April 20, 2006
Waybacks, Jerry Garcia in Humble Stumble
Roy Schneider’s Humble Stumble comic strip mentions The Waybacks and Jerry Garcia today.
I’ve met Roy a couple of times at the Suwannee SpringFest and MagnoliaFest. He’s a musician himself, and he’s used the Suwannee fests (with a different name) as a setting a couple of times.
I don’t get the strip out here in the Bay Area, but I read it online.
Posted by gans at 1:17 PM | Comments (5) | 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 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
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 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 world bend to make special exceptions for their weirdness. If they can somehow muster the energy to do that again, I think the course of the spheres might be righted.
I think we can all agree on that.
And now that the GD are backing down from almost all of this - restricting soundboard recordings to streaming-only but allowing audience recordings to be downloaded as before (I mean, Duh! those recordings were MADE BY THE HEADS, fergawdsakes), we're left with a lot of adrenalin on all sides - and some questions.
For starters, what's the point of preventing the download of soundboard recordings from archive.org when they can (and will) still be distributed widely via torrent sites and good old-fashioned trees and vines?
I have maintained since the start of this controversy that it's reasonable for the GD to shut off the big fat free pipe that competes directly with their own service. I don't know how that will affect the sales of their CDs and the monthly download series - which many feel are overpriced when compared with other bands' download offerings - but I don't think it's an outrageously self-serving move on their part.
As I've probably already said on this site, some folks seemed quite proud to step up and self-identify as members of the "entitlement crowd." They went after the band hammer and tong, and because I spoke up with what I thought was a moderate, on-the-other-hand statement... you'd be amazed at some of the vicious emails and public attacks I've endured since I suggested the possibility that there was some greed on the fan side of this argument.
I've been playing unreleased Grateful Dead music (along with the now-rising tide of commercial offerings) on the radio for anyone who wants to hear it for twenty years now. I've written a couple of very well-respected books on the subject, and I've had the privilege of producing several CDs and boxed sets. It seems bizarre to be called a "leech" by a handful of screamers, and although I'm nowhere near as insecure as I used to be about my place in all this, it still stings when I see this kind of shit. Someone opened a topic on rec.music.gdead last week, titled "David Gans is a Douchbag" [sic]. That one actually turned into a reasonable discussion of my songwriting, of all things. Someone posted the lyrics to my song "Who Killed Uncle John?" (listen to it), which led to a pretty interesting discussion of the meaning of the song (If you like what you hear, you can buy a copy of the CD Solo Acoustic from CDBaby).
The Deadheads were among the first communities to find a home in cyberspace; as Barlow told me in our first interview, in Jamaica almost exactly 23 years ago, this is a community defined not by physical location but by common interest. The net was a perfect place for this scattered tribe to gather. Mary Eisenhart, Bennett Falk, and I started the Grateful Dead conference in the WELL nearly 20 years ago, when you needed a modem and a phone line to call in and it cost a lot of money in both phone bills and connect time - but our community thrived, and so did quite a few others. There are mailing lists, chat boards, newsgroups - a thousand ways for us to meet, and to trade tapes.
It seems clear that the money coming to GDP from CDs, songbooks, coffee mugs, golf-club covers, etc. is declining of late. The problem is not unique to the Grateful Dead scene, but the relationship between the band and fans is a good deal more complex than that of the typical CD consumer and the recording industry. It's distressing to hear some of these music lovers denouncing our heroes for "corporatism," "greed," "selling out," etc. when they attempt to change the terms of the largely-unspoken compact that we've had for 30+ years.
For decades there seemed to be a massive reserve of good faith in our community. It kept us coming to the shows even when the music was declining in those last few years. That good faith has been burning off, slowly at times, rapidly at times, ever since Jerry left us ten years ago. It shouldn't be a fucking crime for the band to try to continue to earn money from their brilliant work (the Fillmore West '69 boxed set being the most recent evidence of the value of their recorded legacy, which is vast), but I do wish they were more communicative about what they're doing and why. And I do wish the entitlement crowd - however small a percentage of the Deadhead community they may represent - would give the band a little slack.
