Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 6, Episode 10
Long Strange Tech, part 2
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Mary Eisenhart, BAM>, 11/15/1987.
- Jerry Garcia, by Howard Rheingold, 1990.
- John Perry Barlow, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 11/1982.
JESSE: We’re going to start today’s trip to the future of the past at the same time-space coordinates where we began the middle episode of our series about the In and Out of the Garden box set — in September 1982 at the US Festival at the Glen Helen Regional Park in San Bernardino, thrown by Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.
STEVE WOZNIAK [1982]: It's time for a big event because there's a spirit. It just seems so good. I felt other people would have the same feeling.
JESSE: As we learned last episode, the worlds of California technology and California rock and roll had been progressing together since the mid-1960s, sometimes entwined, but still mostly a novelty to one another.
US FESTIVAL NEWS CLIP [1982]: There were well stocked food concessions, more than enough toilets and even a Technology Fair, where exhibitors were able to show off the latest in computers, connecting rock music with a scientific wave of the future. But the technology took second place to the main event, which was always the music. The acts included a broad mix of styles, from New Wave to country to the long-lasting San Francisco sounds of the good old Grateful Dead.
JESSE: In 1982, when people thought of computers and music, they probably thought of German pioneers Kraftwerk, who’d released and toured behind their future-looking Computer World album the year before.
AUDIO: “Computer World” [Kraftwerk, Computer World] (0:59-1:24) - [Spotify]
JESSE: At least one of their members, Karl Bartos, had caught the Dead in Düsseldorf on the Europe ‘72 tour. Kraftwerk were and are future music, no questioning their Menschmaschine, same for the wave of techno soon coming out of Detroit, or any of the gazillion bands built around synthesizers. But in the early 1980s, the Grateful Dead were the present of music, in the current moment just as much as they were in the 1960s, even if they looked like a bunch of increasingly grizzled rock stars. The Grateful Dead were at the cutting edge, a magnet for the future. In March 1983, Sony began to sell the first CDs in America. A year before that, in April 1982, a digital recordist showed up at the Dead’s soundboard, as taper Charlie Miller remembers.
CHARLIE MILLER: It was an industry guy who just came from Japan or something, and he had a reverb he wanted to show to Dan Healy. So he brought it in and he showed Dan Healy the PCM Beta[Max] thing, and Healy let him patch.
JESSE: By the end of that year, Dan Healy was recording digitally on PCM tapes, as he would do for the next half-decade, which we talked about in our 1983 episode. And if you showed up near the soundboard that year, you’d’ve seen one of the first computers in live rock, operated by lighting assistant Dan English, controlling the new moving lights.
DAN ENGLISH: One of those really early computers. The monitor was built in, it had some keyboard that was mostly numeric. But it was specifically built to do lighting. The Kliegl Brothers made it; they aren’t even in business [anymore]. Each channel had zero to 10 voltage, and you’re back there at the patching with these spaghetti wires. Picture the old telephone where you patched the wire to get things connected… we used to patch up all these huge boxes.
JESSE: In some ways, it was future privilege. The Dead had access to an incredible amount of technology. They’d put themselves in that position from the get-go, as we’ve discussed. As northern Californians, they were in proximity to it. And, as a rock band, they had the money to chase it. But the weird twist comes in the transferral of that obsession from band to audience. It’s not just that Dead Heads spent money on technology. I mean, sure, taping gear is expensive and same for hi-fis. But Deadheads used technology to build community, often building, hacking, or embodying the tech in the process, and transforming the real and virtual landscapes around them in ways that would eventually feed back into the world at large. In the last episode, the Deadheads at the Stanford and MIT labs had started to connect up via ARPANET. Science writer and good ol’ Grateful Dead freak Steve Silberman.
STEVE SILBERMAN: We have this technology, ARPANET, that was designed to provide redundant communications after a nuclear war. So it's like this Rand Institute, mutually assured destruction idea of how the generals could keep firing at Russia, even after they've taken down our telephone system or whatever — Dead Heads turned that into a place to be friendly, and a place for discovery. I remember there was a guy named Jeff Eagle Davis, who said something like: “It should bring a smile to the face of any outlaw that this elaborate system, developed by five-star generals in the Pentagon, has been turned into a village square by Dead Heads.”
JESSE: The relationship between the internet’s Department of Defense origins and its countercultural applications is nuanced and deep. We’ll point you towards both John Markoff’s book, What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, as well as Fred Turner’s scholarly From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Steve had gotten on the Bus in the early ‘70s, and would get online a bit later.
STEVE SILBERMAN: I had the feeling that I had at shows, which was that there was a preexisting community of of old timers who had been going for a while and there was the ancient dichotomy of online Dead Head-ism, which was present at the very beginning. There was always this [thing] that was both completely frivolous and hilarious, and subjective and opinionated and cranky and snarky.
JESSE: David Gans had a glimmer of it before he got online, too.
DAVID GANS: Barlow said it to me in 1982, in my first interview with him in Jamaica, before any of this online stuff was a glimmer in anybody's eye. But Barlow talked about this being a
community with no physical center.
JESSE: Here’s some of that interview with Bob Weir’s longtime lyricist John Perry Barlow, included in David’s totally tubular primary source, Conversations with the Dead.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/82]: We are a community ourselves, which I think is damned important. I mean, we are a community: we’re not a commune, and we’re not brothers — we’re a community like a small town in Iowa, where everybody farms right outside of town.
DAVID GANS [11/82]: Even though you’re so far away, you’re part of that?
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/82]: Sure. And what’s more to the point is that one of the ways in which I find myself undisturbed by the intense devotion of the Dead Heads is the fact that very few people in this country come from a community in the first place. They come from a suburban area where you live in your house and the next guy lives in his. That’s being lost hand over fist as America becomes more suburban and less country-oriented, which is the natural environment of community. And these kids feel something lacking in their lives, which is that kind of relationship with other people where you don’t have to ask somebody hardly. If you need help you get it, and when they need help, they get it. Because that’s how it works. They wouldn’t have a community on the basis of where they came from, but they have a community now, in themselves, in the floating community of Dead Heads.
DAVID GANS [11/82]: These guys have really belonged to that community for a long time.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [11/82]: The band has, and the Dead Heads have. You go to a Dead concert and you see Dead Heads that you’ve seen before, lots and lots and lots of them.
JESSE: The early heads on ARPANET began to forge online community from communities that already existed. We’re going to focus our attention on the early digital heads for a moment before steering back to the Dead themselves. The first recorded bit of online commerce, in fact, was a cross-country dope sale when some of the Deadhead hackers at the Stanford lab sold some grass to the hackers at the MIT lab. We talked a lot about the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab in our last episode, which folded into the Stanford Research Institute later in the ‘70s. We’re going to linger there just a little bit longer. It was a pretty loose scene at the Stanford lab to be sure. SAIL director Les Earnest, from my interview for Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America.
LES EARNEST [2013]: One of our staff members planted marijuana in the septic tank outflow area, and then came to me to complain that the deer were eating it all. I said, “I'm sorry, I don't think I can do much about that.”
JESSE: Paul Martin had started the dead@dis email list at SAIL in 1973 and worked at Stanford through the early ‘80s.
PAUL MARTIN: People showed up there. One of the people who was a big influence for me about the Dead was a high school kid from Cambridge, who got bored with high school, dropped out, hitched out to the West Coast and came and hung out at our lab for a while. His nickname was Gumby. He was bouncing back and forth between MIT, who also welcomed him to hang out at their labs, and SAIL. The idea that a high school kid with no note from his parents could show up and be offered — “Sure, use our computer, set up your account, do it” — [showed] just how loosey goosey the Stanford AI Lab was at that time. He was definitely a big link between the MIT and Stanford Dead Head crowd.
