!); Bobby saying "Have a safe and sane fourth" during Fennario, obviously in reference to a firecracker thrown toward the stage; a kick-ass Nobody's Fault But Mine out of Truckin'; and a really cool transition from the post-Eyes of the World jam into Brokedown Palace.
I'll be featuring some of these highlights on Dead to the World tomorrow night (Wed 12/7, 8-10pm on KPFA 94.1 in Berkeley, and streaming on the web). Also on tap are an interview with April Higashi, editor of the new Jerry Garcia art book, and 4/1/91 set 2 part 1 (Tim Lynch will play the rest on 12/14).
P.S.: I asked David Lemieux what, if anything, is missing from the download version of 12/10/73. His reply:
Four songs, I think. All from the first set. Hmmm, Jack Straw, Tennessee Jed, El Paso and Brown Eyed Woman. Sonic issues. The second set is complete, starting with Promised Land, although Deadbase lists a Me and My Uncle in the second set that was nowhere to be found on the tapes, so that's dubious.
Correction: Bill Herz passes along the deadlists entry showing an electric Monkey and the Engineer at the Fillmore East on 1/2/70. So the one on the new download isn't the only one.
Addendum to the correction: Davld Lemieux notes, regarding the 1/2/70 Monkey:
If I remember, it's a quick little attempt at the song while technical problems are solved, similar to Jerry's Little Sadie on 10/31/80.
We try to be thorough here at Playback!
Posted by gans at 11:56 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Collateral damage...
Over on Uncle John's Blog, I posted a message from AOL's GD Forum Store proprietor Geoff Gould regarding the state of his business.
An excerpt:
The Grateful Dead have been very good to me over the years. When my company was making Phil and Bobby's axes (and a couple for Jerry he didn't play) they helped keep us afloat. Over the years since the GD Forum first appeared on AOL and then on the web, we have worked together to bring the community many unique chat events and interviews. The GDF Store was actually the first functioning online commerce store selling GD Merchandise back in the Fall of 1995, and the GDM folk provided us with much great gear over the years. It's been an honor serving the community, but times have changed.Enter the "business is business" crowd.
Over the last couple of years, the GDM as well as the JG Estate stores have adopted a marketing plan of offering 'exclusive bonus discs' that has basically cut our sales anywhere from 60% to 90%. It was probably intended to get more market share away from sites like Amazon, and not aimed at me (I hope!) but the result is undeniable nonetheless. Like I said, the GD has been very good to me, and after reading Phil's comments, I have to hope I was not targeted by these practices, but merely affected by the collateral damage.
It's hard to say for sure, but this sure feels like the last holiday season for us
Maybe you could take a browse at Geoff's site and see what sort of bargains he's got...
Posted by gans at 11:04 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
December 4, 2005
Surely You Jest
Surely You Jest (listen)
David Gans
You'd best be glad this guitar ain't a weapon
I'd strum your lyin' ass on up to Heaven
But you'd not get in
Takin' lessons from that thug
Shakin' hippies down for drugs
And drinkin' from that jug
Of stolen liquor
I've been runnin' with a crowd of rowdy rascals
A rootin' tootin' band of Eddie Haskells
That bet of Pascal's
You know it's not for me
My eyes have yet to see
A scrap of proof that he
Believes in humans
I thought it was a hole that needed fillin'
To you it was a a plan that needed killin'
Supervillain
So you've cast me in your flick
You'd make a dead man sick
As if you had been kicked
As much as I have
And after all this storm and drain
You come by to pick my brain
To see what keeps me sane
So you can steal it
I overheard your mumbled malediction
My truth is even stranger than your fiction
This grave addiction
Well I came here for the fun
But I see those days are done
I'm not the only one
Who saw it comin'
I thought that you and I would be like brothers
Instead we just keep dissin' one another
You sorry mutha
After all the tears we've cried
Since our broken angel died
These acts of fratricide
Are so offensive
So go tell your kleptocrat
That he ain't no diplomat
If everybody's fat
Then what's the skinny?
© 2004 Whispering Hallelujah (BMI) All rights reserved
Posted by gans at 10:38 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
Dealing with Schwa
"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's very public moves to rebuild his political fortunes by reaching out to Democrats are making for some tricky equations up in Sacramento," write Phil Matier and Andrew Ross in today's San Francisco Chronicle.
Take, for example, Arnold's call for a multibillion-dollar bond to rebuild the state's infrastructure.Backing such a bond -- and the construction projects it would buy -- would greatly benefit a number of the trade unions, contractors and other constituents near and dear to Democratic legislators.