As I said at the outset of this debacle, however ill-advisedly, I think there's been unfortunate behavior on all sides of the struggle.
I'll close this explosion of wind with a lyric of Robert Hunter's that I was privileged to set to music (also on Solo Acoustic):
Shut Up and Listen
Lyrics by Robert Hunter; Music by David Gans
Copyright 2000 Ice Nine Publishing Company
You're so busy talkin'
You never find out
What ev'ryone else
Is keepin' quiet about
You're so busy knockin'
You don't understand
The door's wide open
Don't go breakin' your hand
CHORUS:
Shut up & listen
A minute or two
Shut up & listen
You could pick up a clue
Shut up & listen
Doot' n doo doo
Shut up & listen
I'm talkin' to you
Shut up and listen
Or you may never learn
Why pigs don't fly
And why water don't burn
Why you can't find a cop
When it's a cop you need
Why you can't grow gators
From crocodile seed
CHORUS
Walking in the storm
With an ear to the blast
Thinkin' each moment
Could be my last
A small still voice
Seemed to beckon within
So quiet in there
You'd hear the drop of a pin
I asked what it wanted,
Said what do you crave?
It said: nothin' but the first dance
On your grave
I reached for the faucet
And I turned off the storm
Crawled under the bed
To consider reform
CHORUS
You don't pay attention
You don't analyze
An ounce of comprehension's
Worth a ton of surmise
Shut up and listen
And it may come clear
Why the key to your hope's
The very thing that you fear
Posted by gans at 9:56 AM | Comments (19) | TrackBack
November 30, 2005
And they're back...
This just in, from Relix:
Grateful Dead Downloads Likely To Be Restored at Archive.org... read the rest ...
Complete recordings of Grateful Dead concerts should once again be available at the online Internet Archive (archive.org)—perhaps as early as tonight.
According to Grateful Dead spokesman Dennis McNally, the removal on November 22 of all downloadable Dead recordings from archive.org was the result of “a great communication snafu.”
“It is my understanding that by the end of the day, the audience tapes will be restored to archive.org,” McNally said by phone.
Update: New York Times followup story (as noted by randybr below):
Downloads of the Dead Are Not Dead Yet
In the face of anger among its fans and divisions within the band itself, the Grateful Dead on Wednesday said it was reconsidering its decision to disallow downloads of the band's concert recordings from a large Internet archive.With more than 4,200 signatures on an online petition calling for a boycott of Grateful Dead products - from tie-dyed T-shirts to kitsch emblazoned with the band's dancing bear and skeleton icons - the band's spokesman said the members were still working out an official position on the controversy.
"The band has not fully made up its mind," the spokesman, Dennis McNally, said. "Things have already changed, and God only knows if they'll change some more."
... read the rest ...
Update - Almost ALL THE WAY back: Matt Vernon falls on his sword here.
We at archive.org now realize that our mistaken attempts to move quickly were based on what we thought the Grateful Dead wanted. For this we apologize both to the Grateful Dead and their community. There has been a great deal of reaction, our actions have caused more than necessary.
We believe these changes will be more appropriate for both the Grateful Dead and its community:
* Audience recordings will be restored as they were before-- for download and streaming.
* Soundboard recordings will be available streaming only.
Thank you all for helping guide this process. There may be changes in the future, but for now there is access to great concerts, and the audience recordings may be downloaded from here freely.
This will take a day or two to fully implement.
-brewster
Founder, Digital Librarian Internet Archive
-Matt Vernon
Volunteer Archive.org
Update: E! Online covers it.
Update:Mickey Hart's statement:
The last several days have been a whirlwind of activity and commentary regarding the Grateful Dead and archive.org. I am posting this message due to the fact that despite news stories to the contrary, I have been one of the earliest backers of the taping and sharing of Grateful Dead music. I fully support the position taken by Phil in his message and always have. Being a field recordist myself, I stand united with the taper community and always will notwithstanding anything in the media to the contrary. Efforts have been made by Grateful Dead Productions and archive.org to rectify the situation and I hope our loyal fans, friends and family will continue to enjoy and participate in Grateful Dead music.
