Recording The Grateful Dead: The Culture Of Tapers

Mark A. Rodriguez’s ‘After All is Said and Done’ explores a chapter of Grateful Dead history embedded in the band’s narrative. Deadheads didn’t invent taping concerts. 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. Using crude wax cylinder recording devices, audience members were “bootlegging” live opera performances as early as 1901. But fans of the Grateful Dead took the practice to a new and previously unimagined level in their documentation of the group’s concert history. 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… read more >