JESSE: It was through Gumby, otherwise known as David Henkl Wallace, that the West Coast Dead Head email list connected with the emerging list on the East Coast. At around the same time that this was going on, in 1980, Usenet went online, the great public message board system of the early internet. The group net.music launched just before Christmas 1981. By spring 1982, it had forked into net.gdead, the first band to earn their own Usenet group. Unfortunately, only the first two months of posts of net.gdead seem to be currently preserved, with a few blank years in the archive before it became net.music.gdead in 1985, and shifted to rec.music.gdead by 1989. If you’re an early Usenetter who has documentation of the net.gdead days, or any other online Deadhead activity in this era, get in touch with us at stories.dead.net. Around the time that net.gdead was getting going, the original Dead email list started to hit critical mass and eventually merged with the Usenet group, but not before creating a useful filter.
PAUL MARTIN: I believe it was Gumby who suggested that we split the mailing list — instead of just having a Dead mailing list, have one that was specific to show information and tickets and events, and another one that was much broader than that.
JESSE: Steve Silberman.
STEVE SILBERMAN: The division between what was called the Dead Heads mailing list and the Dead Flames mailing list, also known as Jerry's Breakfast — [that’s what] they call the Dead Flames mailing list, which was all the related stuff, not like how to get tickets. All the gossip and all the rumors, ugly and beautiful rumors and opinions about shows, that was Dead Flames. And then there was the Dead Heads mailing list, which was just the tix, man.
PAUL MARTIN: There was a little bit of sort of cultural shift between folks who ran mostly on Unix systems and ran the Unix utility that did the newsgroups versus people who ran on the PDP 10 machines, like the MIT AI Lab and the Stanford AI Lab.
JESSE: The platforms were beginning to multiply by the early ‘80s, when numerous bulletin board systems also started popping up. Though some were commercial endeavors, there was something loosely connecting many of the early internet efforts. For some, the so-called Hacker Ethic was indistinguishable from the basic traits of being a Dead Head. This is what David Henkl-Wallace, Gumby, told me when I interviewed him for my book Heads.
DAVID HENKL-WALLACE [2013]: There was a culture where people believed in sharing. There weren't clear boundaries in my life between Dead Heads going to shows and being on computers, ridesharing and stuff. In fact, we would sometimes arrange consulting jobs around the tour.
JESSE: Over the course of the 1980s, Gumby was near the center of the Free Software movement that evolved in Silicon Valley and which became a cornerstone of how the internet was built, but also how the internet thought about itself.
PAUL MARTIN: He's the guy that started Cygnus [Solutions], a company that sold support for free software and paid it back to the free software developers.
JESSE: Surely unconsciously, the hacker ethic flowed directly into the part of the Grateful Dead universe that has remained one of its most long term portals to technology — the taping world. You might know Doug Oade’s name from Dead tapes as one of the Oade Brothers. But Doug was a taper and audio enthusiast even before he fell in love with the Dead.
AUDIO: St. George waves field recording [Doug Oade]
[field recording audio continues]
DOUG OADE: I had portable recording equipment that I was using to record nature sounds. I have always believed, and still do, that those sounds are fundamental to the human psyche, and they are disappearing. It's now even more difficult to get just a 5-minute stretch of the sound of a geographical area without the mechanical sounds of man intruding.
I used to love recording the ocean. I would find a spot where you could hear the wave run up or down the beach, depending on how it hit. Naturally, it's not going to hit perfectly parallel., so one portion of the way hits first. And then you hear that wave’s collision with the shore travel along the shore. Another example would be the sound of wind through the mountains of the path that wind takes through the mountains. If you sit and relax and focus on those sounds, it has a very centering effect on me, on my consciousness. That's my meditation. It remains my test to this day, nature recording. That is the single most difficult recording you can do. To have it playback accurately on speakers is no small feat.
AUDIO: Horse Park Farm, 6/10/90 [Doug Oade]
JESSE: Doug had another thing going. With his brothers, he was a proprietor of a hi-fi audio store in Thomasville, in Southern Georgia, opened in 1980. He discovered a different kind of field recording.
DOUG OADE: My brother Jim… I had actually gone to Dead shows well before he did, but he connected with some people that were recording it, and they gave him some tapes. My initial impression was that it would be nothing compared to a copy of the LP, the album at the time. And in fact, that is true — it is nothing like that. It’s much better, because it contains the audio cues that we react to emotionally in a very positive manner, and allows one to experience the emotion of the performance. So what I learned, to my surprise, was it was a great deal better than buying studio recordings because of the emotional content. After hearing them, I'm like, “Whoa, this is pretty good.” And he's like, “Well, what can we do? Help me do this.” So I started to apply what I knew about recording nature sounds to recording the Grateful Dead.
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [5/11/86, Oade Brothers audience tape] (8:27-8:57)
JESSE: That was from the Oades’ recording of the Dead at the Frost Amphitheatre on May 11th, 1986. Like the Dead themselves, the Oade Brothers were inspired to enter into research and development, committed to it, and upped the game for everybody. The first was spreading the word of what Doug describes as “true stereo.”
DOUG OADE: At that time, the most popular way to record the Dead was to point the microphones at the speakers. Except for shotgun microphones, which are spot mics—highly directional, that primarily hear what they're pointing at—most microphones don't work that way. So people were doing what were essentially monaural recordings; there wasn't a sense of spaciousness or dimensionality, certainly not a lot of depth. To my knowledge, we were the first people that were running true stereo recordings. Again, from my experience with recording soundscapes, the whole idea was to recreate that soundscape, and [we applied that] to the Dead. If [we’re] not the first, or among the first, I’m certainly the one that popularized it. Now, it’s not uncommon for people to be running true stereo configurations.
AUDIO: Backyard field recording [Doug Oade]
DOUG OADE [2020]: This is a recording of me walking in a circle around a pair of stereo microphones, set up on a mic stand in my backyard. The idea of this is to demonstrate the ability of a high-resolution recording and playback system generating a 360-degree sound field with only two speakers and two microphones. This is something that can be done with a very high-resolution stereo system that’s properly set up. Of course, it also requires a high-resolution recording system that’s properly set up. Take a moment to listen, and enjoy…
AUDIO: “He’s Gone” [5/11/86, Oade Brothers audience tape] (2:18-12:44)
JESSE: And, like the Dead, the Oades loved modifying gear.
DOUG OADE: We became comfortable spending the money—which was not insignificant—upgrading to better condenser microphones, to a better tape recorder. We started running into the limitations of the gear itself, as opposed to the limitations of the gear available in a given budget. And that's what started the modification process. The first was a mic preamp upgrade to the Sony TC-5, which was the most popular portable cassette recorder during its day among Dead tapers. The only step up from there was really going to the open reel, but his performance was not what I'd hoped for. So the first modification was to upgrade its built-in mic preamplifier.
JESSE: And, as with the Dead, one modification would often beget another, the never ending chase of just-exactly-perfection.
DOUG OADE: And from there, the second one was to remove the Erase head. I learned that the Erase head actually puts noise on the tape. If you take a clean tape and listen to it, just play it back from the factory, it has a lower noise floor than if you record nothing. If you turn the gain all the way down to nothing, other than run the Erase head on it, that brings up the noise floor. So that was the second modification — again, consistent with trying to lower the noise floor in nature recordings. And from there, the next modification was, again, an upgrade to the preamp. This time, rather than being motivated by lowering the noise floor, since I'd gotten it down to the inherent level of the tape, was to improve the imaging, the soundscaping, the sense of three-dimensionality that one hears when one listens to a stereo recording. The idea was to make it as natural sounding as possible, as much like your head was in that space as possible: minimizing the artifacts, minimizing the distractions, and maximizing the emotional quality of the experience.
JESSE: A hack that was good for one, was good for all.
