Live Recordings of the Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead and its world of tapers has finally got its claws into me. I don’t know if it’s the band and their catalogue so much as the lovingly-curated cultural artifacts around them. Undoubtedly, there are/were better bands with better songs and performances out there. But what other group has such an earthiness in their music and a wealth of well-documented live recordings available on archive.org?

I’ve lately been taking a Java programming course at one of Virginia’s finer community colleges. Not to devalue the music, but Grateful Dead live recordings go extremely well with reading and studying for this class. (The Logitech Squeezebox and the Live Music Archive make these especially easy to get to.) You can pay as much or as little attention as you like, but the music is always there, comforting, like water. A few clicks with the Squeezebox remote will tell you whether the show you’re listening to originated from Sony condenser mics and a 770 reel recorder in the audience (AUD) or through a direct soundboard (SBD) feed. My preference has been with AUDs like this 1971 show; they’re gentler on the ear when they’re done well. Either way, you go through an aural time machine. The real treats for me are the shows that happened before I was born.

I’ve been particularly enamored with the Grateful Dead Listening Guide - apparently written just for people like me who are only just dipping their toes in. It’s kryptonite for a frustrated archivist.

Don’t even get me started on the Wall of Sound and how cool their “matched pairs of condenser microphones spaced 60 mm apart and run out of phase” vocal mic system was.