I saw one ad ("Sign in or register for email updates and this box won’t appear again. We’re grateful for your support.") but could read the entire article after dismissing it.
On subsequent pages I got a couple of similar dialogs but was able to read several articles.
Never was a big fan of the Dead, but I did have an opportunity to see them in concert once.
The Dead encouraged taping, and the last few row of the floor seats were reserved for it.
It was an interesting thing to see. The back few rows was a forest of microphone stands and microphones. This was no casual thing.
The other interesting thing was that the band did not talk to the audience. They walked on stage, started playing. Played a bit, paused, said "We'll be back" and took a break for intermission.
Then they returned, started playing and then walked off. I honestly can't say if they said "Thanks" to the crowd, or waved, or anything.
It was just their familiarity with their audience, and vice-a-versa. I guess none of that was really necessary.
> The other interesting thing was that the band did not talk to the audience.
Huh what?
You sure you're thinking of the Grateful Dead?
The live shows I've heard have plenty of banter and talking. Bobby or Jerry telling people to 'take a step back', telling jokes, especially when there's an equipment issue...
It’s very cool to have so many moments that normally evaporate captured in audio recordings. Anyone know a compilation of good recordings? I’ve gone down the dead live videos youtube algo rabbit hole but I’d love a guide.
The same philosophy behind GD and tapers was adopted by many "Jam Bands" that came after them. Taping improvisational bands like the Dead has a special importance due to the way each show varies and is completely removed from the studio experience. I'd go so far as to say many folks just dislike most studio Dead albums but can rattle off a list of shows with the favorite versions of their favorite songs.
One of the greatest things about the Dead, IMO, was the relationship between the band members. Jerry wasn't the typical lead guitarist and band leader. He was more than happy to share that role and the structure of the band was more or less flat. This jazzier style where anyone was free to lead is something I try to execute in my day to day work life. It's funny though... Just like in playing music, you'll find that there are folks that revel in improvisation, and there are some people who, despite phenomenal talent, can't function without sheet music, rules, a plan, etc.
It's sad to me that the Dead is more or less 'boomer music' these days. There was a time when there was a significant overlap between the tech community and Deadheads. I think the Dead's culture was a geek-friendly form of socialization that was accommodating to non-neurotypical folks and gave many of us weirdo nerds a chance to learn some social skills. The Dead scene was crazy but it was... communal and provided a 'safe space' for all kinds of folks when the world was much less friendly to divergence.
The Grateful Dead created some unique music in the early 1970s, best characterized as a kind of bluegrass-rock blend.
However, their later popularity and touring in the late 1980s turned into a really pathetic spectacle. Some of this was likely related to Jerry Garcia's heroin addiction (which undoubtedly contributed, along with other factors like smoking cigarettes, to his early death at age 53). Dead shows of the period were well known as the place to go to score the best heroin among druggie circles of all kinds. This all predated the opiate marketing game and the rise of the pain pill clinics, whose results can be seen wandering the streets of any major American city today.
It's really a kind of sad tale, but I still like their early music (the vast majority of which wasn't taped with any quality).
I felt the heroin-soaked period of 73-77 was the best Dead of them all (some tunes down to almost 60 beats per minute) though as they started to pick up a bit in 78 that was pretty great too.
By the late 80s they had ended up as a really good cover band playing Grateful Dead material. Though there were flashes of brilliance even then, I had a hard time getting up the energy to hear anything but local shows.
I didn't (and don't like) taking the drugs myself, though there was always a contact high / breathing the atmosphere that would tune me up. But the drugs just got in the way of the music.
I often accidentally call them "Grateful Dead Conferences" because so many tech people I knew and worked with in Silicon Valley and regularly saw at computer conferences and trade shows would show up (like you, Fen, Gilmore, Barlow, etc).
(That was back when the hippies were in charge, before the frat bros took over.)
Q: What did the Deadhead say when he ran out of marijuana?
Just curious - you ever listen to railroad earth? I used to be in that band and we killed in the Bay Area. It was said by some that we “filled their jerry hole”, which was some of the highest and funniest praise we got.
Wow cool! That is indeed the highest praise, though easily misinterpreted out of context.
I saw a bunch of Flying Other Brothers concerts, who started at an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) benefit at The Fillmore Auditorium in 1997, and occasionally backed Bob Weir and Mickey Hart!