DOUG OADE: Modifying gear for other people, they hear the recording. So it's like, “Whoa, gee, that sounds good. Can you do that for me?” “Sure — cool.” And that was something that was borne of requests, successful technology that was a significant improvement over what you could buy. And once people heard it, they wanted to do it. Now, we already had the business — it's a local stereo shop called Hi-fi Sales & Service, so we already had that going.
JESSE: As the Dead tapers transferred to PCM, the Oades discovered they were among the only companies in the country that could repair them, and found themselves with business far outside the Dead scene.
DOUG OADE: That's how we first got attention as pro dealers. That same story — first ones that came out were a great bargain from Japan, and then released, but nobody really knew how to repair them, so we started doing that. Then we started modifying them, added the ability to record at 44.1 kHz, as opposed to 48 kHz, which wasn’t compatible with what they had. It was an idea of the record industry to limit digital copies.
JESSE: In case you were wondering about how Jerry Garcia felt about the record industry’s early attempt at putting a Digital Rights Management scheme onto DAT tape, we present this bit from Mary Eisenhart’s 1987 interview. Thanks, Mary!
JERRY GARCIA [11/15/87]: But the worst thing about it is the way they're proposing the notion that they have about how to protect, how to make non-copyable copies — which is to filter out one frequency. Unfortunately, the frequency is a musically valuable frequency. So it means that you've got a little notch in your music at 8k, which contains a lot of musical information! It’s really stupid.
JESSE: Someone should hook Garcia up with the Oades.
The WELL
JESSE: Alongside the birth of digital audio came the arrival of home computers. Stewart Brand, organizer of the Trips Festival, is credited with being the first to use the phrase “personal computer.” In 1984, the same year Apple introduced the Macintosh, with Dead Head Daniel Kottke as part of the design team, a Dead Head named Mary Eisenhart became editor of MicroTimes, the tech-oriented offshoot of BAM, Bay Area Music.
MARY EISENHART: When the Macintosh came along, because that changed a whole lot, it brought homemade computers accessible to a whole new set of people who ran with them. That was a big thing. As it progressed, you got into your HyperCard, which in the end didn't really do much, but you got into Macromedia, which became huge and desktop publishing and all that.
JESSE: The tech world was still deeply tied to the psychedelic underground. HyperCard, the modular build-your-own app tool kit for Macs released in 1986 had been conceived by programmer Bill Atkinson a few years earlier after an LSD trip. I used HyperCard to run Stack-o-Dead, which collected Dead setlists and allowed you to print out tape covers.
MARY EISENHART: It was one of those historic moments, not unlike the ‘60s, where everything kind of changed. And, suddenly, there were all these new possibilities, and people who never had tools suddenly had tools, and they could do things with them.
JESSE: Mary got a different perspective on this in 1984 when she started helping Blair Jackson and Regan McMahon with their new magazine, The Golden Road.
MARY EISENHART: I had been working, Blair and Regan had just started putting out The Golden Road around that time. I was working for them, too, as a proofreader and various [other roles]. We were friends and practically neighbors. When that came out, it was so touching to get all these letters that came in going, “Oh my god, I’m the only Dead Head in Kansas. Thank you so much.” It’s like all these people that were the lone Dead Heads out in the wilderness — suddenly, they could connect to The Golden Road, which was a magazine. That need to connect was really there.
JESSE: David Gans.
DAVID GANS: Mary Eisenhart, was a friend of mine, who was the editor of MicroTimes magazine, a free publication on the same model as BAM and published by the same people for whom I worked. But Mary was talking about all this stuff: she was paying attention to what was going on in the online world, which was just beginning to exist in the mid-’80s, when all this came down. We were in the balcony of the Henry J. Kaiser one evening in November of 1985.
MARY EISENHART: So we were at the Dead show at Henry J. [Kaiser Auditorium] in the November run, 1985. It was a great run and marvelous music. I'm sitting there with Bennett, who is my show buddy and friend. I think David’s in the next row. And I think it was in “Terrapin Station”—although mileage varies. But in the middle of this jam, it was like, David and I looked at each other and went: “A computer system for Dead Heads!!”
DAVID GANS: We all showed up at a party after that Dead show with the same idea, which was: “You know all this online community that's beginning to happen with CompuServe? The Dead Heads would probably be a really good fit for that kind of thing, because we all have so much to talk about.” And as John Perry Barlow told us, we are a community without a physical location. That evening, at that party after that show, we decided to try to form an online Dead Head community. The initial notion was we could try and found a system, buy a computer and form an online community of our own. And Mary suggested that we try The WELL.
JESSE: The WELL stood for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link and was an outgrowth of a new digital edition of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. Based in Sausalito, it was essentially one of many bulletin board systems around the country, a BBS. But it was a BBS that would grow to have an outsized influence in large part because of its location. Journalist John Markoff covered technology for the New York Times for decades and is the author of the recent book, The Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.
JOHN MARKOFF: In terms of having a broader impact on the culture, the brilliant marketing thing that Stewart did is he gave people like me and Steven Levy and technology writers free accounts. So we all hung out there, and it got an out-of-sight, out-of-scale reputation because all the tech writers were there and writing about it. The Source had been around, Prodigy had been around, CompuServe had been around and Usenet had been around, and this digital culture was really alive and well.
JESSE: And as we know, all of those places certainly had Dead Heads by the early ‘80s. But The WELL was different. As a somewhat local BBS, The WELL would come to reflect the vibrant Bay Area scene, which included technologists and journalists as well as an array of artists and musicians, like Ramon Sender, who’d founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s or Earl Crabb, a veteran connector in the vibrant bluegrass and folk scenes, sometimes known as the Great Humbead.
MARY EISENHART: Almost by definition, it was a really narrow subset. And really interesting things happen in really narrow subsets, but they don't necessarily scale.
JESSE: Though The WELL would be held up as a model of early online community, many of its inhabitants see it as a model for a small online community.
MARY EISENHART: It was a lot less noisy then. There was not a Dead Head website, chat room, podcast, YouTube channel / whatever on every street corner of cyberspace. You have to winnow your way through it and find the ones you like. That wasn't your problem back in 1984. Back in 1984, the problem was that there was this big huge desert, and unless you were an engineer on the ARPANET, you didn't really have a place to hang out and talk about the Grateful Dead — period, at all. So that is a pretty darn huge paradigm shift.. Now, your problems are much more navigational, and filtering.
DAVID GANS: We all jumped into The WELL, wound up having a really, really great time there. And a lot of us didn't confine ourselves to just the Grateful Dead conference; we just jumped into the rest of The WELL. I ended up being a co-founder of the media conference, the TV conference, a lot of the different conferences, and I'm still very much involved.
MARY EISENHART: In a not very long period of time, apparently, The WELL was basically completely overrun by Dead Heads — which was great for the cash flow, but a little bit of a shock to the culture. In theory, it’s all sort of simpatico. But in practice, as we’ve seen in Grateful Dead World—where no two Dead Heads are in perfect agreement about anything—it could get pretty cranky sometimes, and it could be brilliant at other times.
JESSE: At first, it was a local scene for local heads.
DAVID GANS: Alan Mann, I think it was, said, “When you're at the show, you don't want to be talking about it, because you're busy enjoying the show.” But when you're not at the show, there's all this stuff to talk about: where are we going to stay? Where do you want to meet for dinner? There's a great little meme that came up from The WELL that we started. Somebody said, “Well, where are we going to meet before the show at the Oakland Coliseum?” And somebody said, “Well, let's meet under Light Pole #7.” Well, we found out that there were only six numbered light poles in the parking lots around the Oakland Coliseum, so everybody was looking for Light Pole #7. So Light Pole #7 became a sort of a mythical meeting place, and it became a running gag in our scene for years and years after that.
JESSE: But it grew from there.
