by David Burn | Dec 1, 2005 | Music
David Gans, musician, author and host of the syndicated radio show, Grateful Dead Hour, has weighed in on his blog, Playback, about the controversy swirling around Deadlandia.
At first, he attemped to sound reasonable and take the band’s side.
The howling has begun, and the sense of entitlement that has always concerned me is in full flower.
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.
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).
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.
After enduring a barrage of comments about his take on his site and other sites, Gans updated his original to post to better clarify his position.
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.
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.
by David Burn | Dec 1, 2005 | Music
The New York Times: Faced with growing 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.
John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist, supports file sharing.
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.”
Phil Lesh, the band’s bass player, posted a statement on his own Web site (phillesh.net) on Wednesday, saying he had not known that band representatives the week before Thanksgiving had asked the operators of the Live Music Archive (archive.org) to stop allowing downloads of Grateful Dead concerts.
John Perry Barlow, one of the band’s lyricists, said he had had a “pretty heated discussion” on Tuesday with Bob Weir, the Dead guitarist and singer, over the extent of the restrictions.
Mr. Barlow said the blanket request to the Live Music Archive was driven by Mr. Weir and the band’s drummers, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann. “It was almost as if they had just discovered it was happening, even though it’s been online for at least three years,” he said.
Mr. Barlow said the band’s other primary lyricist, Robert Hunter, did not wish to get involved in the public debate but supported his position. But the lyricists are not full voting members of the band, and given the apparent 3-1 split among the four surviving performing members in favor of disallowing the downloads, Mr. Barlow said he was not sure how the issue would play out.
by David Burn | Nov 29, 2005 | Music
The greedy bastards.
Benjy Eisen for Rolling Stone: Grateful Dead fans, perhaps rock’s most dedicated bunch, are taking a stand against the band they love. Until recently, Deadheads could download countless live recordings of the band for free from third-party sites, including the popular Live Music Archive (archive.org), which once hosted nearly 3,000 Grateful Dead shows. All of the downloads were pulled last week at the request of Grateful Dead Merchandising (GDM), the group that handles official products for the band and is overseen by its surviving members.
Deadheads have answered in protest. In an online petition, fans have pledged to boycott GDM — including CDs and concert tickets — until the decision is reversed. (The band itself broke up in the wake of leader Jerry Garcia’s 1995 death, but in recent years guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann have toured simply as “the Dead.”)
GDM recently began selling live music downloads through its online store. The sudden lockdown could be a simple non-compete strike, or it could foreshadow a long-rumored deal with iTunes that will make the entire Grateful Dead live vault available for purchase.
Fans were incensed that the policy change applies not only to official soundboards but audience recordings as well. Throughout their four-decade career, the Grateful Dead actively encouraged fans to trade live recordings and even designated a special “taper’s section” at the concerts. In return, Deadheads largely respected the band’s wishes that the concert recordings weren’t sold for profit.
John Perry Barlow, EFF co-founder and former Grateful Dead lyricist, told Boing Boing:
You have no idea how sad I am about this. I fought it hammer and tong, but the drummers had inoperable bricks in their head about it.
What’s worse is that they now want to remove all Dead music from the Web. They might as easily put a teaspoon of food coloring in a swimming pool and then tell the pool owner to get it back to them.
It’s like finding out that your brother is a child molester. And then, worse, having everyone then assume that you’re a child molester too. I’ve been called a hypocrite in three languages already.
How magnificently counter-productive of them. It’s as if the goose who laid the golden egg had decided to commit suicide so that he could get more golden eggs.
This is just the beginning of the backlash, I promise you.
This is worse than the RIAA suing their customers.
For a business analysis, jump over to AdPulp, my blog on advertisng, marketing and pr.
by David Burn | Nov 29, 2005 | Music
Ariel Meadow Stallings, author, editor, blogger and hooping enthusiast, has done an interview with NPR’s Marketplace. It’s supposed to air tomorrow.
by David Burn | Nov 29, 2005 | Music
AP: This is Trey Anastasio’s first year without Phish, the band he led to an astounding 20 years of grassroots success. There’s also Anastasio’s newfound sobriety and a caustic backlash from a once adoring fanbase. Anastasio, 41, is finally getting around to what most of his musical heroes have spent careers doing: demolishing a lucrative conception of himself, and discarding all the rules that went along with that identity.
By the time Phish played its final show at Coventry, they had, like The Grateful Dead, become something more than a band – they were a lifestyle. And for thousands of disillusioned, pseudo-bohemian youths, they were a traveling home, as well as a bottomless vehicle for interpretation. The latter – propagated by fans armed with minute statistics about Phish’s musical habits – sharpened as the band’s live performances dulled and their albums veered from the majestic intricacy, atonality and extensive jamming of Anastasio’s early compositions.