The same could be said for striking deals to increase education spending or helping to build affordable housing or improving the state's roadways. In each case, the interest groups that would be happiest with the deals tend to be Democrat-friendly.
On the other hand, helping Schwarzenegger get something done could also mean resurrecting his image right as he's gearing up for what could be a close re-election race next year.
It would be nice to live in a world in which doing the right thing by the citizenry would be rewarded by the voters, wouldn't it?
I sympathize with anyone who would prefer not to do anything to elevate the fortunes of our fraudulant, fuckheaded whore of a governor. But jeeziz, the work has to be done, so let's get it done.
There should be no shortage of opportunities to get the better of Schwa next year. Start by reminding everyone that he spent millions of our dollars promoting a special election for a quartet of vile, manipulative, anti-democratic initiatives that were soundly defeated by the voters.
Posted by gans at 12:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Another perspective on GD "greed"
Two posts by Steve Marcus, former head of Grateful Dead Ticketing, from the WELL, reproduced here with his permission.
539, 416 of 428: Steven E. Marcus (smarcus) Sun 4 Dec 05 01:56 65
I am just happy for all that I have received in the past and for the over 100 times that I was allowed to plug into the board.The facts are fairly simple. When the Dick's Pick's series was started each one sold about 25,000 units, but in the last few years that has dropped to 10,000 or less (which is why the Fillmore boxed set was limited to 10,000. Hind sight is most likely now telling GDP that they could have easily sold 25,000.)
Offering a new Dead Download every month is NOT going to make any one rich, and the fact is that because of the way that the band ran their business none of them are rich in the true sense of the word. Some of them put away their money and invested, but I would be very surprised if any them are worth more than $15,000,000.
This band was overly generous in the wages they paid their employees. At the peak I was paid a base of $62,500.00 (which was at the time about $20,000-$40,000 more per year than all other box office managers for all the major stadiums and arenas in the country and a hell of a lot more than any other ticket sales manager for any other band) on top of that base you can add four bonuses per year; one for each tour (Spring, Summer, Fall at approximately $5,000 per tour) and a Christmas bonus of around $10,000 although I believe it was $20,000 in 1988.
One top of that add in the 15% of the TOTAL amount earned that GDP contributed into a profit sharing plan and COMPLETE Dental and Medical coverage plus four week vacations (not including the two to four weeks GDP was closed after New Years.) The free tickets for almost every show for almost every employee. Hell the women that were basically receiptionists were getting over $45,000 per year plus all the above. In the real world they would have been lucky to get $30,000 total per year!
A few months after Vince was brought into the band he finally asked how much he was getting. He was told $1,000 per day. His response was so we play 80 shows per year, that good. He was corrected and told that it was for 365 days plus tour and Christmas bonuses. He was paid exactly the same as Garcia and everyone else. Do you think Ron Wood was paid the same as Mick or Keith? Not a chance. Do you think Darryl Jones is getting paid the same as Bill Wyman was getting even after 15 years in the band? Not even close.
My point is that this band could have cut everyone's pay almost in half and we would still have been well paid, but their basic attitude was share the wealth.
In a period of one year I went from sitting outside Frost because I couldn't get a ticket (1982) to NEVER having to worry about getting a ticket for ANY show AND being paid for it. I am thankful for all of that.
My point is that all of us have benefited from this bands generousity if only from the years of allowing us to tape shows and share them. Even as an employee I bought EVERY single music or video release.
And when I have the money I still do.
I have hundreds and hundreds of hours of incredible music that I can listen to some of it high quality board source and some of it high quality audience source. Everytime I listen to one of those tapes I thank the Grateful Dead for letting me relive incredible times, and if they choose to take all the free stuff off line it is their choice. I can still trade what I have.
Shit, it's 2 am and I am rambling...
539, 418 of 428: Steven E. Marcus (smarcus) Sun 4 Dec 05 06:43 13
I left off the "per diem" when on the road which was $45-$60 per day for expenses, but the Grateful Dead traveled with a four star chef from a major resteraunt AND a Vegan chef, plus we could order food "bags" with custom made meals for the days off. 30 days on the road at $45 per day = $1,350 of which I would usually spend less than $300.And another point about sharing the wealth. When David Bowie was paid $1,500,000 to play the 1983 US Festival he paid each member of his band union MINIMUM!!!! Which I believe was $350 each!!!!! Stevie Ray Vaughn was supposed to be on that tour until he found out what Bowie was planning on paying him.