DAVID GANS: We passed out leaflets at the Berkeley Community Theater in April of ‘86: “join our online community.” And people started joining our online community. The Grateful Dead was already sort of the killer app for online community. We were leafleting in the Bay Area, but we also had people that were part of it fairly early on who lived in other places. I don't recall, but we probably sent leaflets out to them to pass around as well. But the Grateful Dead culture, being so massively connected, it was parallel processing on a national scale, so the word got out. We had people in New York… I think it quickly became a global thing. I remember a couple that lived in England got on board. I don’t know how the word got out. The first limitation on it was the cost of getting to The WELL. And The WELL was a flat monthly charge, plus $2 an hour to be on. There were people that ran up huge bills.
JESSE: Steve Silberman became a WELL being.
STEVE SILBERMAN: Dead Heads made The WELL well financially possible, in part, because The WELL was really expensive. I remember getting my first phone bill when I got to The WELL… it was like: “One hundred and fifty dollars?!”
DAVID GANS: Over the first couple of years, it got so huge that we had to split it up into different conferences. We started a tapes conference, we started a TOURS conference and we had the regular Grateful Dead one. Then we started a DEADLIT conference, to talk about songs and songwriting and that kind of stuff. And eventually, somebody started a RUMORS conference, which became a little bit controversial after a while when people in the Dead organization tried to shut down the RUMORS conference — as though you could stop people from sharing rumors in Grateful Dead land.
JESSE: As the geographical reach of the Dead Head conferences grew wider, the information they were sharing grew more specific. In the age of social media, this kind of information sharing is commonplace, but in the 1980s, it was outright magic.
DAVID GANS: It just took off. The tours conference, people were sharing — “Okay, where are we going to meet? Where are we going to meet up?” “What hotels are you staying in?” It was like: “When you get around Morgantown, West Virginia, watch out — there’s a cop that hides behind billboards.” “There’s a speed trap along here” — that kind of stuff. They were sharing specific information, and communities formed among people with all of these common interests.
JESSE: In our episodes about the Madison Square Garden shows on the new In and Out of the Garden box set, we celebrated Rich Petlock, the Clark Kent of Dead Heads, who taped every Garden show before heading back to work the next day. Rich Petlock helped build the Dead Head infrastructure on The WELL.
DAVID GANS: Rich was always the first guy to put the setlist up on The WELL at the end of the show. If he wasn't there himself, he had somebody at the show who would call him with the list at the end of the show — and, literally, before the encore was over, Rich had posted the setlist. So we were tracking the progress of the tour as it went along.
JESSE: Members of the Dead community popped up on The WELL, too.
DAVID GANS: Phil Lesh was there for a little while. He interacted just a few times. It didn't last — I think he became overwhelmed and retreated from it. But he was there a little bit. There were just a handful of posts from him, I think it might have been like the late ‘80s.
JESSE: But of all the members of the Grateful Dead family to make a digital footprint, there was no one who did so more than the late John Perry Barlow.
DAVID GANS: Barlow, once he got ahold of it wound up being… in a way, Barlow, I sort of thought of him as the Lord Mayor of Cyberspace for a while there. He really put himself into it and became a major figure in that world.
JESSE: Let’s pause on the term “cyberspace” for a moment.
WILLIAM GIBSON [Neuromancer, Tape 1B]: Cyberspace: a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… a graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...
JESSE: That was a draft-dodging former head shop manager named William Gibson, from his stone classic novel, Neuromancer. He coined the term “cyberspace” in an earlier short story. And it was John Perry Barlow who first applied that term to the emergent internet not long after David Gans introduced Barlow into The WELL ecosystem.
MARY EISENHART: He understood it instinctively and really well. And he had a lot, being from Wyoming and Pinedale and all that, he had his own sense of community and how it worked. That was a very valuable thread to have in there. One of the synergies that developed as a result of the WELL was connected with Barlow, because Barlow quickly developed some interesting connections with technology on his own. I had a place where he could publish them, so we had a nice little synergy there for a while. He would go, “I want to interview Steve Jobs.” And I’d go, “Yeah, you and the rest of the world, that's fine. You go pursue that and get back to me if anything comes of this.”
JESSE: Barlow got his Steve Jobs interview in 1992. It doesn’t seem to be online, though. Technology circled around the Dead.
DAVID GANS: Jeff Hellman was the sort of Mac dealer to the stars over there. He had a shop in San Rafael that a lot of us visited. They also knew people at Apple, and I think there was probably somebody inside giving people deals on stuff. But I remember everybody being really excited about their Mac SE[s].
JESSE: Jerry Garcia especially had a fertile creative relationship with his Macs, throwing himself into digital art that’s now been collected in books and offered as NFTs. Mary Eisenhart interviewed him for BAM in 1987.
JERRY GARCIA [11/12/87]: I'm a terrible typist, but I'm a real great mouser. [My] Mac tablet is my favorite accessory, it's easier than writing with a bar. Most of my computer stuff has been graphics and animation and fooling around with that kind of 3-D stuff. I’m fascinated by spatialities and that kind of thing. I haven't had much use for the verbal side of the computer world. For me, it's something I play around with; I don't use it in any kind of direct way. I have a couple of music programs, which I sometimes fool around with. They're fun for doing just weird things. I would never use them seriously for music though — I just don't find an application there. For me, music has to do with… it’s too caught up in my thing of having chops as a guitarist. I don't really have a desire to cross that river. So far, the MIDI guitar thing and the computer is very stiff, not much fun. But eventually, maybe that will smooth out.
JESSE: It would smooth out, and when it did, it would be fun.
JERRY GARCIA [11/12/87]: Meanwhile, as an artist, as a draftsman, I get a lot of use out of the Macintosh for that kind of stuff. And it really is wonderfully organic, considering what it is. I wish it was in color.
MARY EISENHART: Adobe Illustrator had just come out at the time, and we had just done an article on it. It was all very exciting. Somehow, the subject got around to Adobe Illustrator and the things you could do, and Jerry goes, “I love the Macintosh, but I don't like the mouse. I don’t like drawing with the mouse,” and “It’s not in color.” I’m going, “Jerry, get with the program! The Mac 2 just came out.” And he’s going, “Ooh! Ooh!”
MARY EISENHART [11/12/87]: Supermax got a new 19-inch Trinitron monitor.
JERRY GARCIA [11/12/87]: Ooh!
MARY EISENHART: And so then we start talking about Adobe Illustrator, like: “It can do this, and this…” The tape is hilarious. It’s like he’s going, “Ooh! Ooh!” to describe what Adobe Illustrator does. This was before Photoshop was even a gleam in anybody’s life.
MARY EISENHART [11/12/87]: They've got these fairly common 300 DPI scanners now.
JERRY GARCIA [11/12/87]: Ooh!
MARY EISENHART: Then, a couple days later, I got a phone call from a guy I knew who was running a Macintosh shop in San Rafael. He says, “Mar, I thought you’d like to know that Jerry’s Mac II just went up the hill to his house…”
JESSE: In 1990, another technology intersected with the Dead’s world: virtual reality.
ABC NIGHTLINE NEWS CLIP [9/19/91]: Fly over Mars; take a trek through a prehistoric jungle; tour a house that has not yet been built. It’s called virtual reality, and as Jay Schadler found out, all it takes is a special helmet and a glove, and you’re off…
MARY EISENHART: Autodesk was doing a lot of VR. They were fairly cutting edge at the time. And Barlow had connected with them, I think at the hackers conference. And he had somehow arranged with the two Erics to get a hands-on demo of the VR technology with helmets and with gloves and all that — which, by today's standards, was laughably primitive, but it was pretty exciting back then. He brought two of the Barlowettes out with him, and also invited Jerry to come, and, for some reason, told me to be there too. And so here's Jerry, at his most bear-like shuffling up the sidewalk at Autodesk to get the VR demo. I didn't hang around for the whole thing.
