smacky and bucky

Oh man, is there anything the internet can't give you? Thanks to "trader-friendly" bands like the Grateful Dead, Phish, Keller Williams (and so on), excellent recordings of full shows exist. And thanks to the internet, you don't need to find people with shows, mail them blank cassettes, wait a few weeks and get shows in the mail (and figure in cost of cassettes and postage both ways). Not that I ever did that. I just know that's how it was done in the dark, pre-internet days. People would mail requests for certain shows to the back of Relix magazine, for example. Their requests would appear on the same page with Deadheads in prison looking for penpals.

Now you just find a website (and I've found a bunch), find the show you want, click on the zip file, wait a few minutes (thank you, high speed wireless!), open the file, and drag the songs into iTunes. It's mind-boggling that the entire process takes maybe 10 minutes. Ten minutes to have a complete concert, an audio record from 1972 (35 years ago)!

And it works the other way too. Not only does it preserve history, it disseminates information immediately. I found a concert by Keller Williams that took place three days ago. Someone recorded and uploaded the show that quickly.