Posted by gans at 3:05 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
GD on archive.org, cont'd
The "Thanksgiving massacre" issue is a week old.
The New York Times has covered it, and of course it's been thrashed out all over cyberspace.
Phil Lesh posted a message on his web site that has given many aggrieved heads reason for hope.
Here is a post from The Well, by Craig Hillwig (reproduced here with his permission, of course) that answers Dennis McNally's statements in the NYT:
Re: Lack of community. If that means walking to the post office to weigh your padded envelope and post it, then ok. But the LMA was more than that. Each posted show on the LMA had a place where you could comment, review the show or the tape, and reminisce about the performance. There were many, many heartfelt soliloquies ... "This was my first show!" "This was the show where I [my SO, my Mom, etc.] finally 'got it'". "Hoo boy, the bus broke down and we never made it...fortunately we had a vial and an OZ and were able to listen to the radio broadcast". You get the picture.If that's not community, then neither is most of the WELL.
I'm not sure that McNally ever really appreciated the extent to which Deadheads were early adopters of the Internet as a community medium.
Sure, the ability to download the shows themselves is not an essential element of that community. But he's dead wrong to the extent he is discounting the community aspect of the LMA.
I think the band is going to back away from this decision - not entirely, but certainly with regard to audience recordings.
Update: This is from a friend who agreed to let me post it but asked that I not use his/her name:
Pop (Music) Quiz:What is odd about this picture?
1) Become pioneering musical ensemble that develops wildly popular genre of music and associated life style.
2) Put drug addicts in charge of your huge stash of insanely marketable music archives.
3) Turn a blind eye (for two decades) while your archives are given away, ransacked, sold and traded for "favors" by your very own employees. Simultaneously allow your potential customers to freely record and trade the music they consistently beg you to sell to them.
4) Wait to start selling your archives until your maximum sales potential starts to decline (and, despite numerous requests from your customers, fail to provide accurate information regarding the products being sold and refuse to make available the specific music they request to purchase).
5) Endlessly bicker amongst yourselves...in public.
6) Get non-profit organization that gracefully provides much-loved service (of disseminating music you already let slip through your hands) to withdraw this service after they have been doing this for years.
Update:
Statement from Matt Vernon, the curator of the GD section of the LMA.
Posted by gans at 10:36 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
November 23, 2005
Grateful Dead on archive.org
Yesterday the Grateful Dead's archive was removed from public access at archive.org. From the announcement:
...the Internet Archive has been asked to change how the Grateful Dead concert recordings are being distributed on the Archive site for the time being. The full collection will remain safe in the Archive for preservation purposes. Here is the plan: Audience recordings are available in streaming format (m3u).Soundboard recordings are not available.
The howling has begun, and the sense of entitlement that has always concerned me is in full flower.
Many are quoting the famous Jerry Garcia statement, "Once we're done with it, you can have it," or words to that effect.
I think we need to get a little perspective here.
First of all, when Jerry said that - and he said it more than once, so we know he meant it - tape trading was an important aspect of life in the Deadhead community. It was a one-to-one affair, for the most part, and although there were some social pathologies in evidence, it was largely a manifestation of our love for the music and our desire to enlighten the world and turn our friends on.
That is a far cry from what is happening now. The internet Archive and all the other online distribution sources are high-speed, mass-distribution systems that make the best quality recording available to all who know where to look for them. That is a good thing, of course, culturally - but there is an economic element to this that must be taken into account.
I've read a ton of angry posts in the last 24 hours, from people who are convinced the greedy Grateful Dead are doing this to preserve their champagne-and-Porsche lifestyles. "I've given them thousands of dollars over the years, for tickets and CDs and t-shirts," I read. "How dare they take away my instant access to all their music just so they can make money off it?"