JESSE: Not long after this, in late June of 1990, Garcia had a cool futurological conversation with Harold Rheingold in which he ruminated on his VR experience.
JERRY GARCIA [1990]: The whole idea, the virtual reality idea, if you progress it far enough, it starts to transcend things like language. It’s going to take experience beyond intellect on some levels. The thing of being able to share somebody’s reality—which has, so far, been a matter of what communication is about—now, it’s got a whole new leg. It’s got a thing of being able to actually step in somebody’s reality and walk through it like they do, experience it the way they do specifically. The implications, to me, are immense. I mean, how far can it go?
JESSE: Jerry quickly makes the leap to what technologists now call Augmented Reality, AR, though still a few steps passed where it is now, more than 30 years later, but not too many steps.
JERRY GARCIA [1990]: Eventually, there would be the thing that you put on, that you would wear that would translate all of the material out here into some other kind of language, possibly, other visual language so that things would look the way you wanted them to. Reality would behave the way you wanted it to. Whether it did it, whether it really did it or not, that’s the whole question of what's real and what isn't starting to get real mushy right there. If everybody's experiencing completely subjective realities based on their own temperament, or whatever they want.
JESSE: We’ve posted links to Howard Rheingold’s book on virtual reality, The Virtual Community, as well as books on other topics. If you’re feeling the themes of this episode, you can either read the transcript of Rheingold’s conversation with Jerry, or listen to the whole thing online. We cited this conversation in our “Infrared Roses” episode, where we talked a bit about Garcia’s visual art. At the time, Garcia was fascinated by the first wave of virtual reality technologies that were being developed at AutoDesk. In a way, the MIDI technology that the Dead embraced was the audio equivalent of virtual reality, resulting in the wild “Drums” / “Space” excursions that led to the 1991 album Infrared Roses where the Dead inhabited new soundscapes and occupied new voices. Released the year after this conversation, Infrared Roses would be the Dead’s final album of original music. The entire album involved the Dead engaging with the newest technology at their fingertips, from MIDI instrumentation to Garcia’s digital cover art.
AUDIO: “Infrared Roses” [Infrared Roses] (4:00-4:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Bob Bralove was hired in 1987 to help with Brent Mydland and Mickey Hart’s sounds on the new album In the Dark, stayed for a tour, and pretty soon was working with the whole band, converting their instruments to MIDI systems — musical instrument digital interface. During the last few years, he even had solo segments during the “and” between “Drums” and “Space.” These pieces with Bob are from our “Infrared Roses” episode.
BOB BRALOVE: Especially with Jerry, the issue became for me: how do I make this synthesizer respond to Jerry's fingers so that Jerry feels like it's him? Not that he is playing what a horn player would play, but what Jerry feels like playing. One of, of course, the most important things became the translation of the pitch bend for his vibrato. You can always tell Jerry's playing one of the synths by the vibrato. He'll have that vibrato on a trumpet or something, or on the flute. It sounds like his hands. When that sort of fell into place and he became happy with it, then he started using it a lot.
AUDIO: “Infrared Roses” [Infrared Roses] (4:59-5:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Though the sound of MIDI was certainly a novelty, the Dead treated it like the deeper tool that it was. These days, MIDI drives nearly all electronic music, and the Dead were innovating with it beyond just their music.
BOB BRALOVE: With Candace [Brightman], the lights were amazing, in terms of feeling like they were part of the music. She could anticipate and, at the end, I was sending her MIDI feeds from each of the band members. You can tell in some of the last couple of years of the lights, during “Space,” there were sections of the lights that were dedicated to each performer. And as they played, each note would move — they're called chases in lighting, which is like a sequence of lights. So each note would be another step in the sequence. So their instruments themselves were driving the lights. These moments—which I was, of course, completely enthralled with, because my stuff was going out there—[were] these very organic interactions of sections of light that are being driven by each instrument. It’s like a light Wall of Sound. Each person is driving their own set of lights.
JESSE: After the Dead themselves dissolved in 1995, Bob Bralove has remained a part of the extended Dead family. This very week—that’s mid-November 2022 for you future dwellers—he’s got a new album with Dose Hermanos, his long-running duo with former Dead organist Tom Constanten. The record is Persistence of Memory, featuring Tom Constanten’s grand piano and Bob’s latest keyboard colors. This is “Bubbles.”
AUDIO: “Bubbles” [Dose Hermanos, Persistence of Memory] (2:55-3:25) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The band, especially Jerry Garcia, saw MIDI and the emerging technologies as new places for music to go, as well as new tools for emergent musicians. Here’s Jerry anticipating AI music augmentation tools with Harold Rheingold in 1990.
JERRY GARCIA [1990]: I’m a musician. I recognize that, as a musician, there is a certain chauvinism attached to it, which is the thing of, “I spent my time learning how to play. You didn’t spend time learning how to play; therefore, you are not a musician.” Well, in reality, everybody has got musical thoughts. If you are able to overcome the part of it which is muscle training—which is what most musical playing actually is, what performance actually is, muscle training and you are able to convert your ideas directly into music—[then] you’re a musician, too. How many Beethovens are there that, just for lack of the training, the world doesn’t get exposed to?
AUDIO: “Magnesium Night Light” [Infrared Roses] (1:00-1:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube] JESSE: Technological innovation was part of the daily business in Dead world. David Gans.
DAVID GANS: John Meyer and the late Don Pearson, people like that. They were using computers to interface the sound system to the building and stuff like that, which is all that stuff is now just super automated. But in the early days, everybody was looking for these tools to enhance their abilities to do their jobs.
JESSE: Backstage, the Dead were playing early Mac games. Bob Bralove.
BOB BRALOVE: There was one tour when I got this story that was an interactive story. Everybody had computers at that point and it was an interactive story. You loaded it on CD — it was called “Victory Garden.” And the way the preface talked about it is that you should see this as a museum. This is a thing for a while — it was a very brief thing, but it was really interesting. You should look at it as a museum, go and wander around the rooms and check out what’s in that room. So I gave it to all the band members, and we were all reading the same book. But you could pick a word and it would take you down a path, and pick another word and take it down another path. So you were scripting the story out of all these options. We would talk about it and we’d find ourselves all in different times in history; we were all in different countries; we had all different characters. Some would share characters, like: “Oh yeah, I followed that person until this.” It was a fascinating thing.
JESSE: It was a piece of hypertext fiction called “Victory Garden” by Stuart Moulthrop. While the Dead were playing Mac games, John Perry Barlow was networking his way into a new world. In 1990, the lyricist and former cattle rancher would co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, still something like the American Civil Liberties Union of the internet. David Gans.
DAVID GANS: The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in The WELL, and I actually still have my membership card. I have an under-10 member number card from the EFF. The WELL was a nexus of thought for that kind of stuff, In a really major way.
JESSE: Counting his careers as a rancher and part-time lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which we spoke about on our “Ace 50” episode, Barlow began his third act. A libertarian former Republican from Wyoming, Barlow had lost when he tried to run for his late father’s seat in state Senate earlier in the ‘80s, but, along with a group of tech heads, began to shape the early politics of the internet a few years before the first web browser. Barlow’s politics were a natural fit with the seemingly blank slate of the emergent internet. Erik Davis is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.