539, 429 of 429: Steven E. Marcus (smarcus) Sun 4 Dec 05 12:48 17
... in 1987 when they started making $50,000,000 per year in ticket sales [...] their song lyric writers were living off royalties from record, tape and CD sales which was and is very little. At that point the Grateful Dead voted to pay Hunter and Barlow annual salaries, plus the royalties.Also I wanted to make it clear that my above posts are relating only to the Grateful Dead with Jerry, not The Other Ones or The Dead who I am very sure aren't paying every player the same, and that that policy ended with Jerry.
Posted by gans at 12:04 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
More commentary on the sad situation
Peter Braverman pointed me at a blog called Cullen Sweeney, American Dreamer. In an entry titled “Requiem for the Dead,” Sweeney writes:
In a lot of ways, the Grateful Dead were more of an idea than a band. Which is a clumsy way of saying that the fact they played musical instruments really, really well was far less important than the shared intuition that they were actually instruments themselves: master craftsmen in whom a holy fire found its rightful vessel. Which is an elaborate way of saying that the Dead as musicians were greater than the sum of their parts, that it wasn’t just fingers and strings and drumsticks but rather, somehow, a collective of seekers aiming their arrows at the Infinite, just beyond the pale of our usual understanding. Which is all a lengthy preface to a bleak finale, because the Dead have died, at their own hands. As far as deaths go, it was a quiet and mundane affair. The passing was, in a word, businesslike. And, indeed, no word but that could ever describe their demise, because it is the ultimate negation of their entire journey. It is the darkness at the end of the tunnel.Later in the piece:
…if we accept the premise that life is but a series of moments, to be performed in as we are able, then the Dead’s long train of action-in-time was more powerful, more awe-inspiring and just more totally fulfilled than almost anything else you could compress into the narrow historical document of a musical recording. It was all there, all free, all open - and just as the Dead wanted it.And:
The surviving members don’t much play like they used to, at least not with each other. The day-to-day operations of the Grateful Dead organization have been pawned off on hired corporate jockeys who pronounce “music business” with a silent “m-u-s-i-c.” The Dead’s “scene” long ago atrophied from lack of exercise, meaning that there just wasn’t much left for the band to keep in touch with outside of their ever-narrowing world. The band members gradually disappeared behind a faceless conglomerate. And there is no accountability - no address to write to, no sympathetic ear to speak to.Every day has delivered a new twist to this sad story, and along with it a new adjustment to my attitude about it. Hearing Weir’s KBCO interview yesterday broke my heart; he may be right about the archive’s legal exposure with regard to publishing rights, but the nastiness of his tone at the end of the interview - sneering “information wants to be free” the way he did, and kissing off the boycott-petitioners with a curt “seeya” - put an end to Bobby’s long streak of being a decent and classy voice in the middle of all the bickering among the ex-brothers. There is some merit to the concern about the archive putting the GD at risk of lawsuits over the use of cover songs on this free archive. But the GD organization’s handling of this mess rivals that of the Bush administration regarding Iraq: one rationale after another, any of which might have been convincing if it had been delivered with some respect for the people it was addressed to, and if it hadn’t been replaced the next day by another. Back to Cullen Sweeney:
The good ol’ Grateful Dead carved out a sizeable homestead on the frontier of human possibility. While it lasted, it was a good place. It was worked and tended in their image and those who had eyes to see, saw that it was good. After Reagan, even after Jerry, it still stood. But they have grown old now, those who remain. In large part, I can’t even really blame “the boys” for seeking some easy financial solace in their waning years. And, in truth, there wasn’t much left for them to wash their hands of.I’ve known all along that this weird little world of ours isn’t anywhere near as wonderful as the myths would have you believe. Doing business with the Grateful Dead will do that to you. But my job in Deadland is to put the best music on the air, and that is what has kept me inspired and productive throughout the journey. There had always been rivers of shit to cross on The Golden Road, but the ecstatic and aesthetic payoff has always been worth it. When I started doing the Grateful Dead Hour nationally, I thought it would be great if I could say at the ened of each show, “And if you like what you heard, call this number to order a copy.” Now you can do that, and I have a new commercial release to deal with at least once a month. I still manage to feature a lot of unreleased GD (and related) music, and I will continue to put the Dead’s best foot forward on the air every week. I’m staying for the music, goddammit. Addendum: A friend of mine, a longtime GD employee who has been (wisely) staying out of this debacle for the most part, sent me this and granted my plea for permission to post it. It helps to explain where Weir has been at through all this shit:
No one - and I mean NO one - fought harder than Bob for the people who worked so hard to keep the Grateful Dead thriving and who stepped up to hold things together after the touring gold mine caved in. No one fought harder to keep the merchandising operation in-house instead of farming it out to Coran Capshaw’s empire. No one fought harder to honor the loyalty of long-time employees in kind. No one took a more hands-on interest in creating new possibilities for the company (including the ahead-of-the-industry vision of digitizing and making available the entire contents of the Vault, and the never-to-be-realized business alliances with other bands, in which such major acts as U2 and Pearl Jam expressed an interest). When Phil’s my-way-or-else conditions for reuniting the Dead spelled doom for GDP/GDM as an independent, viable business, no one took it harder than Bobby, who was near tears during the company meeting at which the layoffs of 2/3 of the workforce was announced.
