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DownerMan Revival
Archivemania

by Alek Grabinski - alek@best.com

I used to belong to a group that would meet regularly to work on breaking down barriers to communication, so that we could hopefully foster a stronger sense of community among ourselves (and then into the "real world"). One of the participants was a Quaker midwife in her fifties; Faith was, as they say, a "pistol," with a fine sense of humor. One of her favorite jokes went like this: A Unitarian Universalist dies, and his soul leaves his body and begins to ascend. On the way up, the soul passes a sign: one arrow points to Heaven, the other arrow points to A Discussion About Heaven. The soul hesitates...

In order to get this joke, it's helpful to know that the Unitarian Universalist branch of Christianity is (apparently) known for its intellectual approach to religion. Their idea of heaven is a vigorous theological discussion about the nature of The Eternal Kingdom. Forget the pearly gates, the cherubim and seraphim and Saint Peter's All-Star Rock'n'Roll Band; let's talk about the protocols which determine who gets to sit at the right hand of God, is it better to be in front of Him or behind Him or a little off to the side... Faith said it was a classic case of missing the forest for the trees - and that's really the point here (the point is not my ignorance about Universalists!). Applying the same format to my thesis, which is that magnetic media causes limpness in your musical organ and distortion of your musical values, the joke would go like this: The Die-Hard Tape Collector dies (no doubt while driving, rooting around on the floor for a tape, and boom right into a bus) and his soul ascends. On the way up, the soul passes a sign: one arrow points to All the Tapes, Ever, Digitally Flawless and Sonically Perfect, the other arrow points to The Ten Best Shows You Ever Saw, In Rotation, For Eternity. The soul hesitates...

This is not a slam against technology, or the amount of tech that one owns - hell, I own three DAT decks, three tape decks, three CD players, and I can play any medium I own in my car (except vinyl, and I'm working on that). I get Holiday Greeting cards from the president of Sony. I sunk the pesos to buy a new PC so I could transfer all my DATs onto CD, before those bits turned to rust. It seems like every week another gaggle of dead presidents are exchanged for "hopefully the last piece." No, my message is this: The more media mass you have, the more miles of chrome oxide, the greater risk you run of missing the center of it all, which is the emotional response which the music elicits.

My new PC, with all its bells and whistles, has not turned out to be the super-fun thing I thought it would be. It's a time-consuming chore to get the bits into the computer, manipulate them to fix problems with balance or levels or mix (Huh; used to be, in the old days, it was considered anathema to run a tape through an EQ to boost the guitar or remove the boom - nowadays, anybody can do digital remastering), insert fade-ins and fade-outs and cross-fades, burn the disc, compose the disc label and the inserts, and put the whole package together. Granted, I am not doing this as efficiently as possible (a technical point I won't go into), but the fact that I have burned maybe a dozen different discs in four months is not a matter of the time it takes - it's a matter of not having a compelling desire to have those bits easily accessible on CD. And the reason it isn't compelling is because, of all the DATs I have, only to a precious few do I have a real emotional connection - primarily because I was at the show. In fact, I am having a hard time coming up with a single live show which I didn't attend that I would want to spin up to CD. I've got at least a hundred DATs for which there is blessed little desire to archive beyond where they're at now - on the rustable tape that was the impetus for the new PC in the first place.

Why do we collect? It's an activity that fits well into the way our brains are wired - constantly organizing, looking for patterns, identifying holes or gaps and wanting to fill them, categorizing and pigeonholing. It meets a need to appear prosperous in this matter-oriented society; perhaps it's much older than our Western civilization, hearkening back to our hunter/gatherer days, when successfully collecting meant the difference between satiety and going to bed hungry. Taken to an extreme, though, collection turns into obsession. Obsession is unanchored desire. The anchor, the prize, of collecting live music tapes is the creation (or better yet, re-creation) of positive emotion - buoyancy, transcendence, the lift, the buzz. You know, the reason you go to all those shows in the first place! But it's easy to lose sight of that, easy to let the left-brained collector take over from the whole-brained appreciator of the music. Easy to be convinced that bigger is better, that more is better, that crisper is better, that unique is better. Truth time, folks: only better is better (and besides, it's not how big it is, it's how you use what you've got that counts).