A couple of weeks ago there was another round of layoffs at GDP. A few more people - friends and fellow Deadheads - lost their jobs because GDP isn't making enough money to keep them on board. I heard that one of the casualties of this last downsiziing was Ram Rod, who was a member of the GD road crew from the beginning. I really don't think anyone took lightly the decision to let that brother go.
"They are doing this in order to protect their download business," is another cry I've heard. Well, yeah, and in what universe is that an unreasonable position?
I don't really have a dog in this fight. I have a job on the periphery of the Grateful Dead organization, but I am not privy to their decision-making process and I don't depend on them for my income. I help to promote their official releases by playing them on the radio, obviously, but I also play a lot of unreleased music (and I've gotten some of that unreleased music from archive.org).
I have sympathies on both sides of this issue, but I am also detached enough from it to have a perspective that I hope you'll at least consider.
There's a petition online directed at GDM and promising a boycott. "Now it appears doing the right thing for the fans, has given way to greed."
I think it is worthwhile to ask ourselves if there isn't some greed on the other side of the equation.
update: Another petition
Update 11/26: another petition - much more kindly worded.
Update 11/28: Given the violence of the response my post has gotten (on other blogs, on rec.music.gdead, etc.) - which to a certain extent proves my point about the bad attitudes of some Deadheads - I suppose I need to make explicit what I thought was pretty clear: I am not blindly supporting the GD organization's decision here. I think they're within their rights to shut off the high-speed free download service, but I also think it is not likely to give them the result they seem to be looking for. Nor has anythiing been said about discouraging smaller-scale trading of soundboard tapes.
And of course, the complete absence of an explanatory word from the organization is (although pretty much par for the course) a big part of the problem.
To those who have blithely asserted that I have no right to comment since I can get whatever I want from the vault, my "collection is complete," and I have no need for archive.org myself, I need to say: sorry, none of those things is true. I have gotten lots of great music from the archive for the radio show, and I haven't had access to the vault since Dick Latvala passed away six years ago. I'd also like to suggest that pure self-interest is not the only possible point of view, and assassinating the character of people who disagree with you - especially since it's possible they don't really differ so much - is not terribly constructive.
This is a complicated situation. That's all I'm sayin'.
Update 11/29: RollingStone.com news item quoting this blog, w/ Dennis McNally saying, "David Gans' comments were dead -- you'll pardon the expression -- on." I wonder what that portends for the official announcement.
Update 11/30: Jeff Leeds of the New York Times calls me for comment after talking to Dennis McNally. "Deadheads Outraged Over Web Crackdown":
David Gans, who is the host of a syndicated radio program, "The Grateful Dead Hour," said in an interview yesterday that the battle is rooted in the band's "historically lackadaisical attitude toward their intellectual property." He added: "When they were making $50 million a year on the road, there wasn't a lot of pressure to monetize their archives." Now, however, it may be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. While the move to revise the Live Music Archive may deal a blow to what many fans considered an organized library of material, "the idea that they could stop people from trading these files is absurd," Mr. Gans said, adding: "It's no longer under anyone's control. People have gigabytes of this stuff."
Update 11/30: Phil Lesh has posted a statement on his web site:
It was brought to my attention that all of the Grateful Dead shows were taken down from Archive.org right before Thanksgiving. I was not part of this decision making process and was not notified that the shows were to be pulled. I do feel that the music is the Grateful Dead's legacy and I hope that one way or another all of it is available for those who want it . I have enjoyed using Archive.org and found it invaluable during the writing of my book. I found myself being pulled back in time listening to old Grateful Dead shows while giggling with glee or feeling that ache in my heart listening to Jerry's poetic guitar and sweet voice.We are musicians not businessmen and have made good and bad decisions on our journey. We do love and care about our community as you helped us make the music. We could not have made this kind of music without you as you allowed us to play "without a net". Your love, trust and patience made it possible for us to try again the next show when we couldn't get that magic carpet off the ground. Your concerns have been heard and I am sure are being respectfully addressed.
- Phil
Posted by gans at 8:51 AM | Comments (131) | TrackBack
August 9, 2005
More Jerry Garcia stuff...
