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Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly. Foreign the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season six of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. As always, thank you very much for tuning in. Well, this Dead Cast continues the exploration of the Grateful Dead's long term cosmic entanglement with the California technology world. This episode is part two of our journey into cyberspace with the band and some very crafty Deadheads all driving that technology train to both connect and create. Pop on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes including the complete seasons 1 through 5 and link from there and to your favorite podcasting platforms so you can listen where you'd like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing. Hit that like button and leave us a review. It helps more than you know. Thank you very much. Have you checked out the transcripts we have now for many of our episodes? Well, head on over to dead.netdeadcast index, click the transcript link and get reading. And also just announced is the 50th anniversary deluxe edition of Bobby Weir's first solo album, Ace. There's a few configurations you need to know about. Bobby actually remixed the original album for this collection and he pairs that version with a new live version by Bobby Weir and the Wolf Brothers recorded earlier this year at Radio City Music hall featuring the Wolf Pack with special guests Tyler Childers and Britney Spencer. Our own Jesse Jarno even wrote the liner notes so you know it's good stuff. There will be a 2 CD version as well as a custom High Roller Pearl White vinyl release available exclusively from dead.net both with a release date of January 13, 2023. A black vinyl version also follows on February 3rd. You can pre order any and all of the Ace releases and merch over at dead.net thanks to everyone who has recorded their stories over at stories.dead.net we're now asking you to share your stories of serendipity miracles and the most unbelievable, craziest stories ever told. Share those stories@stories.dead.net and you just may hear yourself on a future Deadcast. While the Dead were always on the forefront of sound technology, squeezing the most out of their gear and delivering the best sound they could to their fans, when cyberspace and its accompanying technology made the scene, it was just as eagerly embraced by Grateful Dead insiders and Deadheads alike. Get ready to have your circuits blown as Jesse Jarno takes us down the digital rabbit hole. 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. 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. 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. 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 the 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 the country to the long lasting San Francisco sound of the good old grateful dead in 1970. 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. Business numbers, money people Business numbers, money people, computers. At least one of their members, Karl Bartos, had caught the Dead in dusseldorf on the Europe 72 tour. Kraftwerk were and are future music. No questioning their mensch machine. 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 soundboard as taper Charlie Miller remembers. 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. Then he showed Dan Healy the PCM Beta thing and Healey let him patch. 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 have seen one of the first computers in live rock, operated by lighting assistant Dan English, controlling the new moving lights. One of those really early computer, the monitor was built in, had some keyboard. Had a. Had a keyboard that was mostly numeric, but it was specifically built to do lighting. And it was made. Klegel brothers made it. They aren't even in business. Each channel had a zero to ten voltage. And you, you're back there at the. Patching it with like these spaghetti wires. Like, picture the old telephone where you patch the wire to get the thing. So, yeah, we used to patch up all these huge boxes. In some ways, it was future privilege. The Dead had access to an incredible amount of technology. They 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 transferal of that obsession from band to audience. It's not just that Deadheads spent money on technology. I mean, sure, taping gear is expensive and same for hi Fi's, but Deadheads use 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 old Grateful Dead freak Steve Silberman. We have this, this technology, ARPANET or whatever, 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. Deadheads turn 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 on The Pentagon has been turned into a village square by Deadheads. 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 how the 60s counterculture shaped the Personal Computer Industry, as well as Fred Turner's scholarly From Counterculture to Cyber Culture. Steve had gotten on the bus in the early 70s and would get online a bit later. I had the feeling that I had at shows, which was that there was a pre existing community of old timers who had been going for a while. And there is the ancient dichotomy of online deadheadism, which was present at the very beginning. There was always this kind of both completely frivolous and hilarious and, you know, subjective and opinionated and cranky and snarky. David Ganz had a glimmer of it before he got online too. 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. 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, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. 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, you know, where everybody farms right outside of town. Even though you're so far away, you're part of that. 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 Deadheads is the fact that, you know, very few people in this country come from a community in the first place. They come from a suburban area where, you know, you live in your house and the next guy lives in your house. And 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 know, you don't have to ask somebody 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 the Floating community of Deadheads. These guys have really belonging to that community for a long time. The Bandheads and the Deadheads have. I mean, you go to a Deadhead concert, I mean a Dead concert, and you see Deadheads that you've seen before, lots and lots and lots of them. 