“Groups,” Greil Marcus wrote in “Mystery Train,” are “reflections of community, and the problem with community is that you have to live in it.” Phish made their early music at a literal distance, walled up in the backwoods, only to find their world unexpectedly close in upon itself. The fans’ problems became their own, particularly Anastasio’s.
AP: Have you been made to feel like a pariah?
Trey: Oh sure. I’ve felt that.
AP: How has sobriety affected you as a musician?
Trey: You gotta understand that we never did drugs, for years. We smoked pot occasionally, but pretty much it wasn’t around. And I’m talking about the first time that I ever even saw drugs was … in the late 90s, and we started in 1983.
AP: Is there something appealing to you about the concept of vanishing?
Trey: Yes! Absolutely! It’s amazing to me that this can sometimes be hard to explain but the artists that I most admire maintain their relationship with their audience through all their changes. John Lennon being the number one example. Bruce Springsteen, anyone who had a long career.
by David Burn | Nov 25, 2005 | Literature
The State: As the South’s population booms — projected to constitute 40 percent of the nation’s population by 2030 — a new Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds the percentage of people in the region identifying themselves as “Southerners” is slowly shrinking.
The AP-Ipsos poll conducted last month found 63 percent of people living in the region identified themselves as Southerners. That mirrors a trend from a University of North Carolina analysis of polling data that found a decline of 7 percentage points on the same Southern identity question between 1991 and 2001, to 70 percent.
“Does it mean that being a Southerner no longer has any meaning? I don’t think it does,” says Larry Griffin, a sociologist at UNC who analyzed the AP polling data. “It just has a very different kind of meaning.”
Are the qualities that have long been ascribed to the South really true anymore? Are Southerners really more hospitable than other Americans? Does family really count for more down South? Are depth of faith, loyalty to home, reverence for history and sense of place identifiably “Southern” traits?
The South has become “sort of like a lifestyle, rather than an identity anymore,” says James Cobb, author of the newly published Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity.
by David Burn | Nov 23, 2005 | Politics
TNYT: The Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera urged Britain and the United States on Tuesday to investigate a British newspaper report that Prime Minister Tony Blair had dissuaded President Bush from bombing the station’s headquarters in the Persian Gulf.
Mr. Bush was said to have referred to the idea of bombing Al Jazeera’s studios in Qatar, a close Western ally, according to a document quoted Tuesday in The Daily Mirror. The tabloid said it was quoting from a leaked government memo said to contain a transcript of a conversation by Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair at the White House on April 16, 2004.
The Bush administration has frequently depicted Al Jazeera’s broadcasts as showing anti-American bias.
Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, told The Associated Press via an e-mail message, “We are not interested in dignifying something so outlandish and inconceivable with a response.”
by David Burn | Nov 22, 2005 | Digital culture, Media
By a unanimous vote, the Federal Election Commission issued Advisory Opinion 2005-16 which concludes that the Fired Up! Network of blogs qualifies for the “press exception” to federal campaign finance law. The Commission adopted the draft opinion without revision.
The AO states:
Fired Up qualifies as a press entity. Its websites are both available to the general public and are the online equivalent of a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication as described in the Act and Commission regulations.
The Commission concludes that the costs Fired Up incurs in covering or carrying news stories, commentary, or editorials on its websites are encompassed by the press exception, and therefore do not constitute “expenditures” or “contributions” under the Act and Commission regulations.
Lot 49 further notes this passage in the ruling: “…an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity…”
by David Burn | Nov 22, 2005 | Music
MSNBC is running an article on Bram Cohen, tha man behind Bit Torrent–every jamband fan’s favorite means of procuring live and uncompressed music. See eTree for the definitive collection.
Cohen’s company recently received $8.75 million in venture capital. Here’s how he plans to use the VC’s coin:
We’re setting up a marketplace for selling content online, and it’s going to be both pay-per-download and advertising space. We’re aiming to have some amount of content that you can’t get elsewhere, but we’re aiming to be fairly all-inclusive in terms of if you want to get content online, you can just go to our Web site and get it.
by David Burn | Nov 21, 2005 | Politics
Citizens of this nation owe U.S. Representative John Murtha (D-PA) our deepest gratitude. One need not agree with his proposal that we withdraw our troops from Iraq at once to salute this decorated Marine. Merely recognizing that he acted with honor by creating much needed debate on the war, is enough. Which makes it all the more difficult to digest Rep. Jean Schmidt’s (R-OH) inane rhetoric.
click for Quicktime video