Hence my shock and disappointment at the thoughtlessness of Bob’s utterances in Boulder this week.
Posted by gans at 8:51 AM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
December 3, 2005
Bob Weir speaks
Bob Weir gave an interview on KBCO in Denver, and the subject came up:
Listen to it here. It's a little jerky, with pieces missing, but I transcribed some of it...
We had to cover our asses. What they're doing is illegal, unless there are arrangements made... particularly in the case of covers - other people's material.If we're perceived to be distributing their songs without their agreenent, they have every right, and really and every obligation, to sue us...
We had to take it down. We had no choice. It's archive.com's [sic] job to make arrangements with the other people whose material... we're playing, and then everything's good....
Probably a lot of it is stuff that we intend to release in the future anyway.
We need revenue. Our music division needs revnue so we can digitize all of that stuff.
The 'information wants to be free, man' - those folks... this is not information, this is music. It's kind of value-added information. Some people prefer to call it art....
We had to go ahead and do the right thing, and it upset some folks. I'm really sorry about that. So they started up a petition, a boycott, and all that kind of stuff. I really hope they can stick to their guns, and boycott us, and... seeya....
Weir's attitude makes me very sad. The publishing/rights issue has been the big unspoken question mark in this whole archive.org deal for quite some time, but coming from Weir in this interview it sounds like legalistic bullshit retrofitted by some bureaucrat.
And really shitty PR, too. Bob's been a pretty classy character through most of the sturm und drang of the post-Garcia GD drama, and to hear him sneering at fans is pretty distressing. Ratdog's (and GDP's) publicist, Dennis McNally, is usually on the road w/ Ratdog - was he there in the studio when Bob blew off a big chunk of his audience?
Sure, some of the most vocal of the complainers in this deal are totally full of themselves, and I thought the boycott petition was a lousy way to seek redress of grievances, but jeez, Bobby.
P.S.The other voice (aside from Weir and the interviewer) heard on the KBCO interview is Mark Karan's.
Posted by gans at 5:16 PM | Comments (19) | TrackBack
Yet another NYTimes story about GD/archive
Jon Pareles' "Critic's Notebook" column today is titled "The Dead's Gamble: Free Music for Sale."
A few excerpts:
The Dead did a quick turnabout - call it a half-step uptown toodleloo - this week. ... The Dead's pristine soundboard recordings, with minimal crowd noise, are no longer available for quick downloading, but can be played as streams (and recorded in real time). It's not a complete reversal, but all the music is online again. Now, however, the Dead are going to find out how difficult half measures can be. ... The Dead's easygoing attitude toward concert recordings had been a bulwark of its legend. At concerts, there was always an authorized "tapers' section" - a mini-forest of high-quality microphones on long poles - and the band never tried to stop fans from trading the recordings, as long as they weren't sold. The traders' network upgraded through the years from cassettes by mail to digital downloads.
That is indeed the legend. But the truth is, until the early '80s, taping shows was a stealth operation. The road crew were famous for gleeful forays into the crowd with wire cutters, and the band even made comments from the stage from time to time. I have a tape dated 12/31/70 in which Phil Lesh hollers, "Spotlight on the bootleggers!"
Sound man Dan Healy knew there was value in the tapers' work, and he made friends with quite a few of them. At Stanford's Frost Amphitheater in October 1982 I brought my cassette deck and plugged into the outputs of Eddie Claridge's cassette deck; Eddie's mics were set up right next to the sound booth, with Healy's blessing. Dan was interested in hearing how his mixes sounded in diferent places in the venue, how different microphones behaved, etc.