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 bit longer. It was a pretty loose scene at the Stanford Lab, to be sure. Sail director Les Earnest, one of our staff members, planted marijuana in the septic tank outflow area and then came to me to complain that the deer was were eating it all. I said, I'm sorry, I don't think I can do much about that. Paul Martin had started the dead at DIS email list at sale in 1973 and worked at Stanford through the early 80s. 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 and dropped out and hitched out to the west coast and came and hung out at our lab for a while and his nickname was Gumby. He was bouncing back and forth between MIT who also welcomed to hang out at their labs and Sail and the idea that, you know, a high school kid with no note from his parents could show up and and be offered, sure, use our computer, set up your account and do it. Was just how loosey goosey the Stanford AI Lab was at that time. He was definitely a big link between the MIT and the Stanford Dead crowd. It was through Gumby, otherwise known as David Henkel Wallace, that the west coast Deadhead 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 Gded, the first band to earn their own Usenet group. Unfortunately, only the first two months of posts of Net Gded seem to be currently preserved with A few blank years in the archive before it became net music GDED in 1985 and shifted to rec music GDED by 1989. We've posted links@dead.net deadcast. If you're an early Usenetter who has documentation of the Net gdeaddays or any other online Deadhead activity in this era, get in touch with us@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. 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, Steve Silberman. The division between what was called the Deadheads mailing list and the Dead Flames mailing list, also known as Jerry's Breakfast, they call the Dead Flames mailing list, which was all the related stuff, not like how to get tickets. So all the gossip and all the rumors and, you know, 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 ticks, man. 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 news groups, versus people who ran on the PDP10 machines like the MIT AI lab and the Stanford AI lab. The problems 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 Deadhead. This is what David Henkel Wallace Gumby told me when I interviewed him for my book Heads. There was a culture where people believed in sharing. There weren't clear boundaries in my life between Deadheads going to shows, working on computers, sharing stuff. It was in fact, we would sometimes arrange consulting jobs around the tour. 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. He's the guy that started Cygnus, the company that sold support for free software and paid it back into the free software developers. 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 Odie's name from dead tapes as one of the Odie brothers. But Doug was a taper and audio enthusiast even before he fell in love with the Dead. I had portable recording equipment that I was using to record nature sounds. 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 five minute stretch, the sound of a geographical area without the mechanical sounds of man intruding. I used to love recording the ocean. And 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 wave hits first and then you hear that wave collision with the shore, travel along the shore. Another example would be the sound of wind through the mountains. The path the 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 and it remains my test to this day. Nature recording, that is the single most difficult recording you can do. To have it play back accurately on speakers is no small feat. 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. My brother Jim, actually I've gone to Dead shows well before he did. But he connected with some people that were recording it, gave him some tapes. My initial impression was that it would be nothing compared, you know, to like a copy of the lp, the album at the time. In fact, that is true. It is nothing like that. And 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, hey, this is pretty good. And he's like, well, what can we do? You know, help me do that? So I started to apply what I knew about recording nature sounds to recording the Grateful Dead. That was from the Odie's recording of the Dead at the frost amphitheater on May 11, 1986. Like the dead themselves, the Odie brothers were inspired to enter into research and development, committed to it and up the game for everybody. The first was spreading the word of what Doug Describes as true stereo. At that time, the most popular way to record the dead was to point the microphones at the speakers. Well, 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 monorail recordings. It wasn't a sense of spaciousness or dimensionality, certain one, a lot of depth. To my knowledge, we're the first people that were running true stereo recordings. Again, from my experience with recording soundscapes where that was the whole idea, you know, is to recreate that soundscape, applying it to the dead. And if not the first or among the first, certainly the one that popularized it. Now it's not uncommon for people to be running true stereo configuration. This is a recording of me walking in a circle around a pair of stereo microphones set up on a nightstand in my backyard. The idea of this is to demonstrate the ability of a high resolution recording and playback system of generating a 360 degree sound field with only two speakers and only 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. Whoa. Stop your train. And like the dead, the Odies loved modifying gear. We became comfortable spending the money, which was not insignificant, you know, upgrading to better condenser microphones to better tape recorder. Started running into the limitations of the gear itself, as opposed to the limitations of the gear available at a given budget. And that's what started the modification process. The first was a mic preamp upgrade to the Sony TCD5, which was the most popular portable cassette recorder during its day among dead papers. The only step up from there was really going to open real. But its performance was not what I'd hoped for. So the first modification was to upgrade its built in mic preamplifier. And as with the dead, one modification would often beget another. The never ending chase of just exactly perfection. 