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ZONE
OUT with The ROLLING RIDER
This
Week: Shorten
Bread, Shorten Dead
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Sunday,
November 19, 2000
Your
Rider here, back with more reports from the field trip we call the dead
scene. Where to begin? None of the horns of dilemma
we spoke about last week have yet been silenced, but as is often the case
in Deadland, things move on, so we move on.
The big news in every net-heads' Inbox this week was surely the release of many crystal-clear soundboard recordings from Phil's last fall tour - lovingly transferred from the DAT masters by none other than John Cutler. "Manna from Heaven" was the title of one email received by yours truly regarding the .SHN and .MP3 free releases. Even in this day of band-sanctioned tapers tickets and sprawling live releases, this gesture from Phil and Co. is kinder than most. In speaking briefly with Cutler before the Wiltern shows I was surprised to learn that this move was being considered. Certainly I don't want to rehash any of the GD Vault issue, but I sure hope the "opening of the vault" party the Grateful Dead organization is still planning on throwing is done as generously (not to mention as swiftly).
For those unfamiliar, .SHN stands for "Shorten", a relatively unheralded lossless compression scheme for digital audio files, allowing for a true tape-trading holy grail: identical cloning of original source material, made small enough to send and receive over the internet. It also has the added convenience of being extremely easy to convert to a CD-friendly format. Now with Lesh upping the ante by providing the pure digital source, traders just got stoked.
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All Good
Things in All Good Time
Having listened to the aforementioned shows just this morning (Out: "Wake
and Bake!" In: "Rise And .Shn!") I was again amazed and
delighted by the brilliance of the shows and the clarity of each note
captured by the digitization. Once the jam in the opening China Cat >>
Eleven gets set into perpetual motion it becomes an impressionist pastiche
of landscapes and skylines punctuated by bright flags of Grateful Dead
references. Never before has Phil's Dead-music-as-repertory concept been
so dramatically highlighted. Each jam is a Grateful Dead meta-structure,
multiple songs and riffs impossibly held together by a long-held Warren
note here, a Phil run there. The word "morphing" needs to morph
itself into newer meaning as defined by the shape-shifting abilities of
Phil Lesh and his All-Star Friends.
Of course, my audience tapes of the show were immediately devalued, but
I can only hope that my entire collection of audience recordings is similarly
and summarily dismissed. I want much more, of course. I know, I know,
the whole "give an inch" thing notwithstanding. If the apparent
obstacles to commercial release for shows gone by are genuine, then I
can only pray that they donate gems from all tours since April 99. The
sound quality alone is enough to have made this writer an instant junky.
Some tapers will swear by their audience recordings, and believe me, I
too have been blown away by a crispy 'audie', but to this Head, nothing
beats a 'board. (Unless if you want to get super freaky, a Matrix board,
but that's asking for a lot. Hint Hint, John).
Anyways, the project deserves a round of applause and gratitude from us Phans. Certainly the bandwidth hiccups from the first round will be ironed out (and already have been, say some) and the CD-R's will get out there. And then you'll probably agree: we've got to be the luckiest phans in the world. If you need help understanding the shorten format, surf over to etree's shorten link page and get the information you need to start your own digital soundboard production facility. If you want the files, check here, but also check here, here, and here.
Enjoy the Love,
Your Rolling Rider
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