ERIK DAVIS: If Jerry was the “leader,” he was sort of like Kesey in the [Merry] Pranksters. Kesey used to call himself the “non-navigator” — so, there’s sort of a leader role, but the leader is kind of vacant or unarticulated in some kind of way. That’s all part of both trust in emergent processes in open systems, but [also] an aspect that is kind of libertarian, where you’re like — I’m not going to control the system; let the system make the decision, in a way that is a kind of libertarian gesture. It’s not the right word exactly, but we can see the connection between that kind of attitude, which is also sort of ecological, and some aspects of what becomes libertarianism. Barlow could not be a better example here. On the one hand, you see him articulate these social values, hedonistic values, and spiritual values that really come out of that hippie libertarianism, or a hippie sense of freedom that’s also collective. At the same time, with Barlow, you see it go in these directions against the state and towards big capital, where he’s sitting on the board of banks. In a way, he’s just a weird capitalist who recognizes that the state is not going to be able to hold this beast back, and says, “Well, let’s ride the beast.” It’s a weird mixture. The EFF is a perfect blend of that, where they’re doing great stuff to resist the monsters. And yet, there’s a way in which they’re also riding certain kinds of rhetoric, certain kinds of ideas, that people increasingly today are more critical of because they see the libertarian dimension of it. It’s a problem across the board, when you look back at a lot of hippie and counterculture politics. There’s a vein of libertarianism in there that we kind of loved at the time, but then we see how it manifests today, and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know about that — that might not work out so well…” So, it’s just a part of our conundrum in a way, what to do with that.
Usenet
JESSE: As the expression goes, events assumed their own momentum. The Dead online community would continue to experience developments now commonplace in online communities everywhere, but were still new experiences in the early 1990s. As internet access grew easier in the pre-web days, the Usenet kept growing.
DAVID GANS: rec.music.gdead was also immense, and also just pretty quickly got taken over by absolute vile bullshit and creepiness and stuff. It became untenable fairly early on. I haven't been back to Usenet in years, but it was just this horrible flame pit for a really long time. So The WELL billed itself as a more civil place, but we had our own blow ups and weird shit, too.
JESSE: The chaos could be deeply entertaining, though. rec.music.gdead gave birth to several long-term memes, some of whose histories are worth mentioning in the context of the history of online Dead communities. The first is probably the most infamous of the rec.music.gdead era — Dale the Porsche guy. Christian Crumlish.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: Reputedly, it happened around ‘89, and it ended up being a series of reports from going to a show. But it was basically… it always reads like a parody. It’s maybe a real person who had a terrible experience, writing like an upset yuppie who was looking for an ‘80s-style commercial experience and got a parking lot experience — this thing they later called Shakedown [Street], but just the lot scene was what we called it in my day. He ran into a lot of smelly hippies.
JESSE: We had Christian read a little bit of the original post by Dale the Porsche Guy.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: “A few years ago some friends of mine decided to take me to a dead-head concert. I had never been to one and knew little about the Grateful Dead… we came across a dilapidated yellow-school bus and several oxidized VW-vans with pandemonium painted on the sides. In front of these were people, who can only be described as freaks, selling buttons, bumper-stickers, a miscellaneous assortment of dead-head memorabilia which primary constituent was junk, and tuna-fish sandwiches that were slowly corroding in the hot sun.”
JESSE: Not a good day for Dale.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: “A girl came up to my car window, looked me straight in the eyes with the glare of anger and said, with sarcasm, “What kind of man would bring a Porsche to a Dead-Head concert?” I spoke to her with a smile and tried to calm her down, but it was to no avail. She began to utter obscenities and I rolled up the window. This antagonized her and the clique of idiots she was with. Several sat on the front of my car, and a few hopped on the rear bumper. They rocked the car back and forth while spewing out a stream of insults.”
“... [A] girl came up to my car window, looked me straight in the eyes with a glare of anger and said with sarcasm, "What kind of man would bring a Porsche to a dead-head concert?" I spoke to her with a smile and tried to calm her down, but it was to no avail. She began to utter obscenities and I rolled up the window. This antagonized her and the clique of idiots she was with. Several sat on the front of my car and a few hopped on the rear bumper. They rocked the car back and forth while spewing out a stream of insults.
JESSE: The Porsche Guy story became an anchor reference for the growing community.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: There's something as recent as 2002 that's still casually noting Dale the Porsche Guy as an archetypal yuppie who hates the Dead. It's like today, when someone's trolling — you’re like, is this person for real–Poe’s Law–or is this just a hippie writing what they think a yuppie would say when they came to a Dead show? I could never fully detect that, although there is a real signature on the bottom of it with an email address that looks like it was probably real at the time. It may have just been a person who was leaning into their “Dead Heads are smelly and gross” kind of trope. But the thing is, the newsgroup just immediately turned that person into a figure of fun — almost like an R. Crumb character, instantly.
JESSE: Dale got dunked on, and having done some preliminary searching on that old email address, I’m ready to conclude he was just a garden variety troll — a head, I think, but not of the Dead variety. But amid all that chaos, there was also something important happening.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: There's sort of a dynamic in online sociality, where there’s a conversational mode that's just live and in the moment and the latest thing, and flows like normal people. And then there's sort of like documentation mode, where you gather up: “Oh, so we figured it out,” and you write it down somewhere. But if you get enough culture in your group, then people start to become curators, and they start to make archives. Usually, it would be an FAQ in the case of the Grateful Dead newsgroup. There was the FTP server at Berkeley. Good stuff was saved, and then pointed to in the future. It kind of rekindled my fascination with the Dead. I had started seeing shows in ‘84 and ‘85, and then moved to California in ‘86 and started seeing a lot more shows. My old crew that moved to California with me and started seeing shows with me, they started to grow up a little bit or move away, or just not see as many Dead shows. I started to not catch all three shows of every area gig, and every Jerry show — maybe just two out of three, or one out of three, or skip a run every now and then. I got jaded. And also, we sort of exhausted all of our speculative “I wonder where this came from?” Or “I wonder what the story is behind this?” Or “I wonder if this rumor is true?” We only had our real-life network to get stories and mythology questions figured out. When I first got access to Usenet around ‘91, ‘92, I immediately found the Grateful Dead news group, and Dylan and The Beatles by the way. Some other topics as well. But the Grateful Dead was the very first one. And almost immediately, part of what I realized is there was a larger group of people now. I could say, “Do you know how I can get a copy of my first show?” It was Saratoga, SPAC, in ‘84, and I got it, not too long later, which is a pretty cool tape trading experience. It made me realize these were real people. But also it gave me this new community to discuss things. “I always wondered this…” Or: “Do you think this is connected to that?” Or: “Is this story true?” Or, “Whatever happened to that?” Suddenly I'm talking to people who used to see Pig[pen], or used to see Keith, or just had another part of the world I hadn't quite run into in the lot or at shows before.
JESSE: Another way of looking at that is to witness the refinement of the already-existing Dead Head group mind, where fans of the band from all different eras could answer each other’s questions and fill in the missing gaps in Dead freak folklore, as well as make their own.
AUDIO: “Scarlet Begonias” [5/8/77] (1:29-1:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Have you heard the one about the Dead’s 5/8/77 show at Cornell being a hoax? Google it and you’ll find a variety of posts on a variety of platforms about how the Dead’s arguably most famous show never actually happened — a hoax staged by the CIA, like the moon landing or something. The joke celebrated its 25th anniversary earlier this year.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: It started off as hazing of new folks, where people would come on asking about 5/8/77 — how to get a good version of it, or what do you think about this show. And someone came up with the idea of saying, “Oh, haven't you heard that's not a real show? That was a hoax — that’s actually like a best-of show pastiche from the whole tour, and they never really played Cornell.” Usually, someone would say, “No, I was there,” and the thread would go along. But people would then accuse that person of hallucinating or being a shill or something like that. Eventually—I was just digging through Usenet to track this down—it looks like a person named Bruce Higgins actually posted a set of exactly where each of the songs was from: like, naming the other show on the tour that was the source version of the “Scarlet [Begonias]” and the “Fire [on the Mountain],” and all these other details… just to lean into the hooks. The thing is, it’s one of those things like a dad joke or teasing your younger siblings. I don’t think it was ever really intended to fool anybody, and I don’t think it ever really fooled anybody.