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 on it. You turn the gain all the way down, do nothing other than run the erase head on it and that brings up the noise floor. So that was the second modification. Again, consistent with trying to lower noise floor in nature. Recordings. And from there, the next modification was again an upgrade to the pre app. And this time, rather than being motivated by lowering 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. A hack that was good for one was good for all. Modifying gear for other people. They hear the recordings, it's like, whoa, gee, that sounds good. Can you do that for me? Like, sure. Cool. And you know, that was something that was born of request. It was successful technology. It's a significant improvement over what you could buy. And once people heard it, they wanted it to do it. Now we already had the business. It's a local stereo shop called hi Fi Sales and service. So we already had that going. As the dead tapers transferred to pcm, the Odys discovered they were among the only companies in the country that could repair them and found themselves with business far outside the dead scene. And that's how we first got attention as pro dealers. That deck's same story. First ones came out where gray market from Japan hadn't been released from the yet nobody really knew how to repair them, so started doing that, then started modifying them, added the ability to record at 44.1 as opposed to 48 kilohertz which wasn't compatible with what they had. It was an idea of the record industry to limit digital copies. In case you were wondering about how Jerry Garcia felt about the record industry's attempt at putting a digital rights management scheme onto DAT, we present this bit from Mary Eisenhart's 1987 interview. Thanks, Mary. 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, you know what I mean? 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. Someone should hook up Garcia with the ODIs. Alongside the birth of digital audio came the arrival of home computers. Stuart 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 Deadhead, Daniel Kotke as part of the design team, a Deadhead named Mary Eisenhart became editor of Microtimes, the tech oriented offshoot of BAM Bay Area Music, when the Macintosh came along, because that changed a whole lot, made computers accessible to a whole new set of people who ran with them. And so that was a big thing. And 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. The tech world was still deeply tied to the psychedelic underground. Hypercard, the modular build your own app toolkit 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 set lists and allowed you to print out tape covers. 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. 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. I had been working Blair and Regan had just put out the Golden Road, started putting out the Golden Road around that time. And I was working for them too, as a proofreader and various. I mean, we were friends and practically neighbors. And when that came out, it was so touching to get all these letters that came in going, oh, my God, I'm the only Deadhead in Kansas. Thank you so much. And it's like all these people that were like lone Deadheads out in the wilderness, suddenly they could connect to the Golden Road, which was a magazine. So that need to connect was really there. David Ganz, Mary Eisenhart was a friend of mine who was the editor of Micro Times magazine, a free publication on the same model as BAM and published by the same people for whom I work. 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. Mid-80s, when all this came down. And we were in the balcony of the Henry J. Kaiser one evening in November of 1985. So we were at the Dead show at Henry J. In the November run, 1985. And it was a great run and marvelous music. And I'm sitting there with Bennett, who's my show buddy and friend. And 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 Deadheads. 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 Deadheads 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. And that evening at that party, after that show, we decided to try to form an online Deadhead community. And the initial notion was we could, like, try and found a system, you know, buy a computer and form an online community of our own. And Mary suggested we try the well. The well stood for Whole Earth Electronic Link and was an outgrowth of a new digital edition of Stuart Brand's Whole Earth catalog based in Sausalito. It was essentially one of many bulletin board systems around the country, 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. In terms of having a broader impact on the culture. The brilliant marketing thing that Stuart did is he gave people like me and Steven Levy and technology writers free accounts. And so we all hung out there and it got an out of size, out of scale reputation because all the tech writers were there and writing about it. And I mean, you know, the Source had been around, Prodigy had been around, CompuServe had been around, and Usenet had all been around, and this digital culture was really alive and well. And as we know, all of those places certainly had Deadheads 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 60s, or Earl Crabb, a veteran connector in the vibrant bluegrass and folk scenes, sometimes known as the Great Humbeed. Almost by definition, it was a really narrow subset, and really interesting things happen in really narrow subsets, but they don't necessarily scale. 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 is that it was a lot less noisy then, and there was nothing a Deadhead website, chat room, podcast, YouTube channel, slash whatever, on every street corner of cyberspace, and 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. And now your problems are much more navigational and filtering. We all jumped into the well, wound up having a really, really great time there. And a lot of us, you know, didn't confine ourselves to just the Grateful Dead conference. We just jumped into the rest of the well. I wound up being a co founder of the media conference, the TV conference, a lot of. A lot of different conferences. And I'm still very much involved in a not very long period of time. Apparently. The well was basically completely overrun by Deadheads, which was great for the cash flow, but a little bit of a shock to the culture, even though the in, you know, because in theory is all sort of sympathetical. And in practice, as we've seen in Grateful Dead world, where no two Deadheads are in perfect agreement about anything, it could get pretty cranky sometimes and it could get just brilliant at other times. At first it was a local scene for local heads. Alan Mand was, I think it was, said, you know, 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, you know, 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. We started. Somebody said, well, where are we going to meet before the show? At the Oakland Coliseum, right? And somebody said, well, let's meet under light pole number seven. Well, we found out that there were only six numbered light poles in the parking lots around the Oakland. So everybody looking for light pole number seven. So light pole number seven became a sort of a mythical meeting place. And it became a running gag in our scene for years and years after that. But it grew from there. 