Grateful dead setlists1/7/2023 These visuals are not, except in a few rare cases, photos of the band. But the history as compiled and archived by Rodriguez also emphasizes the project’s visual aspects. There’s also the music, of course: magnetic tape capturing audio documents of the Grateful Dead onstage in all their often-erratic, sometimes transcendent glory. To Rodriguez, they’re documentation of the art project he’s shaped. To the rest of us, those photos look like huge, wall-mounted shelving units filled with thousands upon thousands of cassette tapes, each meticulously labeled, and all placed carefully in chronological order. Rodriguez characterizes the result of acquiring, organizing and archiving his collection of live Dead tapes as “what technically might be called a relief sculpture with an additive process.” By way of explanation, he points to several images near the beginning of After All is Said and Done which document his collection. Nobody knows for sure.Īnd as Krimko explains, since Rodriguez was already “an active artist with a conceptual bent, it wouldn’t be a mischaracterization to call the idea itself an artistic proposition.” And that’s precisely what the author of After All is Said and Done proceeds to do. As Stuart Krimko asserts in one of the book’s many essays, Rodriguez “was struck with the Sisyphean impulse, perhaps familiar to many completist Deadheads, to acquire a copy of a tape of every show the band ever played.” Most estimates place that number somewhere in the neighborhood of two thousand recordings. The tapes themselves are at the heart of Rodriguez’s project. A breathtakingly impressive work, After All is Said and Done represents the kind of creative fanaticism that could only come from a Deadhead. A massive tome–nearly LP-sized, more than an inch thick and weighing in at close to four pounds–Rodriguez’s book represents 12 years of dedicated and exhaustive research. Rodriguez has brought together the various components of this underground tradition in his new book, After All is Said and Done: Taping the Grateful Dead 1965-1995. At first, concert tapers had to be sneaky, but by late in the Dead’s historical arc, they were acting with the tacit approval of the band. Using crude wax cylinder recording devices, audience members were “bootlegging” live opera performances as early as 1901.īut fans of the Grateful Dead took the practice to a new and previously unimagined level in their documentation of the group’s concert history. As Clinton Heylin chronicles in his exhaustive 1994 book, Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, people have been making unauthorized recordings of live music since the dawn of recording technology.
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