JESSE: We’ve linked to the 1998 thread. Bruce Higgins couldn’t figure out where the “Scarlet” / ”Fire” came from though. One of the first guys to reply to the thread, a certain Jeff Tiedrich, figured it out — a February 20th, 1977 studio rehearsal.
AUDIO: “Fire on the Mountain” [5/8/77] (14:33-14:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The internet unquestionably changed the Dead Head experience. David Gans.
DAVID GANS: I remember in 1993, being at home and watching the tour setlist being posted. And everybody got really excited when they started doing this obscure little song called “I Fought the Law” that I remembered from the Bobby Fuller Four from the ‘60s.
AUDIO: “I Fought the Law” [Bobby Fuller Four, I Fought the Law] (0:00-0:23) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It was originally by Sonny Curtis of Buddy Holly’s band, The Crickets. The Clash did it, too.
DAVID GANS: Everybody was excited about this brand-new song. And the funny thing was, by the end of the tour, everybody was sick of seeing the name of that one song because they played like every other show on that tour. So we watch the entire lifecycle of a song—from “Oh my god, look at this cool new song!” to “Jesus, they’re doing that again…”—all happen over the course of three weeks while the band was on tour. This kind of setlist mentality, sort of the weird side of the setlist tracking mentality, was manifested in that one.
AUDIO: “I Fought the Law” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 3/27/93] (2:12-2:40)
JESSE: That was from March 27th, 1993 in Albany, the only officially released Dead version of “I Fought the Law,” from the 30 Trips Around the Sun box. Sounds boss to me. The setlist-driven mentality would follow the Dead and other jam bands, an early indicator of obsessive online fandom. But the online Dead Head community also foresaw more positive uses of online communities for collaborative activism.
DAVID GANS: Well, Jerry went down in the fall of 1992, and they missed a bunch of shows. The first show back from that episode was to be in Colorado in December, I think of 1992, a few weeks after one of those disgusting, repellent anti-gay legal things was passed — something called Amendment 2. We all wanted to go to Colorado and be with the Dead for the first gig after Jerry's illness, but we didn't want to go there and not say something about Amendment 2. So on The WELL, we organized a campaign. We had a number of people, a woman named Naomi Pierce, who worked in publicity for tech companies — she was one of the big organizers of this. We had another guy who was a graphic designer and came up with the design. What we decided to do was: we're not just going to go and spend our money in Colorado and pretend that they didn't just do this thing. We know that Colorado doesn't hate gays, but a lot of people in Colorado do. So what we decided to do was buy a billboard and put it up across from the McNichols Arena, where the gigs are going to be. One of our members designed this thing, and Naomi went out and did the research on how to get it going. And we raised money from people all over the country. We rented this billboard and put up this sign — it was a Stealie, with a pink triangle instead of a lightning bolt. Across the top, it said something like: “Dead Heads Against Discrimination — Undo #2,” because Amendment 2 that was the anti-gay legislation. We had a press conference at the bar under the billboard, and I got my photo on the front page of the Boulder Daily Camera, wearing my “Ain’t No Time to Hate” t-shirt, holding up my sweater to show the t-shirt underneath with the billboard over my shoulder. It was just a gesture — just a publicity stunt, basically. But it was an example of a nationally-organized thing that we did from our passion for this topic. And it showed the effectiveness of this community, because huge numbers of people, dozens of people, coordinated their work to make this happen.
WWW
JESSE: When the Grateful Dead ended in 1995, the internet was just getting going. Dead Heads of course remember the date August 9th, 1995 as the day Jerry Garcia died. But it was also the day that Netscape, the company that made the first web browser, Mosaic, went public.
DAVID GANS: The opening of the Internet to commercialization was a gigantic change in the way things work. When it became more open to the public, and everybody could get on, it proliferated just insanely.
JESSE: As the net became more commercialized leading up to 1995, John Perry Barlow had a lot to say about it. In one infamous and influential essay written and revised in 1992 and 1993, titled “Selling Wine Without Bottles,” he used Grateful Dead’s live taping policy to make a broader argument for an economy of what he called “soft goods.” “We have been letting people tape our concerts since the early seventies”—’84, Barlow—”but instead of reducing the demand for our product, we are now the largest concert draw in America, a fact which is at least in part attributable to the popularity generated by those tapes.” With nearly three decades of hindsight, it becomes a more complicated picture. In 1996, Barlow wrote his most well-known and audacious manifesto, the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.”
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [Declaration, 1996]: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone.”
JESSE: As an advocate for the open internet, Barlow would provide a solid bridge from the world of the Grateful Dead into the future. If he didn’t speak for the Dead at all times, he remained a representative of their world.
JOHN PERRY BARLOW [Declaration, 1996]: “It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions. You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces.”
JESSE: It was certainly bold, part of the emerging thought around the internet. Barlow once wrote, “Nature is itself a free market system. A rain forest is an unplanned economy, as is a coral reef. The difference between an economy that sorts the information and energy in photons and one that sorts the information and energy in dollars is a slight one in my mind. Economy is ecology.” Erik Davis ain’t buying.
ERIK DAVIS: How far do you take the ecological analysis analogy? One of the things about cybernetics is it goes both into highly technological communication and control environments, and it goes into ecology. These are almost opposites. But our ability to understand the environment, not as just a tree here and a mountain there, but to see it as a system of information, material flows, energy flows, patterns that recur, emergent open systems — that whole thing, that's also kind of cybernetics. So then, when you start thinking about what is the internet: do we see it as an aspect of that emergence of something that's natural? Or, do we see it as a highly human construct that’s filled with human decisions, human politics, human biases, that have an origin and should be articulated as human decisions? And in a way, it's kind of both. But if you lean toward the nature one, like Barlow and those guys: “Well, let’s just let it go. Don’t try to control it, man! It’s, like doing it’s own thing. It’s cosmic! It’s part of the big unfolding plan!” Maybe there was a period in 1991 when you could, maybe, legitimately think that. But at a certain point, you're like, “No.” Or maybe, “Yeah, maybe it's like that on one level, but on another level it's a con; and on another level, it's a surveillance device; on another level…” Yada, yada, yada. Part of the trickiness of this stuff is that you can kind of appreciate why someone calls it a coral reef… but, at the same time, to just think of it that way is to miss a lot of what's going on, and we're kind of suffering through that other stuff. It doesn't feel like a coral reef to me. I don't know about you…
JESSE: As with Stewart Brand and other figures in the countercultural technology scene, Barlow has received a reassessment in recent years, including April Glaser’s powerful piece, “The Incomplete Vision of John Perry Barlow.” One of the many reasons I mourn Barlow’s death in 2018 is that I’m fascinated about how he might’ve responded and continued to evolve, probably in a charming way with a half-invented anecdote.
ERIK DAVIS: I remember seeing him speak at one point. I think he was talking about John Gray, the British philosopher, and he was acknowledging that unleashed capital was a ferocious monster in hell; it’s just he wasn't so sure that the attempts to control or constrain made a lot of sense. I think he, on some level, was very realistic about the negative dimensions of it, but he had a temperamental touch of the adventure of it all, the wildness of it all. That was very much part of his personality. He represents a sort of generation of technological thinking that was perhaps somewhat libertarian, but was also very sensitive to community and collective forms of meaning and experience that, in a way, is kind of like the past. Silicon Valley libertarians today are much more ferocious, and in many ways, much more explicitly reactionary.