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 online world. The Grateful Dead was already sort of the killer app for online community. We were leafletting in the Bay Area, but we also had people that Were part of it fairly early on who lived in other places. And 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. And so the word got out. We had people in New York, you know, so I don't. I think it quickly became a global thing. We had. 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. And there were people that ran up huge bills. Steve Silberman became a well being. Deadheads made the well financially possible in part because the well was really expensive. You know, I remember getting my first phone bill when I got out of the well. It was like $150. Over the first couple 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 Dead lit 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, you know, tried to shut down the rumors conference, as though you could stop people from sharing rumors in Grateful Deadland. As the geographical reach of the Deadhead 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. It just took off. The tourist conference people were sharing, okay, where are we going to meet who? Where are we going to meet up? What are the hotel. What hotels are you staying in? And it was stuff like, you know, when you get around Morgantown, West Virginia, watch out the cops. Hide behind billboards. There's a speed trap along here. And that kind of stuff. I mean, we're sharing specific information and communities formed among people with all of these common interests. 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 Deadheads, who taped every garden show before heading back to work the next day. Rich Petlock also helped build the Deadhead infrastructure on the well. Rich was always the first guy to put the set list 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 set list. So we were tracking the progress of the tour as it went along. Members of the Dead community popped up on the well too. Phil Lesh was there for a little while. He interacted just a few times, just he. 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 and I forgot when. It might have been like the late 80s. But of all the members of the Grateful Dead family to make a digital footprint, there was no one who did one with a greater flourish than the late John Perry Barlow. Barlow, once he got hold 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, because he really put himself into it and became a major figure in that world. Let's pause on the term cyberspace for a moment. Cyberspace, a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. A graphic 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. 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. 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. And that was a very valuable thread to have in there. One of the synergies that developed as a result of the will was connecting with Barlow, because Barlow quickly developed some interesting connections with technology on his own. But I had a place where he could publish them, and so we had a nice little synergy there for a while. He'd go, I want to interview Steve Jobs. And I 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. Barlow got his Steve jobs interview in 1992. It doesn't seem to be online, though. Technology circled around the dead. 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 did, visited. And they all, you know, 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, you know, Mac Se or whatever. Jerry Garcia especially had a fertile creative relationship with Max, throwing himself into digital art that's now been collected in books and offered as NFTs. Mary Eisenhart interviewed him for BAM in 1987. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast I'm a terrible typist, but I'm a real great mouser. Mac tablet is my favorite accessory. It's easier than writing with a bar. Most of my computer stuff has been graphics, animation and fooling around with that kind of stuff, 3D stuff. And I'm fascinated by spatialities and that kind of thing. And I haven't had much use for the verbal so side of the computer world. For me, it's something I play around with. I mean, I don't use it in any kind of direct way. I have a couple of music programs which I come from school around with, and they're fun for doing just weird things. I would never use them seriously for music though. It's just I don't find an application there. For me, music has to do with. It's too cost up in my thing of having chops as a guitarist, I don't really have a desire to cross that river, you know what I mean? And so far the, the MIDI guitar thing at the computer is very stiff, not much fun, but. And eventually maybe that will smooth out. It would smooth out and when it did, it would be fun. Meanwhile, I, I as an artist, as a draftsman, you know, I get a lot of a use out of the Macintosh for that kind of stuff. And it really is wonderfully organic considering what it is. And I wish it was in color. Adobe Illustrator had just come out at the time and we had just done an article on it and it was all very exciting. And 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. And I'm going, Jerry, get with the program. The Mac 2 just came out. He's going, ooh, ooh. Super. Max got a new 19 inch trinitron monitor. And so then we start talking about Adobe Illustrator. I was like, and then it can do this and the tape is hilarious. It's like he's going to, to describe what the what the Adobe Illustrator does. This was before Photoshop was even a gleam in anybody's eye. Well, they've got at least fairly common 300dpi scanners now. Ooh. Then a couple days later, I get a phone call from a guy I knew who was running a Macintosh shop in San Rafael. And he says, mayor, I thought you'd like to know that Jerry's Mach 2 just went up the hill to his house. In 1990, another technology intersected with the dead's world. Virtual reality. 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 Schaefer found out, all it takes is a space special helmet and a glove and you're off. 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 the helmets and the gloves and all that, which by today's standards was laughably primitive. But it was pretty exciting back then. And he brought two of the Barlowettes with him and also invited Jerry to come and for some reason told me to be there too. And so here's Jerry in his most barrel, like, shuffling up the sidewalk and Autodesk to get the VR demo. And I didn't hang around for the whole thing. Not long after this, in Late June of 1990, Garcia had a cool futurological conversation with Harold Reingold in which he ruminated on his VR experience. The whole idea, the virtual reality idea, if you progress it far enough, starts to transcend things like language, you know what I mean? It's going to take experience beyond intellect on some level. The thing of being able to share somebody's reality, which has so far been a matter of what communication is about, you know, now it's gotten a whole new leg. It's gotten the 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. How far can it go? Jerry quickly makes the leap to what technologists now call augmented reality, Arkansas, though still a few steps past where it is now, more than 30 years later. But not too many steps. Eventually there would be a 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 or whether it really did or not. So the whole question of what's real and what isn't starts to get real mushy right there. If everybody's experiencing completely subjective realities based on their own temperament or whatever they want, you know. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast as well as to Howard Reingold's books on virtual reality and virtual community. If you're feeling the themes of this episode, you can either read the transcript 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 and 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 with Harold Reingold, 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. Bob Bralove was hired in 1987 to help Brent Midland and Mickey Hart 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 in Space. These pieces with Bob are from our Infrared Roses episode. 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. And one, of course, the most important things became the translation of the pitch bend for his vibrato, right? You can always tell Jerry's playing one of the synths by the vibrato. He'll have that. It's like a vibrato on a trumpet or something, or on the flute. It's not. It's. It's sounds like his hands. And when that sort of fell into place and he became happy with it, then he started using it. A 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 Sounds. With Candace, the lights were amazing in terms of feeling like they were part of the music. She could anticipate and things. And at the end I was sending her MIDI feeds from each of the band members. And you could tell in some of the last, 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. And it becomes this at these moments, which I was of course completely enthralled with because my stuff was going out there. This very organic interaction of sections of lights that are being driven by each instrument. It's like a light wall of sound. Each person is driving their own set of lights. After the Dead themselves dissolved in 1995, Bob Rayloves 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 Dos Hermanos, his long running duo with former Dead organist Tom Constantin. We've linked to Persistence of memory@dead.net Deadcast featuring TC's grand piano and Bob's latest keyboard colors. This is Bubbles. 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. I'm a musician. I recognize that as a musician there's certain. There's a certain chauvinism attached to it, which is the thing of. Well, I spent my time learning how to play. You didn't spend time learning how to play, therefore you're not a musician. Well, in reality, everybody's got musical thoughts. If you were able to overcome the part of it which is muscle training, which is what most musical playing actually is, performance actually is muscle training. And you are able to convert your idea, ideas directly into music. You're a musician too. You know, everybody can make their own music. Everybody could produce incredibly beautiful music. And there could be. I mean, how many Beethovens are there that just for lack of training and the world doesn't get exposed to it? Technological innovation was part of the daily business in Dead World. David Ganz, 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. Backstage, the Dead were playing early Mac games. Bob Brailove 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 and you should look at it as a museum and 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. And so you were scripting the story out of all these options. And so we would talk about it and we'd find ourselves. We were 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. It was a piece of hypertext fiction called Victory Garden by Stuart Mallthrop. We've posted a link to some info@dead.net deadcast 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 Ganz the Electronic Frontier foundation was founded in the well and I actually was one of the. I have, I still have my membership card. I have like an under 10 member number card from EFF. The well was a nexus of thought for that kind of stuff in a really major way. Counting his careers as a rancher and part time lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which we spoke about on our ACE50 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 the 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. Eric Davis is the author of Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. If Jerry was the quote unquote leader, he was sort of like Kesey in the Pranksters, which was he. And 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. And that's all kind of part of both. This sort of trust in emergent processes, in open systems. But there's an aspect of that that is kind of libertarian where you're like, I'm not going to control the system. Let's let the system make the decision in a way that is a kind of libertarian gesture. It's not maybe 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 become libertarianism. I mean, Barlow could not be a better example here where you're like, on the one hand, you see him articulate these social values and hedonistic values and spiritual values that really come out of that hippie libertarianism, if you will, or a hippie sense of freedom that's also collective. And at the same time, with Barlow, you see it go in these directions against the state, towards big capital. He's sitting on the board of banks. You know, he's just, in a way, he's just a. He's just a weird capitalist who. Who recognizes that the state is not gonna be able to hold this beast back and says, well, let's ride the beast. And so it's a weird mixture in the. Like the electronic. 