I was just made aware of this Marty Weinberg entry today. Fun read.
deadessays.blogspot.com/2012/07/marty-weinberg.html

I often look at this one. An excellent listing for referencing early song ideas and jam themes (for lack of a better way to word it):
deadessays.blogspot.com/2010/01/deads-early-thematic-jams.html

So much interesting stuff coming up on the forum lately or maybe it's my imagination. Thanks for post.

i'm about 1/2 way through the Marty Weinberg article, and it is absolutely fantastic. this is my favorite passage so far...

"Weinberg has fond memories of the November 5-8 run at the Capitol Theater. “In many ways, those shows were the best… The audience was very sophisticated. At those shows…there wasn’t a lot of clapping at weird times. It was an older audience, and the people listened… I was sitting in the first few rows of the theater with a lot of people who were true believers, who went to a lot of shows, and who really understood the better shows… You had a group of people in the first twenty rows that knew a good show, who were not going to scream and cheer for every song. This was a fairly selective audience. When the Dead played some flat songs, the people didn’t go berserk.”


sophisticated listeners, please come back!!!!! it's incredibly frustrating to go to a show and have aeveryone around me talk throughout the set like the band is nothing more than background noise.

here's another good excerpt from the Marty Weinberg article (see below). it's no secret that Phil at one time was very supportive of tapers... but I want to know why it all changed. These days Phil seems to go out of his way to make it hard for the tapers. Phil, I still love you tons, but c'mon man... cut the tapers a little slack. We're there to help!

anyway, here's the excerpt...

"Phil asked me how I recorded [the LP]. I told him I was in the audience for these things, and he asked me lots of questions about what I did with my tapes... Then he told me a little bit about how they had this dream of being able to do this, of having something they'd performed the night before be available the next day... And he congratulated me on the taste I used. His words were, 'Very good taste in the selection of music for that.'"

It seems surprising that Lesh would be so welcoming about a bootleg record, but the Dead were wobbly on the subject at that point. So you get an instance like 8/6/71, where Weir suggests the tapers move back for better sound, versus 12/31/71, where the band busts a taper in the audience accusing him of being a bootlegger. Lesh in particular was probably the most supportive in the band of tapers, as there are several stories of him listening to AUD tapes that people played for him. (At least when he was in a good mood.)"

Blues_Power wrote:
I wasn't aware that he was cockblock for tapers. Can you share some stories or examples of what he's said or done to make it difficult? I've heard of Weir being a bit flippant about recordings and rights, but I thought Phil was consistently supportive.

I know some people recognize the great importance of the GD's agreement with tapers, but I happen to feel it might be the single greatest move they ever made. Maybe success wasn't something they valued, but in a general conversation, those tapes probably had just as much to do with their cult following as their playing, their albums, their politics, or anything else. The taping made the GD what we know as the GD. Not Garcia's playing. Not the otherworldly group dynamics. Not the songs. etc etc.

no

tapes were great, but there was nothing like attending a show...the live show, and the scene surrounding the live show made the GD what we know as the GD. How else could one possibly explain their cult-like popularity prior to the explosion of the tape-trading scene?

In the early days, there were mixed emotions in the Grateful Dead organization about tapers and taping. I saw rodies knocking down mike stands at shows in 1973. To the best of my limited knowledge, Phil has always been supportive of tapers. When soundboards were taken off the internet (from Archive) in 2005, Phil addressed this issue. Phil: "I had two conversations with Cameron Sears, our CEO at GDP, regarding Archive, starting when our material first showed up there. I told Cameron that I was fine having the audience tapes up there, but that he should talk to everyone, including Bob Hunter and John Barlow, regarding the soundboards. A year later when I had not heard anything about the boards, I mentioned to Cameron that I felt by not doing anything we were making a decision about the boards and that I was fine with that. Again I urged him to talk to everyone. I was caught by complete surprise when, right before Thanksgiving, the recordings were pulled. I feel that Bobby was not updated properly and unfairly took most of the heat. A lot of our business disagreements are ther result of poor communication from advisors. Bobby is my brother and I love him unconditionally; he is a very generous man, and was unfairly judged regarding the Archive issue."

bump for some great stuff

I remember an old thread about these early jams to

www.furthur.net/forum/general-discussion...-early-thematic-jams