To have all the tapes from last tour, or all the tapes, period, is seductive, if only because it can feel like the human thing to do, and we are wired to not automatically moderate such behavior (that is, we won't become sterile or outcast or otherwise debilitated if we Collect Them All). But collection for collection's sake fails on two counts: it's unproductive, and it can be foolishly exclusionary. Unproductive in the sense that, no matter how good the band is, they're not going to be on 100% of the time. You will not enjoy every song they play; you'll feel the draw of the lavatory during [insert pissbreak title here]. Some shows will feel like one continuous stretch on the can. Burn-out is imminent when you feel yourself a steady diet of the same... thing... over... and... over... And foolishly exclusionary because you can spending so much time working on your collection that you'll end up missing other opportunities to be introduced to excellent music (Benjy Eisen describes the lure, and how he overcame it, in his inaugural JamBands column). I recall being annoyed several times during my Phish tape-trading days when the trading partner would send me unsolicited non-Phish music; in retrospect I think, What a fool I was for thinking that my life would not be enhanced by the music of Dave Matthews, moe., and Jambay!

These are exciting times to be a fan of good music. I've recently been introduced to KVHW, the latest vehicle for Steve Kimock's unbelievably soulful guitar playing; after ho-hum experiences with Zero and The Other Ones I was wary of the hype about "Jerry Garcia's favorite unknown guitarist", but his new band sets a new standard for technical fusion brilliance (and it doesn't hurt that Ray White, one of Frank Zappa's frontmen, lends his mellifluous voice and rhythm mastery to the mix). I had the good sense to bring a deck to my first show, and so was able to burn CDs immediately. What I discovered is that, despite the fact that the tape sounds good, it sounds even better because the music is burned into my brain more tenaciously than the bits bite into the dye on the disc - the medium serves to draw forth the emotions I felt in the moment. I'm not particularly interested in getting more KVHW, except the other show I saw (and didn't tape), even though I consider them one of the best live acts around.

I'm feeling similarly conflicted about the Disco Biscuits. I purchased their second album (Uncivilized Area; click here for a review) at a Homegrown Music Network-sponsored show, and it's been in heavy rotation ever since. I feel as excited about the Biscuits as I did when I first heard Phish nine years ago. As I enter the fray and begin trading for my first live tapes, I find myself wary of getting in too deep, too soon. My first live Phish tapes were treasures; they were hard-won, they came as gifts, and they came in small numbers. They didn't all sound excellent; some had ugly cuts, some were hissy, but they were all special because they were meaningful. Once I had enough tapes to be considered a serious trader, I started running into trouble. Several packages of tapes would arrive every week. I had a hard time keeping up with them. Some tapes sounded awful; after a few seconds, I immediately put them in into the recycle box. I burned out on more than one occasion, setting aside new jamband music in favor of the CD's I used to listen to in college. There was little attachment to most of those tapes that I acquired in volume - and that's the situation I'm in now as I try to find a reason to want to spin up a show I didn't attend off a tape I've only listened to twice onto a CD that I'm unlikely to ever listen to. I want to avoid that with the Biscuits. I want to avoid that with all good music.

As a (former?) taping snob, I used to mock those who would post to the Net, searching for a show they attended. "Fools," I thought. "You don't want that show; you want the Bomb Factory, you want Red Rocks, you want Bangor. The show you went to sucked." I dismissed their search as a quest borne of sentimentality; these are not serious music fans. But that's changed now. The shows in my collection that have meaning, and the ones which will be spun to CD, are those for which I have a ticket stub - and the memories of that show.

Of that chapter of my life.


DM