You're talking about rock music and the Dead. Drugs were the catalyst, an essential aspect of the musical experience for many of the performancers and the audience. But you're totally right, drugs were the solvent too, dissolving focus, talent, and brilliance to fade away. It's a risk and (sometimes fatal) attraction, I think largely due to the lack of cultural knowledge for responsible and sustainable recreational drug use.
Why would heroin contribute to his early death? If you don't overdose (a real risk) about the worst opiates do is cause constipation. No major organ damage and opiate users have lived well into old age.
Dr. Halsted was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and lived until 1922 - 70 years old. Addicted to morphine for much of his adult life.
Opiates are dangerous and highly addictive and people should stay away from them except for serious pain management. However they aren't going to do the kind of cumulative organ damage that cigarettes and alcohol abuse do.
In Jerry's case it was more likely chili dogs. He fell into a diabetic coma in '86, after which he had to relearn how to play guitar. It really aged him.
I believe opiates do mess with your hormones, which could have subtle effects which do affect lifespan, but yeah, I mostly agree. Opiates won't seriously damage your health if you are responsible.
I agree with everything you say, though I wonder a bit about this:
> the Dead is more or less 'boomer music' these days.
I haven’t lived in the U.S. for many years so I don’t know the current scene first-hand, but whenever I watch Grateful Dead videos on YouTube I start getting recommendations for videos of currently performing cover bands [1]. These include not only the groups that include surviving original members, like Dead & Company, but also a lot of younger bands throughout the country. Some stick to the original Dead repertoire fairly closely, while others mix it with their originals and with other covers. While Dead & Company seem to attract a lot of graybeards to their shows, the crowds for the younger bands look a lot younger.
Those videos stir mixed feelings in this graybeard. On the one hand, I’m happy to see young people enjoying the music I was into nearly fifty years ago (I attended my first Grateful Dead concert in 1973). On the other hand, shouldn’t young people be into newer music?
Yeah the jam band scene is still alive and mostly well. I kind of got out of it a few years ago but I'm still friends with many people in the scene. It maintains a stronger following in the Eastern and Central US from what I remember.
> On the one hand, I’m happy to see young people enjoying the music I was into nearly fifty years ago (I attended my first Grateful Dead concert in 1973). On the other hand, shouldn’t young people be into newer music?
I hear you. I'm overjoyed to see young people listening to classics but wonder when the next Jerry, Zappa or Jimi will emerge. The music world is much more image conscious than it was then, however(video killed the radio star...) and the market is much more fragmented now. That said, there's a ton of great new music. It's hard to tell with my old ears what music now will have the staying power of the music we love.
Eh... love bluegrass but only for like 30 minutes. Used to love some 'newgrass' bands like Yonder Mountain String Band. I love bands like the Dead that have some of that influence but don't go full on into it.
The Grateful Dawg documentary introduced me to bluegrass, strongly influencing my musical taste. Tony Rice, Norman Blake, Doc Watson and, obviously, David 'Dawg' Grisman, was just the beginning.
Young people are into a wider variety of music now than ever, as far as I can tell from having young relatives and only being maybe a decade or so out from "young" myself.
The progression of radio -> tapes -> CDs -> mp3s -> streaming services slowly but surely dramatically broadened things from the days of there just being a couple main genres. Mainstream radio hasn't kept up - the bandwidth isn't there - but there's a ton more out there beyond it.
IME the jamband scene (at least pre-pandemic) carried the torch pretty well. Beyond GD's post-Jerry iterations (Dead & Co, Phil and Friends), that welcoming community of taper-friendly bands (esp Phish, but also Moe, SCI...) has even grown in size and reach.
I don't know if I'd consider Dead "boomer music". Just yesterday, I met a bunch of new people from my wife's workplace, all 20/30 yo clean-cut career and family types. Surprisingly the Dead came up and about 1/3 of group jumped out of their chair at the mention of Jerry Garcia. We talked about shows we'd seen or listened to recently, favorite songs, the upcoming finale of the Dead's touring career... Deadheads are alive and well in the younger generation.
They definitely aren't your stereotypical "hippies" though! That whole aesthetic is a relic of the boomer past.
You'll find there's quite a range of deadheads out there. The Dead was pretty big in some frats so there's that vibe as well. Ann Coulter of all people is a deadhead. Glad to hear you found some kindred spirits without one foot in the grave :)
The linkage between the tech culture and the Dead/Jam Band culture has always interested me. I was a tour rat for years before I discovered that I could make a living creating software.
