Hi friends, welcome back to Low Frequency. Ends up blogging in the first thing to go when I was slowing down for the summer and one of the last things to come back when I’m getting back into the groove. I’ve been making myself crazy developing Freq, which just entered alpha testing 10 days ago. As far as this job goes, writing this blog is the equivalent of going outside to talk to people, and boy oh boy do I need to go outside and talk to people.

The time has to talk about the Grateful Dead. True to form for the band, this post is going to have a shaggy dog tale quality. Gentle way of saying it’s going to be kind of a mess! I basically see this as a post I have to get out of the way, and I wanted to make sure this history wasn’t the first set of stories told on the blog since, too often, it’s told as the beginning of everything. I’ll be writing here about a bunch of things Deadheads and Internet history buffs already know. But telling this story is kind of like an incantation to clear the room before a seance.

Maybe the best way to understand how The Grateful Dead related to the Internet is to imagine basically any of their shows: immersive for all experiencing it and heavily improvised. These were giant events that attracted thousands of fans, some of whom spent as much of their lives as possible traveling city to city to follow tours. 

For a few years, they hauled around a huge sound system called the “Wall of Sound,” arguably the first modern, large format sound system at 26,400 watts and with 546 speakers. That was developed by their live sound technician, an engineer named Owsley Stanley whose other lasting impact is synthesizing and distributing the gold standard for LSD, dubbed Orange Sunshine, until his indictment by the feds in the early ‘70s. There’s a really good Steely Dan song about him.

Ok but… what about the music? On a couple time scales, it was always morphing. 

They were a genre-defining psych rock band early on, spent a few years in the early 70s getting really into country and figuring out how to work American folk and blues tonality into jazz structures, took a hiatus, then spent almost two decades incredibly long shows at stadiums playing dense I-guess-this-is-rock? music that bore no resemblance whatsoever to anything that was commercially successful during that period. 

The last few years of their touring career in the early ‘90s were long reviled by purists, but it was arguably a period when they circled back to the avant-garde bonafides that defined the beginning of their career while simultaneously establishing an audience-pleasing repertoire and breezy style that would make all of their offshoot projects incredibly successful touring acts in the wake of Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995.

Setlists changed every night. Most songs would dissolve (or devolve, depending on your tastes) into lengthy, improvised instrumental segments that are basically incredibly dense jazz existing in some quantum superposition where no one ever solos yet somehow everyone is always soloing. Fans call these jams, and those fans kinda did whatever while the music was happening: dance, chat, zone out on drugs. 

At the most abstract level, the social Internet is a lot like a Dead show. A huge amount of technology was developed by people operating in markets and legal zones that had, in the parlance of the Dead’s only hit single, a touch of gray. Often, that technology was calibrated to amplify a few especially charismatic individuals while really providing a space for a whole lot more people to gather and just kinda do whatever. And some from those masses end up so devoted to the thing that they weave their entire lives around taking part in it. Insiders find it profound and a rich source of community. On the other hand, a lot of people who don’t get it find the whole thing kind of ridiculous and are generally mystified that anyone derives pleasure or meaning from it. 

The other thing Dead shows boasted was an idiosyncratic market economy. An entire traveling bazaar followed the Dead wherever they went, with individual vendors hawking food, clothing, art, and drugs in the parking lot of whatever place the Dead show was that day. It was called “Shakedown Street” or “The Lot” and continues to this day at shows thrown by official Dead spin-offs like Dead and Co. as well as other jam bands. Some of these lot markets are more, umm, specialized than others. Lots outside of Disco Biscuits and Umphrey’s McGee concerts hiss and pop thanks to the dependable presence of an outfit known as the Nitrous Mafia. Sincere apologies for the bazooka blast of cursed proper nouns there.

This is basically how marketplaces work on the social web. People use explicit marketplace tools like Facebook Marketplace and buy/sell/trade forums on message boards to sell things to each other, which in turn spawns somewhat more established businesses that effectively exist via marketing vectors like an Instagram page. But go to the right place, like a private Facebook Group or the right Instagram account, and you can easily find gray and black markets. 

