The Great Full Boycott

In the late 1980s, after Jerry (temporarily) quit chasing the dragon, and the Dead achieved some measure of commercial success, I feared the Grateful Dead were in just the teeniest bit of danger of losing their soul. Not that I begrudged them some record sales. The money was good for them and their organization to a degree - better sound system (but to accommodate bigger and bigger shows). . . It was your classic Faustian Bargain. They had done alright, from what I could see, selling almost no records for a band of their stature, touring constantly, and selling a few t-shirts. Their concert tickets were not the most expensive out there ($9 for my first show in 1983), but their shows were a crap shoot, or an uneven affair usually. They could sound so plodding and god awful that I more than once made a mental note to never come to another show. And then 6 minutes later they would sound like some kind of otherworldly  chorus of alien space traveling dinosaurs backed by earthquakes and the wind and rain, only better. Even if the show was sometimes a clunker, I always came away having heard something - a song, a pure sound that was of a wavelength powerful enough to rattle my intestines - something that I had not heard before and was unaware existed.

And so, what the hell, it was still the 80s, and if everyone else seemed to be getting rich, it was affirming to note that they could too, just by being themselves more or less.

But that wasn't enough. The more you have, the shorter it feels, as the saying goes. So in addition to the expectation of selling ever more records and tickets, there came a huge marketing blitz that has grown today into Grateful Dead Merchandising. T shirts, OK. I wore a few of them proudly back in the day. Music: gotta deliver the music somehow, in pre-internet days that meant shipping product to stores, or direct to people via mail order. But I became squeamish when they released "Built to Last" - a self-conscious attempt to reproduce an unreproducible fluke, the commercial success of "In the Dark." Inside was this little fold out of unbelievably stupid products emblazoned with GD iconography: playing cards, $100 jeans jackets, golf club covers, sanitary napkins, et c. et c.

OK. Surely no one, no self-respecting, real deadhead would buy any of this nonsense, would they? If nobody buys this stuff, surely it will go away, and the GDM will recognize this folly for a momentary lapse into greedheadism.

It is now fifteen years later, and the only lifestyle branding icon to outstrip the skull and roses, the white lightning man, or the stupid dancing bears is Hello Kitty. Candles. Beach blankets. Barstools. Did I mention golf tees and balls? All of it cheesy looking and certainly overpriced. Again, I ask, Who Buys This Shit?

I and many others I know were willing to give the GD a pass on the proliferation of stupid, mindless, overproduction of Grateful Dead branded products because of one simple reason. They wanted their music, or at least the recorded artifacts of their concerts, to be free to circulate to as many people as possible. The tapers were the keepers of this technology and this charge, and they dutifully and in many cases brilliantly overcame one logistical, acoustical and technological barrier after another, so that today nearly every Grateful Dead show since about 1970 or so has been recorded and has been archived, somewhere, if not in the Dead's own tape vaults. In the early 80s the band took the unprecedented step of setting aside space behind their soundboard to allow a forest of microphone stands to grow. They even let some people patch directly into the soundboard, so that they could record the mix that was coming directly from the stage with almost no ambient noise from the crowd or the room, recordings almost completely free of distortion and extraneous sound. The Dead gave their explicit signal of approval years before this, when Garcia noted that they were not interested in locking up recorded artifacts of their shows, that the music mattered in the moment it was being played, and if someone wants a recoding of it, fine. He added gnomically, "when we're through with it, they [the deadheads] can have it." When asked by an incredulous interviewer if their laissez faire policy encouraged piracy (in the classic and true sense vis a vis "intellectual property," the attempt to profit from someone else's work illegally), or hurt record sales, they merely shrugged: "If we ever make a really good record, they'll probably run out and buy that too." That was true.

A low level tape hobbyist like me was more or less reliant upon the kindness of strangers to build a collection of 3d, 4th, or 5th generation cassettes of shows. Hell, it was something. I didn't get to many shows, and I didn't have the wherewithal to become a full time taper,  but I managed to amass about 150 hours of Dead on tape. Those sketchy cassettes were the only thing that kept me interested in the band throughout the 1980s and 90s, other than getting to the occasional show.