The culture of freely taping and trading live shows is deeply ingrained in my psyche and value system - the idea that a band could give something away "for free", creating so much value in the world yet recovering only a part of that value as concert revenue, was very influential to me. And I believe it was a cultural foundation for open source software in some ways. At least personally, when I started writing software, I was immediately drawn to the value system of open source software with near-RMS levels of enthusiuasm.
The DIY ethos I found in my local music scene similarly drew me to the value system of OSS.
Though, maybe DIY is a bit of a misnomer. I had a friend that booked shows. He always insisted on saying "DIT" - do it together. I think this makes it more explicit, whether it's a bunch of people chipping in on setting up a show, a bunch of people sharing their tapes, or a bunch of people committing to an OSS project...
TAB (Trey Anastasio Band has been on fire this fall - Phish’s front mans band) and I just saw an impressive show from psychedelic folk rocker Billy Strings in LA.
I’m heading see Trey in San Diego tonight and tomorrow in Santa Barbra.
Here's one of the best audio "pictures" of the grateful dead's mammoth PA system, The Wall of Sound, designed by engineer and chemist Owsley Stanley for the 73 and 74 tours. This is a famously good audience recording and one that 'AUD' purists often point to. There's some deadheads that prefer audience recordings, and others (probably most) that prefer soundboard pulls or 'SBD'.
'MOTB' stands for 'mouth of the beast' which is one step up from the 'FOB' or 'front of board' mentioned in the article, and was a term used by a handful of tapers including Rob Bertrando.
Here's a little interview with Rob and a couple other prolific tapers:
At some point Dave asks them why they let people tape their shows, and Bob replies with “if we ever make a good album people would probably go out and buy it anyway”
They were open source before it was cool. Also check out https://relisten.net/ for a great index of their shows from the Internet Archive.
Barlow's paradigm seems cheeky without awareness of
the Net's public roots, how it came up through BBS and Fidonet culture, is forgotten by those who only saw the view of the Net as a gift from the ivory towers of academia and the military rather than bedroom z80 & 6502 modem culture.
In another comment reply to Gumby, I mentioned how I often accidentally call them "Grateful Dead Conferences", because so many tech people I knew and worked with in Silicon Valley and the Free Software community and regularly saw at computer conferences and trade shows would show up at Dead shows.
The Raster Masters would lug enormous million dollar high end SGI workstations across North Shoreline Boulevard from SGI headquarters to Shoreline Amphitheater, and actually pack them into trucks and travel on tour with the Dead, performing live improvisational psychedelic graphics on the screen behind the band in real time to their live music, using an ensemble of custom software they wrote themselves, mixing together and feeding back the video of several SGI workstations in real time.
At one concert, some hippie came up to me, pointed at the graphics on the screen behind the stage in awe, and said, "I took all these shrooms, I'm tripping my balls off, and you would not fucking believe what they're making me seeing on the screen up there!!!" I explained to him that I hadn't taken any shrooms, but I could see the exact same thing!
The Raster Masters wrote and performed their own software,
which reflected the taping and sharing culture of the Dead scene, including ElectroPaint and the Panel Library from NASA, whose source code and recorded live performances were distributed with SGI's demo software and free source code library.
The improvisational software was like a musical instrument performed in real time along with the music.
ElectroPaint and other Raster Master performances were featured in the Infrared Roses video:
All this was long before "VJ" live performance graphics became so commoditized by widely available off-the-shelf VJ software that enabled any club kid VJ to show up late, set up their Powerbook, open a playlist in VLC, press the space bar, and then focus their attention on popping pills of ecstasy and snorting lines of coke instead of performing for the rest of the show.
>Raster Masters: Enough with virtual reality -- virtual hallucinations?
>"Free-form mind blowing," is how Raster Master Creon Levit describes the goal of his band's visual music. "We're trying to develop a new performance medium: live computer-graphics ensemble performance.
>"Raster Master's improvisations are a cascade of swirling, metamorphosing images: '60s light shows grafted onto '80s music video, real time. "Enough of reality – let's do virtual hallucinations," Levit declares. "We are instrument builders, playing away on the visual equivalent of the first synthesizers."
>Give this group one thing: They've got some high-end equipment. No wimpy Video Toasters for this outfit! Try two Onyx RealityEngines2 along with two Indigo2 Extremes. It takes a 12-foot truck to pack up all their beefy machinery; setting up for a performance takes five hours. For these artists, corporate sponsorship resembles traditional patronage of the arts more than it does the run-of-the-mill Miller Beer logo stuck in your face. Two of the Raster Masters work for Silicon Graphics; among their duties is writing the code that creates their visual music – code that a Macintosh could never crunch. SGI, of course, also provides the machines that the Raster ...
