Sunday, September 04, 2005

A Long Strange Trip



Taping the Dead




During the last week or two I have been reading (in times away from what I have to be reading) Dennis McNally's A Long Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead and the Making of Modern America. To say the least it is quite a tale..I have not listened much to the Dead for about 10 years but last night I played Aoxomoxoa and it was inspiring. I then moved on to The Internet Archive, remembering that there a few live sets uploaded there. Actually there are 2892 live sets there! When I saw this amazing figure I thought about the subtitle to McNally's book; 'the Making of Modern America'. With such an open source attitude to their music the Dead were 40 years ahead of their time in light of recent file sharing technologies.

No comments: