[Update: Click on the picture to see the full comic.]

David Gans has a response to the shutdown of Archive.org’s live Grateful Dead archives. Not only does he offer up the unsuprising moans of fan “entitlement” and accusations of greed on the part of Joe Deadhead, he actually claims to “not have a dog in the fight”. I guess when you’ve had unfettered access to the Dead’s live vaults for the last 20 years, that’s an easy crutch to lean on.
But it doesn’t fly for an instant. Let’s take a look at his statements that leave little doubt that he supports this move. He writes:

“A couple of weeks ago there was another round of layoffs at GDP”

Well, boo-freaking-hoo! You mean they actually had to lay people off at an business that supports a band that hasn’t really existed for about 10 years? What a joke. The suprising thing is that those people who got laid off didn’t bother looking for other jobs once the money (i.e. Garcia) kicked the bucket. Talk about a sense of entitlement. Welcome to the real world, Ram Rod.

“They are doing this in order to protect their download business,” is another cry I’ve heard. Well, yeah, and in what universe is that an unreasonable position?

The universe in which a band that built up a huge amount of goodwill with it’s fans by not only allowing, but encouraging taping and trading. The universe in which the tape trader culture and the “every show is different” mythology was the driving force behind making the Grateful Dead one of the top-grossing live acts in history year after year.
So now that I’ve played by the rules, never charging to make a copy and never paying for a live tape, supported the band by buying their shitty studio albums, and always, ALWAYS showing up to the show with a ticket in hand (90% of them bought throught GDTS), they want to pull the rug out of from under me? I’m sorry that technology progressed to the point where it wasn’t a complete pain in the ass to get access to good quality recordings, but I’m not the one who changed the rules late in the game.

“I don’t really have a dog in this fight. I have a job on the periphery of the Grateful Dead organization, but I am not privy to their decision-making process and I don’t depend on them for my income. I help to promote their official releases by playing them on the radio, obviously, but I also play a lot of unreleased music (and I’ve gotten some of that unreleased music from archive.org).”

It’s real easy to say you don’t have a dog in the fight when your personal collection is already complete. I wonder how he’d feel if the Grateful Dead Hour was dependent upon downloading shows from archive.org. Perhaps a bit differently.
Finally, Gans writes:

“There’s a petition online directed at GDM and promising a boycott. “Now it appears doing the right thing for the fans, has given way to greed.”
I think it is worthwhile to ask ourselves if there isn’t some greed on the other side of the equation.”

Greed eh? Where would that be manifested eh David? Would it be in all the Dick’s Picks recordings I own? How about all the tickets I bought to shows where Jerry was smacked out of his head and couldn’t play worth a shit? For a band that considers itself to be so forward-thinking and liberal, they sure do act just like the man when it comes to the brave new world of digital music.

Way back in the day I used to be a starry-eyed follower of the Grateful Dead. To those who knew me then, or have heard the tales, this comes as no surprise — but for those who have only known me in the post-Dead era would probably have a hard time putting me in a tie-dyed t-shirt and Birkenstocks behind the wheel of a VW van.
I do assure those of you in the latter category that it is indeed true.
Fact is, at one point the Dead were a very important band to me, the gravitational center of my universe for both extremes of good and bad. I had some of the most rapturous moments of my life at Dead shows, and some of the most extreme lows as a result of living the lifestyle. For a long time, the Dead’s songs and allegories were apt tales to weave the story of my life around (“Sometimes the songs that we sing are just songs of our own…”).
Eventually though, the power their music held over me would start to fade, not surprisingly around the same time that Jerry started hanging out with Deborah Koons and doing smack again. I remember being at my 2nd-to-last Dead show at the Pyramid in Memphis, TN in 1994, and listening to Jerry butcher his lines all night. It used to be that Jerry’s performance at a Dead show was like an ice sculpture — it would start off the night an unformed block of ice, but throughout the night a series of artful, delicate maneuvers would transform that block into something magnificent. The ice sculpture that resulted would be affixed in my memory forever as testament to the man’s guitar-playing genius. On that particular night, however, it seemed as if Jerry was drunkenly attacking the ice block with a chainsaw, letting loose with burps and farts of his signature guitar tone. His work had heroin written all over it that night, and not in the good way.
I remember, before walking in the show that night, hearing two snippets of conversation from the crowd outside the venue: one, a girl with her finger in the air, despairing that she might not find a ticket — “I HAVE TO FIND A TICKET!”, followed by the response: “What the fuck do I care if I get a ticket? I’ve already seen 200 shows. I’m just here to make money.” I think I knew right then that the dream was dead.
Flash forward to the present day. After struggling with Etree announcements and saturated FTP servers for years, archive.org announces it will start hosting the Grateful Dead archives. Thousands of soundboard and audience recordings go up seemingly overnight in lossless format. I did my best to download as many shows as I could, starting primarily with the shows I actually attended over the years. I start looking at Grateful Dead books again. I’m considering getting the entire Dick’s Picks collection to supplement the archive.org downloads. Thinking the archives will be around for a while, I stopped downloading. Big mistake.
On November 22nd, apparently at the request of Deborah Koons and Phil Lesh (who I guess is in charge of GDP these days), Archive.org took down all of it’s lossless archives, audience and soundboard recording alike, and announced that it would no longer be offering anything except audience recordings in (the worthless) streaming mp3 format.
Quite coincidentally I’m sure, this follows close on the heels of news that Dick’s Picks was going all-digital, and that the Dead had inked a deal with iTunes.
The emergence of archive.org’s dead archive seemed to me to be one of the few promises of the internet age to actually bear fruit. I remember, back in 1991, writing to people who had placed classified ads in the back of Relix magazine, asking for their lists of tapes and hoping for first-generation copies from DAT. To have it all at my fingertips just seemed to good to be true. As it winds up, it was.
The last 17 years were a good ride, and although my interest had definitely faded the last 10 years or so, archive.org had been a pleasant reminder of everything I loved about the Dead. Unfortunately November 22nd was a painful reminder of what I had grown to hate about them — the sheer, unadulterated greed of it all. To see the ethos of the Dead’s liberal taping and trading policies reach it’s zenith with Archive.org only to be knocked down by greedy fucks who care only about the almighty dollar — it’s so sad, and it makes me so angry.
So to Grateful Dead Productions, Phil Lesh, Deborah Koons and the rest I say this — congratulations! You finally did what years of exceptional electronic music and sub-par wanna-be jam bands could not do — you nailed the final coffin in my interest in the Dead. I will never, for as long as I live, buy another Grateful Dead product. I will never go see another Phil n Friends show. I will never buy a stupid, lossy DRMed track off iTunes, ever. I have too many good bands and producers and honest human beings to support with my obsessive music collecting habits.
I think BoingBoing.net got it right when they wrote:

“This is pretty disappointing. Deadheads made the Grateful Dead some pretty substantial fortunes over the years by acting as unpaid, volunteer evangelists for their commercial offerings. This is a genuine betrayal of the audience from a couple of greedy people who would line their pockets at the expense of the memory of the generous, mutually beneficial relationship between the band and its supporters.”

Exactly. Nothing like betrayal to utterly destroy a relationship, Mr. Lesh.
[Additional thoughts: I forgot to point out the unbelievable irony of a band that once employed John Perry Barlow – a founding member of the EFF – as a lyricist undertaking such a backwards move. I hope that he comes out with a statement at some point with his position on the matter.]