There’s a reason here for my incredibly drawn out metaphorical dive into how Dead shows resemble the Internet, and vice versa. I think it provides some insight into what felt familiar and exciting to Deadheads who logged on at various points in Internet history. The experience of being a member of a sprawling mass, the loose social structure with strong customs, the “you get it or you don’t” quality—I can imagine the people who this made sense to in the context of being a music fan would be receptive to a culture forming around a network technology that had similar attributes.

I also think this gets at why so many moments in Internet history were either marked by a huge Deadhead presence or involved Deadheads in some integral way. Here was a technology that welcomed whoever could make sense of it and created space for people to try something. At a Dead show, you might try acid or dancing or selling homemade t-shirts, and on the Internet you might try blogging, or trading addresses with fellow tape traders, or codifying RSS 2.0.

Dead Online

This is where I give fair warning that this is a tale that contains a very familiar cast of characters from the particular strain of Internet history that started being told in the early 1990s via WIRED Magazine writers like Howard Rheingold. But I do not believe that these are the monolithic figures who defined the Internet. I see them more as a cast of characters in one very specific story that can be told about the origins of the Internet—one story among many.

In my last post, I talked about the ARPAnet and touched on a couple of the ways Deadheads made their mark early on. They did things like trade lyrics with each other and sell weed.

The Grateful Dead were still a pretty new band when ARPAnet was getting off the ground around 1970. The band officially formed in San Francisco 1965, but didn’t really become much of a scene presence until 1967. And while they pretty quickly started to blow up nationally and internationally, the late ‘60s were a period when they were still enmeshed in the San Francisco scene and, for that matter, very much so a product of it.

Enter Stewart Brand. Brand’s first claim to fame—a self-proclamation, to be specific—is that he mounted some hybrid of a performance art spectacle and public pressure campaign to get NASA to release a picture of planet Earth taken from space. The whole Earth, as it were. Then in 1968, Brand started traveling America, hawking a catalog to hippies who bought land in rural areas to start agricultural communes. 

He called it the Whole Earth Catalog. It’s so ubiquitously discussed as a print precursor to the modern Internet that I don’t even want to bother going into it here, but basically it was a catalog of weird new technologies and interesting books you could buy and it had that beautiful picture of the Earth on the front. It was one of the key texts of the so-called “Back to Land” movement that emerged when young people left cities and suburbia to farm and start communes in the late 1960s. If your commune just absolutely needed a geodesic dome, the Whole Earth Catalog is probably how you purchased the kit to build it.

Brand had his roots in the San Francisco happenings in the 1960s and Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests. In 1966, Brand collaborated with San Francisco Tape Music Center founder Ramon Sender to organize the ultimate incarnation of the Acid Tests called The Trips Festival. The star musical act that night was The Grateful Dead. Arguably, this is not just the genesis of the musical avatars of the burgeoning acid-fried hippie movement, but of a type of live performance that you’ll recognize in any amphitheater or arena today, employing an innovatively large sound system and an elaborate light show.

To oversimplify a little bit, two things that the Trips Festival begat were technology and art. Both had a very specific set of relationships with culture and politics.

Fred Turner, in his stone cold classic From Counterculture to Cybercuture, makes a really compelling case that the countercultural figures of the San Francisco variety should be understood as a completely discrete political force from the contemporaneous New Left that was pushing for social change through political means during. Turner argues that instead, hippies should better be understood as a new face of libertarianism, with anti-authoritarian sentiment leading them to reject participating in institutional politics and an entrepreneurial bent that often saw them seeking to influence society through the market.

In that book, Turner delves into the trajectory of Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow leaving music to pursue a project establishing digital society as one embodying his explicitly libertarian ideals. Barlow penned the extremely influential essay “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” and helped start the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Both are key touchstones in what would come to be termed the cyberlibertarian movement, which held the tenet “Information wants to be free.” By the end of From Counterculture to Cyberculture, it’s the 1990s and the aging hippies have gone to Capitol Hill to team up with Newt Gingrich on policy.

