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The Future's Here
by David 'ZZYZX' Steinberg - zzyzx@ihoz.comDoes anyone remember 1-900-CAL-DEAD? While that number had bulletin boards for people looking for riders and something called "tour sex" that I was always too scared to try, the reason why I called it religiously was that it had next day setlists. I would spend maybe $10 to hear a voice read out really really slowly, "Set One, first song. Touch of Grey... Greatest Story Ever Told [tick tick tick tick]... Row Jimmy... Minglewood Blues [tick tick tick]... Ramble on Rose..." Right before I'd go on tour, I'd call and write down the lists. "Damn, they got my 'Scarlet->Fire!'" "Whooo-hooooo no 'Tennessee Jed' for me!"
Believe it or not, CAL-DEAD was a treat. Before it existed, there were two ways of finding setlists after a show. You could have someone there give you a call or you could wait until your first show of the tour and ask people. Finding a Dupree's Diamond News [free handout that had setlists in it] was the motherlode. This is for the Grateful Dead though. It was a lot harder, nearly impossible, to get any Phish information until very recently. In 1992 - which isn't that early in the Phish world - I was wandering around the U Mass Amherst campus trying to get the setlist from the previous night. I asked every single person wearing a Phish t-shirt there. Finally one person said he was there. "Do you have the setlist?" "Well it was my first show, so I doubt it." "I don't care that much as long as they didn't play 'Harpua.'" (I had seen a "Harpua" at my first show - it was the song that hooked me onto Phish - but it would be over three years later until I even heard it on a tape.) "Ummmmmmmm I think that they did." "I doubt it. It's a song about a cat and a dog that get into a fight. They never play that." "No, I think that they did." It took actually getting the tapes a few months later for me to believe him.
Exactly seven years and 2 months after that day, friends of mine were seeing Phish at Merriweather Post Pavilion. During the course of the show, I got three different calls. I was able to hear all of the "Free" and "Meatstick" with better sound than some concerts that I have seen. Not only that, but when I got the call during "Free," I had already seen the first set setlist. The delay between Phish playing a song and me knowing about it was about 20 minutes.
While none of this is really new, the speed at which this is increasing is breathtaking if you look back to see how far we've traveled in so short of time. Computing my Phish Stats went from spending a couple hours with my setlist notebook and adding stuff up, to selecting 100+ shows out of a check box, to adding a line or two to a webpage We've reached the point where people whine when there is no setlist posted 10 minutes after the expected end of the show, where I get angry email when I forget to warn people that I'm seeing a few shows and Phish Stats will be up late. It's not just information that's being passed around though. What's really impressing me is how quickly the music is being spread.
I currently am listening to cd's of the 7/4/99 Phish show. Despite not taping the show, I got the cd's the Friday after I got home and I didn't have to set up a tape trade. I downloaded them.
Perhaps the most important development in tape trading in years, the e-tree is still in its infancy. The way it works is that someone extracts the contents of a cd, track by track, to their hard drive. Shorten - a lossless compression technique - is applied to the wav files to make them a little smaller; this is relative mind you, 100 megabyte files are not uncommon. They then place them up on an ftp server. (I'd give out some of the names here, but the owners of the servers would kill me.) After sucking the files down over a high speed connection (like my shiny new cable modem) to your computer, you reverse the shorten process. Then you can burn the tracks onto a cd. The whole process takes about 2-3 hours if you can get a fast enough connection to the server. It's faster than the Post Office and no postage is needed.
There is something magical about this whole process. Someone in Atlanta has a cd. Without transferring any physical property from Atlanta to Seattle, I can get an identical copy of that cd. While I love making cd's to listen to, I hate the whole process of trading. I will do nearly anything to avoid having to go to the post office and mail off a bunch of packages. Yet I feel guilty about hardly ever doing tape trades. For me, this is the perfect compromise. I plan to upload Oswego to a server almost as soon as I get home and burn the tapes. Other than tying up my computer for a few hours - and one of the great things about e-trees is that you can do all of the annoying downloading part while you're out of the house or sleeping or something - there is no real effort required on my end. Trees will be seeded, music will be shared, people will be happy, and it will happen faster than any normal tape tree could.
As much as I love e-trees, I should mention the problems that they have. When I burn a cd the old-fashioned way from dat, I have to listen to it. That lets me know about any sound problems with the source before I burn it. I can know whether I need to normalize the wav [1], edit out a click or a pop, or just trash the whole thing because it doesn't meet my standards. With e-trees, it's easiest to burn first and then listen to it. Another problem that comes up is the issue of tracks. I'm very anal about where I track individual songs. I'm sure you are all surprised to hear about me getting obsessed over something trivial like this, but if I fast forward to track 6, I want to hear the music, not 10 seconds of cheering before the song begins. After making some 200 Grateful Dead cd's and about 300 cd's in total, I have a feel for where tracks should go. Other people have the nerve to have their own - obviously wrong - opinions on this. I haven't yet made new copies of cd's just because I didn't like where the tracks on the old versions were, but I've come close on some occasions.
Fortunately, the damage possible is limited due to my knights in shining armor, People for a Clearer Phish. In their attempts to prevent people from taking a 12th generation analog tape, converting it to an mp3, adding a whole bunch of echo, converting it back to a wav, and doing cd trades with it, the unfortunately acronymed PCP have created a long list of standards. While I don't like all of them myself, the most important thing is that there is a set of standards. When I download a show, I know that it will meet certain criteria. Maybe they're not my criteria, but they're pretty darned close. I know that when I download a cd, it will be something that I will be able to download and burn. When people cast a spell, they have to get all of the ingredients right; you can't just substitute eye of toad for eye of newt and hope for it to work. PCP standards are the spell book for the magic of the e-tree. Cast the spell correctly and music will spread across the world.
David Steinberg got his Masters Degree in mathematics from New Mexico State University in 1993. He first discovered the power of live music at the Capitol Centre in 1988 and never has been the same. His Phish stats website is at www.ihoz.com/PhishStats.html
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