Here is the latest news from David Gans, producer and host of the Grateful Dead Hour.
GD on archive.org, cont’d
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.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: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.
Pop (Music) Quiz:Update: Statement from Matt Vernon, the curator of the GD section of the LMA.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.
Morning dew #3
Los Angeles, California, the morning after Thanksgiving.
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
“Less-than-perfect voices…”
My friend and colleague Steve Silberman – we hang out together in The Well, a seminal online community that still chugs along in a plain-text meeting of the minds, sheltered from the roar of the broadband universe – just posted the first piece of journalism he ever published. It was a review of the Jefferson Airplane reunion in Golden Gate Park, published October 15, 1989 in the San Francisco Chronicle.
This statement jumped out at me. It describes one aspect of the special magic that animated the San Francisco Sound, and as Steve went on to say in his piece, it also characterizes other cultural movements we’ve witnessed and/or joined in the intervening years.
It wasn’t only what they were saying, but how they sounded, their soaring alloy of less-than-perfect voices a metaphor for a community that welcomed anyone courageous enough to want to be part of it.
Jerry Garcia, Paul Kantner and others have talked about this: the ’60s San Francisco ballroom scene was a neighborhood phenomenon, and the bands were playing for their peers. It was a DIY movement, the same sort of thing we later saw w/ punk, hiphop, etc.
Here’s what Kantner told Steve Silberman in a September 2005 interview that I broadcast on KPFA:
We werenÕt spokesmen for a generation; we were just reflecting the people who came to the Fillmore. Often in the Fillmore in those days the audience was much more interesting, I always say, than the people on stage. And the reason I went to the Fillmore was because of the people in the audience. Now and again there would be some really good shit on stage too, and that was a plus.
That neighbhood became world-famous, and the bands went on the road to spread their message of love and brotherhood and a sustainable way of life (Phil Lesh talks about this in his surprisingly excellent autobiography, Searching for the Sound). And the ballrooms brought in musicians from other worlds to enrich the local scene. Kantner again:
B.B. King had a great elevating moment Ð he cried when he went on stage at the Fillmore because people were so respectful of the beauty that he produced…. The great fact here is that the na•ve San Mateo white children found that they could be moved. And coming out of the Ô50sÉit was not a very moving decade, and people were very tight-assed. And if you got moved, there must be something wrong with you. So for us to come into the Ô60s – God bless the Ô60s – and to be moved by such things as B.B. King and any number of other players who came there and showed us things that we did not have a clue about, Bill Graham, and Chet Helms as well, have to be lauded for bringing this kind of shit to the basic populace.
If God existed, he/she should strike this fucker dead already
Robertson tells Dover, PA citizens, after the election: ‘Don’t turn to God if you need help’
“If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin…” – Pat Robertson
On today’s 700 Club, Rev. Pat Robertson took the opportunity to strongly rebuke voters in Dover, PA who removed from office school board members who supported teaching faith-based ‘intelligent design’ and instead elected Democrats who opposed bringing up the possibility of a Creator in the school system’s science curriculum.
Rev. Robertson warned the people of Dover that God might forsake the town because of the vote.
“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover. If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city. And don’t wonder why He hasn’t helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I’m not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that’s the case, don’t ask for His help because he might not be there.”