Every time I see an article about scientists using sound waves to map a 3d image of something - around a wall, or just in general - I think of these tapers and how there's numerous tapes of one concert from different angles. I know that the tapers were in one area, but could they be far enough apart to map out a 3d model of the concert?
What if you also had a few 2d photos of the concert - could a program be written to put it all together - how realistic can you get it? You could have the rest "made up" to fill in the blanks.
My father was at Bickershaw festival. It rained for 2 days. They where cold a d hungry, and up to their necks in mud. One guy was electrocuted, and another jumped to his death, but they carried on. My father wasn't a dead head, so waiting an hour for the band to tune-up was an unwelcome experience. Apparently, there are very few recordings from the Bickershaw festival, so when I introduced my dad to the selection of 4 hour recordings of the Dead's set from that day, well, he's found a new appreciation for the band.
https://relisten.net/grateful-dead/1972/05/07/intro?source=3...
My dad used to tell me how they where all starving, and some local shopkeeper took pity on them, and sold him a wheel of cheese for tuppence. This is that shopkeeper. And the wheel of cheese. https://youtube.com/watch?v=TCEPizIV2xc
I also love Garcia's interview from that weekend. Interviewer: "Do you think there should be limitations on open air festivals, like this?" Garcia: "Well, that presupposes that I think there should be festivals". Man, that guy cracks me up. https://youtube.com/watch?v=m0vAqnq1vW0
49 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadI did not see that.
I saw one ad ("Sign in or register for email updates and this box won’t appear again. We’re grateful for your support.") but could read the entire article after dismissing it.
On subsequent pages I got a couple of similar dialogs but was able to read several articles.
The Dead encouraged taping, and the last few row of the floor seats were reserved for it.
It was an interesting thing to see. The back few rows was a forest of microphone stands and microphones. This was no casual thing.
The other interesting thing was that the band did not talk to the audience. They walked on stage, started playing. Played a bit, paused, said "We'll be back" and took a break for intermission.
Then they returned, started playing and then walked off. I honestly can't say if they said "Thanks" to the crowd, or waved, or anything.
It was just their familiarity with their audience, and vice-a-versa. I guess none of that was really necessary.
Huh what?
You sure you're thinking of the Grateful Dead?
The live shows I've heard have plenty of banter and talking. Bobby or Jerry telling people to 'take a step back', telling jokes, especially when there's an equipment issue...
You can get sbd versions of most shows on archive.org, and headyversion will have links to archive.
I made something similar to headyversion but for phish, https://phine.st but it doesn't have a lot of content and I lost interest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0f2FwCxv7k
;)
If you want to hear some of the results, check out the Grateful Dead archive on archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/GratefulDead
The same philosophy behind GD and tapers was adopted by many "Jam Bands" that came after them. Taping improvisational bands like the Dead has a special importance due to the way each show varies and is completely removed from the studio experience. I'd go so far as to say many folks just dislike most studio Dead albums but can rattle off a list of shows with the favorite versions of their favorite songs.
One of the greatest things about the Dead, IMO, was the relationship between the band members. Jerry wasn't the typical lead guitarist and band leader. He was more than happy to share that role and the structure of the band was more or less flat. This jazzier style where anyone was free to lead is something I try to execute in my day to day work life. It's funny though... Just like in playing music, you'll find that there are folks that revel in improvisation, and there are some people who, despite phenomenal talent, can't function without sheet music, rules, a plan, etc.
It's sad to me that the Dead is more or less 'boomer music' these days. There was a time when there was a significant overlap between the tech community and Deadheads. I think the Dead's culture was a geek-friendly form of socialization that was accommodating to non-neurotypical folks and gave many of us weirdo nerds a chance to learn some social skills. The Dead scene was crazy but it was... communal and provided a 'safe space' for all kinds of folks when the world was much less friendly to divergence.
However, their later popularity and touring in the late 1980s turned into a really pathetic spectacle. Some of this was likely related to Jerry Garcia's heroin addiction (which undoubtedly contributed, along with other factors like smoking cigarettes, to his early death at age 53). Dead shows of the period were well known as the place to go to score the best heroin among druggie circles of all kinds. This all predated the opiate marketing game and the rise of the pain pill clinics, whose results can be seen wandering the streets of any major American city today.
It's really a kind of sad tale, but I still like their early music (the vast majority of which wasn't taped with any quality).
