The Quiet Allure Of Audience Tapes

Upon launching the Grateful Dead Listening Guide I brought up a somewhat understated intention that went beyond the overarching goal of helping folks navigate the endless choices of Dead concert recordings online. Early on I came clean on the point that I was particularly fond of audience recordings, and that in years past I had devoted much of my time and energy to spreading the word of audience tapes and the joys within. There was little denying that throughout my ongoing ramblings there would be a sometimes subtle, sometime outright, push to wake people up to the beauty of audience recordings and my opinion that they (yes, I’ll say it) put the soundboard medium to shame on many levels critical to enjoying the magic of the Dead’s music.

Well, I haven’t been keeping any kind of score card, but I can safely tell you that after general e-mails and comments thanking me for putting up the guide overall, nothing quite comes close to the number of people who confess to having been converted over to an appreciation of audience tapes where before they wouldn’t have given them a chance. And, with readership growing steadily, the frequency of converts continues to rise. It’s a good thing, and it seems to be happening naturally, without my wildly banging some audience tape gong.

I often look at the collective readership of the GDLG like that single person I described at the start of this project who discovered the old grizzled deadhead living across the street (still not sure why I always paint him as old and grizzled. I’d like to think that I’m not particularly either), and began borrowing tapes, listening to stories, and building a collection of music not ever to be found in the nearby record stores. So here after nearly a year and a half, the old deadhead has turned this fellow on to about 80 shows. And being careful as he has been, he has slowly let his personal preference for audience tapes whisper its way into the newcomer’s ear. And slowly, being unconcerned with succeeding, the audience tape medium has been allowed to work its magic and gain another passionate devotee.

There can be little doubt that something more than music is going on when you listen to audience tapes, and this goes well beyond the simple fact that these recordings capture the crowd noise and room ambience. As has been recently articulated by folks commenting on the passing of legendary taper, Jerry Moore, when you listen to a good audience tape you can’t help but experience a layer of gratitude for the person who saw fit to deal with all the rigmarole of taping in the first place. This gratitude quickly expands to a difficult to describe sharing of the taper’s experience as it happened, placing a certain physical layer into the soundscape where we come to discern the true scale of the live musical experience (readily displayed when listening to tapes of 1974’s Wall Of Sound. Worth checking out the podcast too). And then we also come to appreciate the fact that the audience recording is a document completely separate from the world of commercial music. It is the product of people, shared from friend to friend, not packaged onto the shelves of record stores. This most quiet social/cultural layer is on every tape, and infuses the listening experience before during and after the tape is actually playing.

It is no wonder that the Grateful Dead Listening Guide is doing such a fine job of showing people the light of audience tapes. They work on so many levels, one only needs a slight nudge in their direction. From there, the tapes themselves begin to shed light on many things, not the least of which is the actual music itself as it flowed from the stage to the audience.

I once thought that an audience tape was only bringing us a small fraction of the listening experience at a Dead show, like how a photograph is a two dimensional take away from a four dimensional experience. But, when we consider everything “coming off the tape” when listening to audience recordings in particular, they appear more akin to the experience of discovering a rich layer of complexity hiding just below the surface of something we hitherto thought we fully comprehended. There is far more within them than a surface view can reveal, like fractals within fractals, and the sub atomic universe deeper within physical matter than any microscope can see.

It’s the crazy talk of a Deadhead, I know. But I struggle to find any more concrete means to explain the experience of the Dead’s music preserved under the glass of a pristine audience recording. That it is really there defies proof, yet the effects of its being there ripple into our more discernable perceptions of the experience. We know it's there because of the impact it leaves on us. People do turn on to audience tapes. The ear does tune to the spectrum of frequencies caught on tape after a short while allowing the listening experience to unfold like a blooming flower. A slight nudge really is enough to draw in the masses.

There is an invisible pied piper playing a siren song here – crazy as any deadhead out there. I’ve been drawn in by that song for a good long time, and I’m glad to see others hear it too.