JESSE: While Bob Weir’s lyric collaborator was busy proclaiming stuff, Jerry Garcia’s counterpart established himself online in his own particular way. Robert Hunter became the official webmaster of dead.net and in 1996 began posting his own writing, which began with daily journal that documented the world inside the Grateful Dead in the year following Jerry Garcia’s death, and soon included epic poems, a fantasy novel, a surreal biopic script, an extended conversation with Terence McKenna, and a revived solo career. We discussed it on our “Keys to the Rain” episode last year. Christian Crumlish was a regular reader.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: He was essentially an early blogger. He wrote this dated diary, and he shared what he was working on and talked about it. I think he enjoyed it in the way that other people did: the joy of a new medium. There was a kind of punk rock, garage rock ethos on the internet early on with that stuff, which is just get out there and do it and figure it out.
JESSE: Known for extreme privacy, Hunter’s new online world allowed him something of a controlled way to interact regularly with his listeners.
CHRISTIAN CRUMLISH: Like any Dead Head, I had a bunch of questions for him or stuff I wondered about. I started corresponding with him and, eventually, got a chance to interview him directly, meet him and chat with him a bit. Mostly, he was super open and responsive, and if you said something that was interesting to him, he would chew on it and give it back to you — maybe quote you in his daily signature change in his diary. Every once in a while, I’d start pestering him about something. One time, he said to me, “Tsk tsk, your Dead Head is showing,” because I was trying to track him down on the naming of the songs on “Cryptical Envelopment” — super nerdy Dead Head stuff. He was like, “Back off.” [laughs]
JESSE: A funny thing, though, was how being a Dead Heads—or a fan of one of the improv-heavy bands that followed—became more of an evolving skill set than traditional media-based fandom. In the ‘90s and beyond, even after there was a proper Grateful Dead, Dead Heads continued to innovate online. Michael Calore is a Senior Editor at WIRED who was becoming a serious music head in the mid-’90s.
MICHAEL CALORE: I started seeing techy things coming in, actually, through tapers. I think tapers were like the nerds of the nerds, because you had to be kind of nerdy to be into this music. There's a lot of stats, and there's a lot of memorization involved, and technical stuff happening. So I first really got into that side of it — not as a taper, but as somebody who was just seeking really good recordings. I found the people who were generating them and then made friends with them, and was able to talk with them about it because I already had the sort of technical mind. I think you had to really be into computers to be online in the mid-’90s — you had to know what a modem was, and how it worked; you had to know how to navigate things with a text-based interface, to navigate news groups. And I think that if you were on an email list, it was a lower barrier of entry — but still, you needed to learn how to check your email.
JESSE: Michael watched as tape trading turned into file trading.
MICHAEL CALORE: I never had a DAT machine. I was always on the analog leaves of the tape trees. But I did notice that, after about three or four years, people started trading shows via FTP. So when you're trading shows via FTP, you know you're probably trading .WAVs — so then you had to learn about .SHNs and then eventually .FLAC. But back then, you know, in the early days, it was all about .SHNs. So you had .SHN files, and FTP logins. There was a big server called SugarMegs, and they had a certain number of slots. So, if you were able to get into one of the various slots, then you were like, “Alright, what am I gonna grab?” Because the slots were kind of hard to get after it started to get popular. You could try for days and never be able to log into SugarMegs. And then once you were in, it was like a bonanza — like that show [Supermarket Sweep], where you do the shopping cart down the aisles, just dumping as much crap as you can into your shopping cart.
JESSE: Dead Heads helped pioneer the next level of online file trading, too, with one of the earliest pieces of peer-to-peer file sharing software, called Furthurnet, spelled with a U, after the Merry Pranksters’ bus. Launched in 2001, Furthurnet coded the unwritten rules of tape sharing into the app — in order to download, you had to upload.
MICHAEL CALORE: You had upload-download ratios that you needed to maintain, and paying it forward was always encouraged. And, like most spaces that are run by Dead Heads in the world, paying it forward actually happens — it's not just lip service, people actually go through the trouble of making sure that they've given as much into the community as they've taken out of it.
JESSE: Launched roughly concurrently was BitTorrent, which worked on very similar principles, and which would shortly become one of the world’s vastest and fastest file distribution networks.
MICHAEL CALORE: One of my good friends, Andrew Loewenstern, known to the taper world as Burris —is a coder, and he was really involved in building the client software for BitTorrent. Because he's a taper and a Dead Head, and a really big Medeski, Martin & Wood fan, he was always interested in trading music over BitTorrent. And I know the Dead Heads picked it up almost as fast as NASA did. So, you have these massive files that you want to trade lossless audio on the internet: how do you do that? Well, BitTorrent is a great way to trade really big files, and spread them to as many people as possible. He saw it as a natural fit for the Dead world, and they really picked up on it.
JESSE: BitTorrent would become the bane of Hollywood and IP lawyers everywhere, but it became the most mind blowing high-fidelity audio trading network the world has yet seen. The more people that download a file, the faster it goes and the rounder we get, because everybody starts sharing bits with other downloaders. Erik Davis.
ERIK DAVIS: You can even think of that as an example of a kind of media ecology, or a kind of strategy that comes out of this media sense of cybernetic expansion and of the open system. Which is, that there are the sort of existing recordings which are, in a way, set: they're dead, they're older, they've already been made, they are themselves the result of an open system, but they have now concretized into something. So, what you need to do is not just repeat them, but embed them in another system which has to do with contemporary strategies and new technologies of communication — embedding them in new ways, and making new kinds of connections with them. So that's the way that the texts become, they stay open.
JESSE: The music continues to find new ways to travel. The central public library of the internet, the Internet Archive, was founded in San Francisco in 1996 with its invaluable Wayback Machine and, slightly later, its Live Music Archive, established by Dead tapers, as part of its core mission.
As cyberspace grew populated and increasingly began to represent a fairly large swath of humanity, those who were able to get online may have noticed various families of digital natives. One of them was the Dead Heads, who continue to make homes on new platforms. There are too many online Dead Heads communities to mention, but I’ll shout the Deadcast channel on the official Grateful Dead Discord, Dead freak Twitter, and Dead freak Mastodon for that matter. But the online world has frequently tilted from the good weird to the bad weird. Steve Silberman.
STEVE SILBERMAN: In the early days of the internet—because it was mostly smart nerds who were getting online, and people who had felt looked down upon or bullied—people who felt subversive naturally aligned with other subversive groups. There was this feeling of: “Oh, this is gonna make a huge difference in the world. Finally, we can talk.” It was very much an extension of the underground newspaper thing. When I was in high school… boy, I was reading underground newspapers, including the San Francisco Oracle, from the neighborhood I would eventually live in. It was like secret communication, like from that alien who could discuss Zen truths on the Outer Limits. Well, little did we know that here we would be in 2020, with some woman with a microphone in front of her face, explaining how illegals are handing fentanyl out to kids in their Halloween candy! Little did we know that giving everyone a microphone would eventually be overwhelmed with people who are ignorant, bigoted, et cetera. And so the bloom is off the Grateful Dead online rose a bit, because the context of the internet now seems much more sinister than it did in the early days.
JESSE: Even still, the online Dead Head world provides a place for groups of Dead Heads to meet, across generations and across vast distances. Next year, the Dead Head online community celebrates its 50th birthday. As this episode goes to press and the stability of Twitter seems well in doubt, there is no doubt that Dead Heads will be able to find each other wherever we end up. I think there’s a song about that.
STEVE SILBERMAN: Something that I say at the end of Amir Bar-Lev’s Long Strange Trip documentary is true, which is that I will have more in common with young Dead Heads 500 years from now than I will with many non-Dead Heads now. It’s not just the shared experience of seeing Jerry, because most of my younger Dead Head friends never saw Jerry; they were born after Jerry was dead. It’s a mindset and a set of cultural information — and a set of intentions, actually. So we can bond anywhere, even if we don’t speak the same native language. We understand stuff about each other.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 2, 4/8/72] (1:36-2:05) - [Spotify] [YouTube]