By the late 80s they had ended up as a really good cover band playing Grateful Dead material. Though there were flashes of brilliance even then, I had a hard time getting up the energy to hear anything but local shows.
I didn't (and don't like) taking the drugs myself, though there was always a contact high / breathing the atmosphere that would tune me up. But the drugs just got in the way of the music.
(That was back when the hippies were in charge, before the frat bros took over.)
Q: What did the Deadhead say when he ran out of marijuana?
A: "This music sucks!"
;)
I saw a bunch of Flying Other Brothers concerts, who started at an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) benefit at The Fillmore Auditorium in 1997, and occasionally backed Bob Weir and Mickey Hart!
http://www.fob.com/band/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Other_Brothers
You're talking about rock music and the Dead. Drugs were the catalyst, an essential aspect of the musical experience for many of the performancers and the audience. But you're totally right, drugs were the solvent too, dissolving focus, talent, and brilliance to fade away. It's a risk and (sometimes fatal) attraction, I think largely due to the lack of cultural knowledge for responsible and sustainable recreational drug use.
Dr. Halsted was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, and lived until 1922 - 70 years old. Addicted to morphine for much of his adult life.
Opiates are dangerous and highly addictive and people should stay away from them except for serious pain management. However they aren't going to do the kind of cumulative organ damage that cigarettes and alcohol abuse do.
I believe opiates do mess with your hormones, which could have subtle effects which do affect lifespan, but yeah, I mostly agree. Opiates won't seriously damage your health if you are responsible.
> the Dead is more or less 'boomer music' these days.
I haven’t lived in the U.S. for many years so I don’t know the current scene first-hand, but whenever I watch Grateful Dead videos on YouTube I start getting recommendations for videos of currently performing cover bands [1]. These include not only the groups that include surviving original members, like Dead & Company, but also a lot of younger bands throughout the country. Some stick to the original Dead repertoire fairly closely, while others mix it with their originals and with other covers. While Dead & Company seem to attract a lot of graybeards to their shows, the crowds for the younger bands look a lot younger.
Those videos stir mixed feelings in this graybeard. On the one hand, I’m happy to see young people enjoying the music I was into nearly fifty years ago (I attended my first Grateful Dead concert in 1973). On the other hand, shouldn’t young people be into newer music?
[1] http://gratefuldeadtributebands.com
> On the one hand, I’m happy to see young people enjoying the music I was into nearly fifty years ago (I attended my first Grateful Dead concert in 1973). On the other hand, shouldn’t young people be into newer music?
I hear you. I'm overjoyed to see young people listening to classics but wonder when the next Jerry, Zappa or Jimi will emerge. The music world is much more image conscious than it was then, however(video killed the radio star...) and the market is much more fragmented now. That said, there's a ton of great new music. It's hard to tell with my old ears what music now will have the staying power of the music we love.
The progression of radio -> tapes -> CDs -> mp3s -> streaming services slowly but surely dramatically broadened things from the days of there just being a couple main genres. Mainstream radio hasn't kept up - the bandwidth isn't there - but there's a ton more out there beyond it.
IME the jamband scene (at least pre-pandemic) carried the torch pretty well. Beyond GD's post-Jerry iterations (Dead & Co, Phil and Friends), that welcoming community of taper-friendly bands (esp Phish, but also Moe, SCI...) has even grown in size and reach.
They definitely aren't your stereotypical "hippies" though! That whole aesthetic is a relic of the boomer past.
The culture of freely taping and trading live shows is deeply ingrained in my psyche and value system - the idea that a band could give something away "for free", creating so much value in the world yet recovering only a part of that value as concert revenue, was very influential to me. And I believe it was a cultural foundation for open source software in some ways. At least personally, when I started writing software, I was immediately drawn to the value system of open source software with near-RMS levels of enthusiuasm.
Though, maybe DIY is a bit of a misnomer. I had a friend that booked shows. He always insisted on saying "DIT" - do it together. I think this makes it more explicit, whether it's a bunch of people chipping in on setting up a show, a bunch of people sharing their tapes, or a bunch of people committing to an OSS project...
Hey man, there are still a few of us youngin's out here repping the Dead!
I’m heading see Trey in San Diego tonight and tomorrow in Santa Barbra.
https://archive.org/details/gd1974-07-21.ecm22p.bertrando.89...
'MOTB' stands for 'mouth of the beast' which is one step up from the 'FOB' or 'front of board' mentioned in the article, and was a term used by a handful of tapers including Rob Bertrando.