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. And it's a problem across the board, when you look back at a lot of hippie and countercultural politics is that there's a vein of libertarianism in there that we kind of love 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 part of our conundrum in a way, is what to do with that. As the expression goes, events assume 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. Rec music GDED was also immense and also just pretty quickly got taken over by absolute vile bullshit and creepiness and stuff and became un. Untenable fairly early on. I haven't been back to Usenet in years, but it was just a horrible flame pit for a really long time. So the well built itself as a more civil place, but we had our own blow ups and weird shit too. 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 Kremlich Reputedly it happened in I guess around 89 and it ended up being a series of reports from going to a show, but it was basically sort of the it always reads like a parody. So 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 got a parking lot experience. You know this thing they later called Shakedown but just the lot scene was what we called it in my day and ran into a lot of smelly hippies. We had Christian read a little bit of the original post by Dale the Portia Guy. A few years ago some friends of mine decided to take me to a Dead Dash Head concert. I'd 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 Deadhead memorabilia, which primarily constituent was junk and tuna fish sandwiches that were slowly corroding in the hot sun. Not a good day for Dale. 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 Deadhead 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. The Porsche guy story became an anchor reference for the growing community. There's something as recent as 2002 that's still just like casually noting Dale the Porsche guy as an archetypal like yuppie who hates the dead or something like that. 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. And it may have just been a person who was leaning into their, like, Deadheads are smelly and gross kind of trope. But the thing is, the news group just immediately turned that person into a figure of fun, like, almost like an R. Crumb character. Instantly, Dale got dunked on. And having done some quick searching on that old email address, I'm ready to conclude that he was just a garden variety troll ahead, I think, but not of the Dead variety. But amid all that chaos, there was also something wondrous happening. There's sort of a dynamic in online sociality where there's like the 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 say, we need to. They become curators and they start to make archives. And usually it would be an faq. In the case of the, you know, the news group, the Grateful Dead news group, there was. There was like the FTP server at Berkeley and other things like that, where good stuff was saved and then pointed to in the future. It kind of rekindled my fascination with debt because I had started seeing shows in 84, 85, and. And then moved to California in 86 and started seeing a lot more shows. And my old crew that moved to California with me and that started seeing shows with me, they started to grow up a little bit or move away or just not see as many Dead shows. And I started to not catch all three shows of every Bay Area gig and every Jerry show, but maybe just like 2 out of 3 or 1 out of 3 or skip a run every now and then. I got jaded. And also we had 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 kind of like mythology questions figured out and stuff like that. And 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. I mean some other topics as well, but the Grateful Dead was like the very first one. And almost immediately part of what I did was I realized there was a larger group of people now, and I could say, do you know how I can get a copy of my first show? It was Saratoga, it was back 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 these. I always wondered this, or do you think this is connected to that? Or is this story true? Or whatever happened to that? And suddenly I'm talking to people who used to see Pig or used to see Keith, or just had another part of the world I hadn't quite run into in the Lottery shows before. Another way of looking at that is that it was the refinement of the already existing Deadhead 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. Have you heard the one about the Dead's 5877 show at Cornell being a hoax? Google it and you'll find a variety of posts on a variety of platforms about how the dad'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. It started off as hazing of new folks where people would come on asking about 5877 or 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 that was a hoax. That's actually like a best of show pastiche from like the whole tour. And they didn't. They never really played Cornell. And usually someone would say, no, I was there. And the thread would go along, but people would then accuse that person of hallucinating or. Or being, you know, a shill or something like that. Eventually I was just digging through Usenet now to try to track this down, but 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 and the Fire and all these other details just to like lean into the hooks. The thing is, I don't. 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. We've linked the 1998 thread@dead.net deadcast. 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 Tedrich, figured it out. A February 20, 1977 studio rehearsal. The Internet unquestionably changed the Deadhead experience. David Ganz I remember in 1993 being at home watching the tour set, set list being posted, and everybody got really excited when they started doing this obscure little song called. What's it called? I Fought the Law that I remembered from The Bobby Fuller four or whatever from the 60s, her breaking rocks in the hot sun. I fought the law and the law one I fought the law and the law one it was originally by Sonny Curtis of Buddy Holly's band the Crickets. The Clash did it too. And that's. Everybody was excited about this brand new song, you know. 