A couple years ago about a half dozen people each put in hundreds of hours, for love and for free, to digitize more than a thousand first generation SBD cassettes, master them to Cds and put the Cds into circulation. Great care was taken to do as perfect a job as possible: knowing that the fountainhead of Dead music had been freely opened by the grace of one great deadhead, it was felt proper to live up to the quality of the gift.
It blows my mind, now, to see some of this stuff come back around rather altered. Take, for instance, SMU Dallas 12/26/69. The 1st gen cassette SBD source has a nasty cut at 26:00 into the Dark Star, about 2 1/2 minutes after the vocals. The tape picks up again near the beginning of New Speedway. A couple people have had the thought to cut directly from the Dark Star vocals to the New Speedway, making a 'cleaner transition.' I can understand the motive for this. What I can understand the motive for, is the way one of these copies has cut a minute or so off the beginning of Cold Rain and the other has cut a couple minutes off the end of Cold Rain and around a minute off the beginning of China Cat. Just to hack things up, I guess. Just to piss in the well, I guess. For still more egregiously stupid example, check out the version of 12/30/69 going around. The first CD times 59:35 & sounds like a clean transcript of Good Lovin through Midnight Hour. The 2nd disc times 36:56 and contains Cumberland through Cosmic Charlie. The cut in The Other One is closed up clean with the beginning of Cosmic Charlie. On one listen it didn't seem like much was lost so I didn't cross check; now I wish I had because in view of the rest I wouldn't trust it. The third disc times 79:20. It begins with Uncle John through Me & My Uncle, without intermediate tracking. It then continues with the first 10 minutes of Dark Star, cutting the last 9 or so, apparently so as to 'fit' the Alligator > Feedback sequence on the CD. Putting this mangled abortion into circulation is like tearing pages out of library books. It is pissing in the well. When I think of the hundreds of hours of love, care, attention and plain work that went into putting this stuff out good and proper, and consider this hacked up corpse that comes back around 2 years later, well, I just want to say Thanks a bunch, bozos. Caveat auditor. -- Jim Powell [EMAIL PROTECTED]