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Links to this video clip just started popping up all over the place. It includes footage of the GD at Chateau D’Herouville on July 24, 1971, plus a clip of the Jefferson Airplane at Altamont (12/6/69) from the film Gimme Shelter, etc.

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The new Congress has barely begun, but the major record labels are already up to their old tricks.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein has re-introduced the PERFORM Act, a backdoor assault on your right to record off the radio. Satellite and digital radio stations as well as Internet webcasters would have to adopt digital rights management (DRM) restrictions or lose the statutory license for broadcasting music. Letters from constituents like you helped beat this dangerous proposal last year — take action now to block it again.

This bill aims to hobble TiVo-like devices for satellite and digital radio. Such devices would be allowed to include “reasonable recording” features, but that excludes choosing and playing back selections based on song title, artist, or genre. Want to freely move recordings around your home network or copy them to the portable player of your choice? You’ll be out of luck if PERFORM passes.

This bill would also mess with Internet radio. Today, Live365, Shoutcast, streaming radio stations included in iTunes, and myriad other smaller webcasters rely on MP3 streaming. PERFORM would in effect force them to use DRM-laden, proprietary formats, so you can say goodbye to software tools like Streamripper that let you record programming to listen to it later.

Tell your representatives to oppose the PERFORM Act now.

Please visit the EFF site and join the campaign to stop this.

Lately I’ve been doing a loop jam that I call “Cassidy’s Cat,” starting with a bit of “Cassidy” and intertwining with snatches of “China Cat Sunflower” and bits of other Grateful Dead melodies. This week I am in New Jersey performing and recording with the Shockenaw Mountain Boys (Tim Carbone, John Skehan, Andy Goessling and Johnny Grubb of Railroad Earth). Mandolinist Skehan in particular is quite well-versed in GD music (he interpolates a little of “Bird Song” in the performance of “Bird in a House” on Railroad Earth’s live CD Elko) – he and violinist Tim Carbone did a gig or two with Phil Lesh and Friends, and RRE has been known to cover “Terrapin” and “The Wheel” in concert.

We opened our show in Wilkes-Barre Friday night with a full-band rendition of “Cassidy’s Cat.” A guy in the audience was pretty excited by what he was hearing, and when we heard him holler “St. Stephen!” I introduced a bit of that melody into the jam. A few minutes later, the same guy called out “Dark Star!” and so we threw that into the mix, too.

Saturday night, January 13, at the Fountain House in Newton NJ we opened with “Cassidy’s Cat” again. Skehan and I talked ahead of time about how to approach the intertwining of the themes, and the rest of the band was in on it, too. Here’s the result (excellent matrix recording by John Major and Rich Levy using Mike Partridge’s house mix and a Soundfield microphone) – I suppose you might call it “St. Cassidy’s Dark Bird Sunflower” or something.

Let me know what you think. This blog accepts comments, you know!

Excerpt from a 1967 CBS news documentary titled The Hippie Temptation.

If you can find the whole program, it’s worth watching. Viewed from the perspective of 40 years later, it’s hilarious, but also pretty scary.  A mother tells the story of how her child took acid and saw god – so she sent him to the looney bin “because you don’t see god until you’re dead.”