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. So we watched the entire life cycle of a song from oh my God, look at this cool new song to oh Jesus, they're doing that again. All happened over the course of like three weeks while the band was on tour. So it was this kind of set list mentality. The sort of the weird side of the set list tracking mentality was just manifested in that one. In that way, she was the best friend I've ever had. I hope the lo. That was from March 27, 1993, in Albany. The only officially released Dead version of I Fought the law from the 30 trips around the Sunbox sounds boss to me. The set list driven mentality would follow the Dead and other jam bands, an early indicator of obsessive online fandom. But the online Deadhead community also foresaw more positive uses of online communities for collaborative activism. Well, Jerry went down in the fall of 1992 and they missed a bunch of shows. And 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. And 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 two. So on the. Well, we organized a campaign. We Had a number of people, a woman named Naomi Pierce, who was a 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, go and spend our money in Colorado and pretend that they didn't just do this thing. And we know that Colorado doesn't hate gays, but a lot of people in Colorado do, blah, blah, blah. 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. And 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. And we rented this billboard and put up this sign. And it was a steely with a pink triangle instead of a lightning bolt. And across the top it said something like, deadheads against Discrimination. Undo to undo. Undo the number two. Because it was Measure two, Amendment two was the anti gay legislation. And we had a press conference at a 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. And it was, it was just a gesture. It was just a publicity stunt basically. But it was an example of a nationally organized thing that we did for, from our passion for this topic. And it showed the effectiveness of this community because just huge numbers of people, dozens of people coordinated their work to make this happen. When the Grateful dead ended in 1995, the Internet was just getting going. Deadheads, of course, remember the date August 9, 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. The opening of the Internet to commercialization was a gigantic change in the way things were. When it became more open to the public and just, you know, everybody could get on, it proliferated just insanely 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 the Grateful Dead's live taping policy to make a broader argument for an economy of what he called soft goods. We've been letting people tape our concerts since the early 70s, 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. We've linked to the whole piece@dead.net deadcast. 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. 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. 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. 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 marketplace. It was certainly bold, part of the emerging thought around the Internet. Barlow once wrote, nature is itself a free market system. A rainforest 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. Eric Davis ain't buyin. How far do you take the ecological 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 cybernetic. 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 to the nature one, you can be like, like Barlow, those guys. Well, let's just let it go. Like, don't try to control it, man. It's like it's doing its own thing. It's cosmic. It's part of the big unfolding plan. And maybe there was a period in, you know, 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 another level it's a surveillance device on another level, you know, yada yada yada. And so it's 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 then. And we're kind of suffering through that. Other stuff like this doesn't feel like a coral reef to me. I don't know about you. As with Stuart Brand and other figures in the countercultural technology scene, Barlow has received a reassessment in recent years. At dead.netdeadcast we've posted a link to 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 have responded and continued to evolve, probably in a charming way, with a half invented anecdote. I remember seeing him speak at one point, I think he was talking about John Gray, the British philosopher, and he was just acknowledging that Unleashed Capital was a ferocious monster of hell. It's just that he wasn't so sure that the attempts to kind of control or constrain it made a lot of sense. And so I think he on some level was very realistic about the negative dimensions of it all, but had kind of a temperamental touch of the adventure of it all or the wildness of it all, that it was very much part of his personality. And again, 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 past the Silicon Valley. Valley libertarians today are a much more ferocious and in many ways much more explicitly reactionary. While Bob Weir's Lear 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 a 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 in our Keys to the Rain episode last year. Christian Crumlish was a regular reader. He was Essentially a kind of an early blogger in that sense, you know, that he wrote this like dated diary and he shared what he was working on and he talked about it. I think he enjoyed it in the way that other people did. The joy of a new medium. You know, there was a kind of punk rock kind of or like garage rock ethos on the Internet early on with that kind of stuff, which is just get out there and do it and figure it out. Known for extreme privacy, Hunter's new online world allowed him something of a controlled way to interact regularly with his listeners. Like any Deadhead, I had a bunch of questions for him or stuff I wondered about and started corresponding with him. Eventually got a chance to interview him directly and meet him and chat with him a bit, but mostly just because he was like 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 and maybe like quote you in his daily signature change on