It was at the Berkeley Communty Theater in October 1984 that the Dead first allowed tapers in on a special ticket, in a special section. It was a mixed blessing - the tapers' area was often in a sonically undesirable place, and I know plenty of tapers who preferred to risk pissing off the powers that be by setting up "FOB" (in front of the soundboard) where the sound was better.
I gave a ticket to my friend Sean at Shoreline once - a nice spot in the middle of the middle section, about 20 rows out from the stage - and watched with great admiration as he stood stock still, his hands in a prayerful arrangement protecting his mics from spying eyes, for the duration of the show. Also at Shoreline you would see stage manager Robbie Taylor scanning the crowd with binoculars, looking for video cameras (entirely verboten) and mics in unauthorized places.
I also heard terminally-cranky engineer John Cutler grumbling about the tapers and dreaming out loud (not entirely in jest) about walking through the crowd with a powerful magnet to fuck up their recordings.
It should also be pointed out that The Jerry Garcia Band never allowed tapers, no way no how. Manager/roadie Steve Parish and sound engineer John Cutler made that call, and Jerry did not see fit to overrule him. That throws an interestiing light on Jerry's famously laissez-faire attitude about the recording of Grateful Dead shows, doesn't it?
Back to Jon Pareles:
Doubtless there were some cottage-industry sellers of Dead concerts. But on the whole, fans respected a simple ethic: Enjoy, don't profiteer. With no restrictions imposed, fans took it upon themselves to do the right thing. The more committed ones went beyond passive listening to active, time-consuming archiving, editing and processing of the music they cherished: making, for instance, so-called matrix recordings that synched the clean soundboard signal with a touch of audience recording for a more realistic ambience......
Even if a Deadhead was not downloading dozens of concerts, the boundless opportunity to do so meant something. There was a bond of trust between the band and its fans - one that is now strained. ... The Deadheads' old trading network had looked back to an earlier model: music as folklore....
The Dead had created an anarchy of trust, going not by statute but by instinct and turning fans into co-conspirators, spreading their music and buying tickets, T-shirts and official CD's to show their loyalty. The new approach, giving fans some but not all of what they had until last week, changes that relationship.
It's a great column. Read the whole thing.
update: Paul Hoffman offers a perspective on his blog along with a link to the origin of the term "Betty Boards":
The Grateful Dead were always very liberal with audience recordings. They set up special tapers' sections, often in the audio sweet spots at shows. They sometimes let tapers patch into the soundboard, although many tapers considered that to be cheating because the board mix didn't include much audience sound. The Dead always thought it was fine for folks to trade tapes as long as it was strictly non-commercial.At one point, a host of old soundboard tapes appeared in the tape-trading world; these were called "Betty Boards" for reasons explained here. At the time, the band was pretty pissed, but then eventually got used to it. At first, I was also pretty excited about the tapes, but as one taper friend said, "why would you want to hear the show without the audience?" The tapes I heard sounded sweet, but they were definitely more sterile than audience tapes for the same shows.
Posted by gans at 8:53 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
December 2, 2005
It's that time of year again...
Cribbed from my friend Jim Leftwich:
Speaking of which, that fuckhead Bill O'Reilly is back on his hobby horse about the "War on Christmas." Please please please let him pop a blood vessel and check out once and for all.
Posted by gans at 12:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 1, 2005
GD on archive.org, cont'd, and Poor Me
Thoughtful post by Jesse Jarnow on the Live Music Blog...
Over the summer, I interviewed Dead lyricist, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder, and professional righteous dude John Perry Barlow for a Rolling Stone blurblet about archive.org. He mentioned that he and Grateful Dead Productions president Cameron Sears had recently spoken about the situation, with Sears none-too-happy that the Dead’s vault was basically available for free.“It made a lot of sense to have things out there for free in digital format, as long as you were selling an experience in physicality,” Barlow said. “But, when you’re not, when you’ve got digital-for-money versus digital-for-free, then you’ve got a problem. This is a painful truth for me,” he sighed. “The main thing is that I want it to be possible for my grandchildren to hear the music the Grateful Dead did, and I think it’ll be a hell of a lot more possible if it’s on archive.org than if it isn’t.”
And...
The reason the shit really hit the fan(s) this week, though, is because the Dead didn’t have anything to offer, just to reclaim. It’s great that they’re rethinking their business model, but this just seems like a poorly thought-through means of doing it, especially without an alternative distribution system to roll out (remember Round Records’ proposed ice cream trucks?).
I like Jesse's conclusion:
It was once a hallmark of the Dead’s brand of misfit power to make the w