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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.

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 DeadÕs vault was basically available for free.
ÒIt 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,Ó Barlow said. ÒBut, when youÕre not, when youÕve got digital-for-money versus digital-for-free, then youÕve got a problem. This is a painful truth for me,Ó he sighed. ÒThe main thing is that I want it to be possible for my grandchildren to hear the music the Grateful Dead did, and I think itÕll be a hell of a lot more possible if itÕs on archive.org than if it isnÕt.Ó

And…

The reason the shit really hit the fan(s) this week, though, is because the Dead didnÕt have anything to offer, just to reclaim. ItÕs great that theyÕre 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 RecordsÕ proposed ice cream trucks?).

I like Jesse’s conclusion:

It was once a hallmark of the DeadÕs 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

This just in, from Relix:

Grateful Dead Downloads Likely To Be Restored at Archive.org
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.

… read the rest …
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.