Suffice to say, in the digital era, the barriers to reproduction have been almost eliminated. Once a show is digital, it can go anywhere anyone with a computer and an internet connection wants it to. The marginal cost of reproduction has reached nearly zero. The Dead were pioneers who deliberately rejected some of the economic model of the music business, and of capitalist culture industries in general -- they embraced what we now would call an open source model of distribution for their music, which they in turn believed would draw more and more people to their shows to experience it first hand. They were right, all along. It took balls to embrace an economic model based not on scarcity, but instead a kind of gift economy. What they gave away translated into more fans, more tickets sold. 

Now that Jerry is gone, and touring revenues are not what they once were, and now that Apple has proved that "consumers" will pay for downloadable music at $.99 a song, the Dead want in on this game. And they have done so, putting some of their live music archive for sale on iTunes and their own website. No one begrudges them this; it's their archive, and if they want to turn it into a revenue stream, they can do with it as they please.

The problem comes when they tell others what to do with other community-based, open source live music archives. Hence, the recent flap over the Grateful Dead Merchandising Inc.'s demand that archive.org remove all Grateful Dead files from their Live Music Archive. For the last decade, the Dead had seen the proliferation of file sharing as just a more convenient and expedient way for people to do what they had been doing for nearly three decades: trade, spread and distribute the music without profit for anyone. I fail to see what has changed about this model. If the model hasn't changed, and has in fact grown more efficient over time, then the change must be with the Corporate Dead.

It hasn't been hard to discern who's been on the right and wrong ends of these decisions in GD land -- witness the unseemly flap over the disposition of Garcia's guitars. His will clearly stated that they were to be given to Doug Irwin, the luthier who made them. Grateful Dead Inc. tried to argue that they were in fact "communal property" and not Garcia's to dispose of. They tried to rob a man of his rightful bequest -- a man who was disabled and unable to earn a living because he had been injured by a motorist while on his bike (a hit and run) -- in the name of some vaguely defined  (and ultimately spurious) "communal" ethos. Communism, my ass. They wanted to pimp out those instruments on the auction market. Call it what it is: predatory necro-capitalism. I decided then (1999) that I was done with the Dead as a corporation. If they were gonna act like greedy assholes, I was going to act like a disgruntled "consumer" and take my business elsewhere. Some time later they settled out of court with Irwin and I gave them another chance, buying some of their "legal" downloadable music, and a DVD of the Radio City Music Hall 1980 show. 

Now this, and I've really had enough this time. You all may have no more of my money.

In truth, the Dead were always about making money (surprise) -- but not to the extent that they were about to fundamentally change their core values of open source/viral music distribution, improvisation, and a tense fascination with the limits of "freedom" (defined in the retrogressive 1960s sense): how far can the open-ended, laissez-faire approach to mass delivery of live music be pushed? This was a purely and naively American idea, one that came in for a number of revisions over the years. The "wall of sound" (ca. 1973-74) was a brilliant creation of music amplification technology that reached the hard limits the 1970s American economy. Sellouts in every town, and they lost money because their sound system was so large, cumbersome, and expensive to set up, tear down and transport. So they were always about making money, but not for the purpose of necessarily keeping it or hoarding it.

But they were never economic (or social) leftists; almost no hippies were. The "successful" ones made tons of cash off drugs, cultural productions, record royalties, and so on. In embracing Microsoft-style techno-capitalism, however (i.e. bullying or buying out the perceived competetion), the GD have sown the seeds of their own economic demise. Capitalism's creative forces unleash excesses of destructive energies that eventually return to haunt us. Not through worker's revolution, but through the unintended consequences of information technologies that were the result, not of "business" innovation, but through open source innovation -- the web, especially.

Comments

[Burtrem]

I dunno man those "steal your face" barstools are shhhhweeeeet!

only a $149 for a stool? I ordered 3. hell ya t3h d34d ruuuoolllzzzz