his diary or something like that. I mean, every once in a while I'd start pestering him about something and he'd be like, one time he said to me, tisk, Tisk, your Deadhead is showing. Because I was trying to track him down on the naming of the songs on Cryptical Envelopment or something like super nerdy Deadhead stuff. And he was like, back off. A funny thing though, was how being a Deadhead or a fan of one of the improv heavy bands that followed became more of an evolving skill set than a traditional media based fandom in the 90s and beyond. Even after there was a proper Grateful Dead, Deadheads continued to innovate online. Michael Colori is a senior editor at Wired who was becoming a serious music head in the mid-90s. I started seeing techie things coming in actually through tapers. I think tapers were like the nerds of the nerds, right? Because you had to be kind of nerdy to be into this music because there's a lot of stats and there's a lot of like memorization involved and, you know, 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 and 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 this sort of technical mind. Also. I think you had to really be into computers to be online in the mid-90s, right? Like you had to know what a modem was and how it worked. You had to know how to navigate things with like a text based interface. To navigate news groups. To navigate news groups. And I think that if you were on an email list, it was like a lower barrier of entry, but still you needed to learn how to check your email. Michael watched his tape trading turn into file trading. I never had a DAP machine. I was always on the analog leafs 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 waves. So then you had to learn about shins and then eventually flax. But back then in the early days it was all about shins. So you had SSHN files and FTP logins. There was a big server called Sugar Megs and they had a certain number of slots, right? So if you were able to get into one of the various slots, then you were like, all right, what am I going to grab? Because the slots were kind of hard to get after it started to get popular. So you could try for days and never be able to log into Sugar Megs. Then once you were in, it was like a bonanza. It was like that show where you do the shopping cart down the aisles and you're just dumping as much crap as you can into your shopping cart. Deadheads helped pioneer the next level of online file trading too, with one of the earliest pieces of peer to peer file sharing software called furthernet, spelled with a U. After the Merry Pranksters bus launched in 2001, Furthernet coded the unwritten rules of tape sharing into the app. In order to download, you had to upload, you had to maintain upload download ratios that you, that you needed to maintain. And paying it forward was always encouraged. And you know, like most spaces that are run by deadheads in the world, like paying it forward actually happens, right? 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. 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. One of my good friends, Andrew Lowenstern, known to the Tapir world as Burris, is a coder and he was really involved in building the client software for BitTorrent. And you know, because he's a taper and because he's like a Deadhead and a really big Modeski Martin and Wood fan, he was always interested in trading music over BitTorrent. And I know the Deadheads picked it up almost as fast as NASA did, right? 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. So he saw it as like a natural fit for the dead world. And they really picked up on it. 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. Eric 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 of the open system, which is that there are these sort of existing recordings which are in a way set. They're dead, they're old, they're 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 and 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, 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, the 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 Deadheads who continue to make homes on new platforms. There are too many online Deadhead communities to mention, but I'll shout out 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 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 or whatever, people who felt subversive really, and naturally aligned with other subversive groups, there was this feeling like, oh, this is going to make a huge difference in the world. Finally, we can talk. For me, it was very much an extension of the underground newspaper thing. Like, when I was in high school, boy, I was reading underground newspapers, including, like, the San Francisco Oracle from the neighborhood I would eventually live in. And it was like secret communication, like, from that alien who could discuss truths on the Outer Limits that I was talking about. 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 and their Halloween candy. Little did we know that giving everyone a microphone would eventually be overwhelmed with people who were ignorant, bigoted, etc. 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. Even still, the online Deadhead world provides a place for groups of Deadheads to meet across generations and across vast distances. Next year, the Deadhead online community celebrates its 50th birthday. As this episode goes to press and the stability of Twitter seems well in doubt, there's no doubt that Deadheads will be able to find each other wherever we end up. I think there's a song about that. Something that I say at the end of Amir Barlev's Long Strange Trip documentary is is true, which is that I will have more in common with young deadheads 500 years from now than I will with many non Deadheads now. And it's not just the shared experience of seeing Jerry, because most of my younger Deadhead friends never saw Jerry 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. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Charlie Miller, Dan English, Les Ernest, David Henkel, Wallace, Paul Martin, Doug Odie, John Markoff, David Gans, Mary Eisenhart, Bob Braylov, Christian Kremlich, Michael Colori, Eric Davis and Steve Silberman. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for contributing audio from his interview archive. Thanks very much, David. And thank you very much for tuning in. Don't forget to like and subscribe, and keep your tour stories coming by recording yours over@stories.dead.net Executive Producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.