The Grateful Dead were one of the most successful live acts of the rock era. Performing more than 2,300 shows between 1965 and 1995, the Grateful Dead’s reputation as a “live band” was—and continues to be—sustained by thousands of live concert recordings from every era of the group’s long and colorful career. In Live Dead, musicologist John Brackett examines how live recordings—from the group’s official releases to fan-produced tapes, bootlegs to “Betty Boards,” and Dick’s Picks to From the Vault—have shaped the general history and popular mythology of the Grateful Dead for more than fifty years. Drawing on a diverse array of materials and documents contained in the Grateful Dead Archive, Live Dead details how live recordings became meaningful among the band and their fans not only as sonic souvenirs of past musical performances but also as expressions of assorted ideals, including notions of “liveness,” authenticity, and the power of recorded sound.

John Brackett is an independent scholar and author of John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression, and coeditor of The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches.

List of Illustrations  xi
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction. Becoming Live  1
1. “To Capture That Special Feeling”: Recorded (and Recording) Liveness (The Warner Bros. Years, 1966–1973)  31
2.  “The Next Best Thing to Being There”: Tapes, Taping, and an Alternative Aesthetic of Recorded Liveness  61
3. A Time of Reckoning: New Approaches to Producing and Marketing Liveness (The 1980s, Part 1)  85
4. “That Quintessential Spirit of the Band”: “Touch of Grey,” the “Betty Boards,” and the Rebirth of the Dead (The 1980s, Part 2)  105
5. “The Live Feel of a Tape”: From the Vault, Dick’s Picks, and the Language(s) of Liveness  125
6. Post-Dead: “Obstinately Physical,” “Vaporous Cargo,” and the Material Remains of Liveness  152
Conclusion: Memento Mori  169
Notes  177
Bibliography  201
Index  211