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.
David,
On the dead.net site, a woman copied an email from barlow saying he and Bob had a heated discussion regarding the issue. So now it seems it is everyone versus Phil. I feel that all is right with the world now that at least Phil said that not everything is about money. Of course the irony is that people will buy almost anything the Dead puts out anyway LMA or no LMA. Again the issue is that 10 years since Jerry’s passing and the internet revolution the Dead still does not have access to the Vault via the internet yet a bunch of Burnouts from california have pulled it off. It is always been the Dead’s music so they can do whatever they want with it… Thank God for Phil Lesh. I hope Bob,Mickey and Billy follow. Debra Koons…..I mean come on really… The whole idea of the Jerry Garcia estate tag turns me off. Did you see on Ebay they are auctioning off Garcia’s toilets…no bs check it out
You said:
“I think the band is going to back away from this decision – not entirely, but certainly with regard to audience recordings.”
That, Sir, is to my tiny mind the biggest point of this whole thing, and in all of the emotional outpouring over the last few days has been sorely unnoticed by too many people.
If the band wants to release SBD material in a more formal (and commercial) manner, I will certainly be at the cash register as a customer. [Just as I’ve done several times in the last year for material from Ratdog and SCI.] I would hope that a decision to do so will actually result in better overall vetting for board-level material, and there will always be avenues that people can use to find that special ’84 show that somehow only circulates as a tenth generation copy from a board patch Healy gave to some guy’s uncle on a whim.
But having a central repository for the AUD collection, where you can often find multiple takes from a given show, is part of what the entire ‘community’ thing is all about. And, like so many other things the band did well before others in the business, it is an excellent example of what we can do with the modern Net. In a sense it only moves forward, using the tapes, with the initial digital community that Heads formed (I was there on one of the branches) as a central-but-distributed repository for talk about shows and ways to get in touch via normal mail for tape trading. That thing was called rec.music.gdead on a largely cumbersome store-and-forward network called Usenet…
I got on the bus on the ‘old’ community, and have been happy as a clam that as I have aged, raised a family, and taken on many more chores than ‘back in the day’, the entire Dead experience has expanded with the Net I’ve worked on (building) and in (playing) to make it easy for me to remain in touch with the community and music, and also to know that today when I explain to new folks what it’s all about I can easily get them hooked with a few simple pointers to places like the LMA or Ratdog Live. To have all of that take several steps backwards would be a shame.
I’m not signing petitions, yelling, or writing off the entire thing. But I *am* holding all current commercial purchase and future show plans until I see how this pans out for the longer term. If it mutates into a plan to create better band control for the SBD side while leaving the AUD repository intact, then I’ll be one of the first supporters as long as there are lossless options on the SBD side with tolerable pricing. But if places like the LMA are permanently removed from even the AUD side of the equation other than as points of access for weak, lossy streaming, well, I guess I’ll pass my seat to someone else and signal the driver that it’s my time to get off the bus.
-Dean