As a kind of postscript to that book, Turner wrote a fantastic article about Brand’s project after the Whole Earth Catalog: the WELL, short for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link. The WELL was one of many Bulletin Board Systems that proliferated in the late 1980s, but it got a lot of credit early on as the most important one. In some sense I think indeed might be the first incarnation of a “social network” as we think about it today. 

Not because it was the first major place people hung out online, but more so it had such a high concentration of journalists and Silicon Valley figures that its sel- importance could be viably laundered as historical importance to non-users. The ultimate contemporary analog would likely be Twitter, which has never enjoyed the same magnitude of usership as some competitors, but has emerged as a culturally important touchstone for social media basically by existing as a digital  water cooler. 

As Turner explains, this was the result of some marketing savvy by Brand, who gave free memberships to journalists at places like WIRED Magazine. 

But who paid to use the WELL? Turner says that it was largely Deadheads, but he doesn’t go into much depth on the topic. I’d argue that even if the WELL isn’t actually as historically important as its users and the media coverage at the time believed it to be, mainly on account of a relatively small, insular user base, it did host the first true music community online. In the Grateful Dead forum, people would coordinate trades to send each other taped recordings of shows, debate about highlights in a given performance, buy and sell tickets, organize meetups with each other, and, perhaps most significantly of all, collaborate a huge project to collate all of the bands setlists for ever show they ever played in a series of printed volumes called Deadbase. That one is pretty remarkable, as a very early instance of voluntary, collective knowledge-making akin to what we see on Internet places like Wikipedia and iNaturalist today. 

Tape trading is a huge part of Dead fandom and plays into many of the significant moments of the Internet in the 1990s and early 2000s. I’ll go more in depth about that in future posts, but since this post is a gloss, I’ll just continue to gloss.

The Grateful Dead had a permissive live taping policy which basically stated that fans could record audio of shows as long as they didn’t profit off those recordings. This created a huge audience taping culture and tape trading subculture, first conducted person-to-person and through the mail, then through text forums like the WELL, BBS servers, and mailing lists, and finally through the actual distribution of digital files. 

Hence, the Internet Archive is flooded with Grateful Dead shows, albeit usually fairly low quality recordings at this point since the nicer sounding ones have been reissued through official vectors. A huge part of the fun of exploring those archives is that fans post their reviews of the shows, and that often takes shape as someone’s wild and wooly recollection of what invariably sounds like one of the wildest nights of their life. Here, we have a very robust living archive of participatory fan culture, a kind of Boomer analog to fan fiction sites. 

When the Bit Torrent protocol started to grow in popularity, the first music communities to take advantage of it were jam band fans. Since the Grateful Dead is the granddaddy of the jam scene, of course dead shows were shared there, but so were live recordings of Phish, String Cheese Incident, Widespread Panic, and so on. I like the Dead but truly cannot endorse any of the other stuff. I don’t need to though. All I really need to do is point out is that those bands have all those recorded live shows and rabid fans sharing those shows because they learned that from the Dead, and that younger generation took really quickly to a new distribution technology. 

The first ever item published via RSS? The Grateful Dead song “US Blues.” Dave Winer’s RSS 2.0 protocol is fundamental to the distribution of blogs and podcasts, and he developed it at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center specifically so that anyone could publish anything to a wide audience of followers online via a protocol that could never be truly commercialized. Winer is a Deadhead. Dave Winer, I seriously want to interview you, please get in touch. 

Ok I’m running out of steam here… Sometimes the jam just peters out, you know? Dead bassist Phil Lesh took advantage of early video live-streaming technology to broadcast shows over Realplayer. Jerry Garcia had a foray into digitally generated visual art in the early 90s. There’s probably more. These guys and their fans knew their way around media and technology. Hell, it’s probably related that Deadheads Anne Coulter and Tucker Carlson knew how to exploit 21st century media and politics to disseminate their vile propaganda. 

More to come on some of this stuff. Don’t expect me to write a post justifying why I like the Grateful Dead.

What I’ve Been Listening To

Had a housewarming party the other night and threw on this all-timer Scott Z sleze rock mix around 1 AM. Ideal vibe.

Once again I’m obsessed with this perfect song by David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Ingrid Chavez.

This John Martyn performance is so cool.