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.
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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.
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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…

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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.
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The Deadheads’ old trading network had looked back to an earlier model: music as folklore.

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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.