Lots of stories in the media today, on the tenth anniversary of Jerry's passing.
Paul Liberatore's front-page story in the Marin I-J
On the Al Franken Show today, they decided to start a campaign to get Jerry on a postage stamp.
high Times piece by Mark Miller.
Posted by gans at 2:08 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
August 4, 2005
The Days Between
It's been ten years since Jerry Garcia passed away.
Robert Hunter posted this in his online journal at dead.net:
August 3, 2005Ten years since old Jer kicked the bucket? Seems more like fifty. Nothing about his passing seems like "only yesterday," rather as long ago and far away as my childhood.
From the sublime to the vicious, everything that could be said has been said and said again. Yet, the essential mystery of who Jerry Garcia was remains. What can be said with fair assurance is that he was a source, an original way of seeing the world that agreed with others in a few broad and important outlines, but which in just as many other dimensions confounded all expectations.
I wouldn't say he delighted, in any Whitmanian sense, in what appear to be his contradictions, nor that he had control of them; predictability was not his strong suit. Not even self predictability. He could be alarmingly kind in situations where kindness was the last response to be expected - and altogether gruff where sympathy seemed the more natural response. You could almost say he had weather rather than climate.
Few would disagree that a key part of him remained isolated, unknown and unknowable. His art is the closest thing to an available roadmap of his singularities, amorphous clues, and clues only, to the nature of his true affections. Where he entered, he dominated, generally to his dismay. He knew he was not a leader, more a scout striking out in the wilderness of his intuitions, unwittingly summoning others to tag along through virtue of his magnetic personality and apparently deep sense of inner direction, but basically antipathetic to following or to being followed. Driving back and forth across the bay from Larkspur to San Franscisco on Workingman's Dead recording sessions, our conversations would range wide, or, sometimes, nothing would be said at all. I remember once we got to talking about directions. He professed to having none and inquired as to mine. "For the time being," I said, "I'm just following you following yourself." "Then we're both lost," he muttered.
A persistent image I have of Jerry which seems strangely resonant with his coming and going: a brilliant sunny day on a boat bobbing above the abyss of Molokini where the floor of the ocean suddenly drops off a cliff and plunges to unknown depths, I watch him check his gear then sit on the edge of the boat and tumble over backwards into the water, which is clear to a depth of several hundred feet. I watch him dwindle in size as he descends further and further, spread eagle and motionless, until he is only a speck to the eye, then disappears altogether from view and there is no more Jerry, only ocean.
Got this email from cartoonist Steve Lafler, pointing to a comic about the Dead that he posted on his own blog. The comic is well worth a look.
Dear David,Been missing your radio show after a move to Portland (after 20 years in Oakland...) but happily figured out how to listen to KPFA archives on my wife's fancy new laptop!
As the tenth anniversary of Jerry's passing is upon us, I felt compelled to post some comics about the big guy on my blog. Take a peek if you get a chance, I guarantee it's funny as well as poignant.
All the best,
Steve Lafler
My friend Teri Dobra sent this to a newspaper in New Jersey that was looking for comments on Jerry. I reproduce it here with her permission:
I never really knew Jerry Garcia, I never got a chance to meet him or to talk to him, but I always fantasized that we would hit it off right away. The band was too obscure to gain much media attention - and we liked that just fine. They were ours and we were theirs. We survived off of each other and that was the understanding between us.Jerry kept us together through good times and bad. He was able to reach a chord in us. His guitar melodies could get you up and grooving with your neighbors or could soothe you like a lullaby. His emotional interpretations of lyrics could bring you to tears or leave you with "nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile!"
Each show was a journey we went on together, and a celebration that we were able to do it together again. Every song had the ability to speak to us, to teach us, to help us through a difficult time. More often than not, the songs would take on different meanings depending on where we were in our lives. It's the reason we treasure our tapes of past shows. It allows us to relive not only the music but our emotions and always gives us the opportunity to "see" something new.
I've had the most fun at Grateful Dead shows and for that, I'll always be grateful.
We miss you Jerry - it's not the same here without you.