Here's a little interview with Rob and a couple other prolific tapers:
http://www.gdhour.com/music/tapers.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_Concepts
I think Fen knows something about that...
At some point Dave asks them why they let people tape their shows, and Bob replies with “if we ever make a good album people would probably go out and buy it anyway”
They were open source before it was cool. Also check out https://relisten.net/ for a great index of their shows from the Internet Archive.
Taping and sharing culture and its benefits were very apparent in many net forums.
As were democratisation of the new tools, public terminals with BBS access and the Deadheads community spirit exemplified on Usenet and Arpanet.
Look no further than John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder and his Manifesto of Cyberspace - he was a Grateful Dead Lyricist !
https://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-been-20-years-since-this-m...
Barlow's paradigm seems cheeky without awareness of the Net's public roots, how it came up through BBS and Fidonet culture, is forgotten by those who only saw the view of the Net as a gift from the ivory towers of academia and the military rather than bedroom z80 & 6502 modem culture.
q.v. Fidonet BBS documentary
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dddbe9OuJLU
The Raster Masters would lug enormous million dollar high end SGI workstations across North Shoreline Boulevard from SGI headquarters to Shoreline Amphitheater, and actually pack them into trucks and travel on tour with the Dead, performing live improvisational psychedelic graphics on the screen behind the band in real time to their live music, using an ensemble of custom software they wrote themselves, mixing together and feeding back the video of several SGI workstations in real time.
At one concert, some hippie came up to me, pointed at the graphics on the screen behind the stage in awe, and said, "I took all these shrooms, I'm tripping my balls off, and you would not fucking believe what they're making me seeing on the screen up there!!!" I explained to him that I hadn't taken any shrooms, but I could see the exact same thing!
The Raster Masters wrote and performed their own software, which reflected the taping and sharing culture of the Dead scene, including ElectroPaint and the Panel Library from NASA, whose source code and recorded live performances were distributed with SGI's demo software and free source code library.
The improvisational software was like a musical instrument performed in real time along with the music.
ElectroPaint and other Raster Master performances were featured in the Infrared Roses video:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrared_Roses
>Infrared Roses is a live compilation album by the Grateful Dead. It is a conglomeration of their famous improvisational segments "Drums" and "Space".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkhr23asO-M
All this was long before "VJ" live performance graphics became so commoditized by widely available off-the-shelf VJ software that enabled any club kid VJ to show up late, set up their Powerbook, open a playlist in VLC, press the space bar, and then focus their attention on popping pills of ecstasy and snorting lines of coke instead of performing for the rest of the show.
https://www.wired.com/1994/06/raster-masters/
>Raster Masters: Enough with virtual reality -- virtual hallucinations?
>"Free-form mind blowing," is how Raster Master Creon Levit describes the goal of his band's visual music. "We're trying to develop a new performance medium: live computer-graphics ensemble performance.
>"Raster Master's improvisations are a cascade of swirling, metamorphosing images: '60s light shows grafted onto '80s music video, real time. "Enough of reality – let's do virtual hallucinations," Levit declares. "We are instrument builders, playing away on the visual equivalent of the first synthesizers."
>Give this group one thing: They've got some high-end equipment. No wimpy Video Toasters for this outfit! Try two Onyx RealityEngines2 along with two Indigo2 Extremes. It takes a 12-foot truck to pack up all their beefy machinery; setting up for a performance takes five hours. For these artists, corporate sponsorship resembles traditional patronage of the arts more than it does the run-of-the-mill Miller Beer logo stuck in your face. Two of the Raster Masters work for Silicon Graphics; among their duties is writing the code that creates their visual music – code that a Macintosh could never crunch. SGI, of course, also provides the machines that the Raster ...
What if you also had a few 2d photos of the concert - could a program be written to put it all together - how realistic can you get it? You could have the rest "made up" to fill in the blanks.
My dad used to tell me how they where all starving, and some local shopkeeper took pity on them, and sold him a wheel of cheese for tuppence. This is that shopkeeper. And the wheel of cheese. https://youtube.com/watch?v=TCEPizIV2xc
I also love Garcia's interview from that weekend. Interviewer: "Do you think there should be limitations on open air festivals, like this?" Garcia: "Well, that presupposes that I think there should be festivals". Man, that guy cracks me up. https://youtube.com/watch?v=m0vAqnq1vW0
For myself, the March 72 gig at Baltimore Civic Centre is my favourite, and the recording quality is amazing. https://relisten.net/grateful-dead/1973/03/26