The views of the cartoonist are not necessarily those of the blogger. I actually like a rather large number of Dead songs. I used to have a pretty meager opinion of all those live Dead tapes since WMSE used to broadcast about 3 hours of hissy low-fidelity audience recordings every Friday evening... However, the Dick's Picks series and live things I've heard from archive.org and even more esoteric locations have led me to concede that they could, indeed, make interesting and accessible music in a live setting... There have been some very nice legit archive mainstream releases in the last couple decades, too. The compact disc format, and digital storage, transmission and manipulation of music in general, has served the Dead's Live legacy well, in my opinion. It's nice to not have to turn the record over every 17 to 22 minutes, for one thing. Also, the average tape deck generally provided pretty average sound reproduction, whereas the average CD player and computer sound card deliver performance to drool for by 1970's standards. Relatively inexpensively, too. Don't you think? Or don't you?
