99% Invisible - 561- Long Strange Tape

Episode Date: November 22, 2023

The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great.  But because the cassette was so much cheaper and easier to use and portable, a lot of people didn't care so much about the audio quality. They just wanted to be able to use something that they could carry around with them. The cassette’s other big advantage: it was easy to record on.We talked to Marc Masters about his new book High Bias, about the history of the cassette. One chapter about concert bootleggers covers perhaps the greatest success story of the cassette: Grateful Dead live tapes.Long Strange TapePlus we're featuring a bonus story that we produced in 2016 in collaboration with Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything about a place where cassettes were of vital importance.

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I've been working in radio a long time. It's been so long that when I first started out, I did all my interviews on cassette tape. I'm a RANCE PMD-222 to be exact. I have a soft spot for cassettes and that machine in particular. But honestly, cassettes never really sounded all that great. So it was assumed that people would use cassettes for voice recordings, things like reporters using them in the field. That's Mark Masters.

He has a new book called High Bias about the history of the cassette. But because the cassette was so much cheaper and easier to use and portable, a lot of people didn't care so much about the audio quality, they just wanted to be able to use something that they could carry around with them. Portability was crucial to the success of the cassette. That's 99PI Engineer Martín Gonzales, who knows a thing or two about making things sound good. Cossettes weren't meant to be as high fidelity as vinyl or real to reels.

They weren't meant to go where those other formats couldn't. The guy Lou Ottens who invented it, his first idea was I'm going to cut out a block of wood and put it in my pocket and see what feels comfortable and then I'm going to try to make a cassette player that matches that size. Cossets had another big advantage. They were much easier to record on. Before the compact cassette was introduced, recording anything was hard to do. The equipment was expensive, the tapes were expensive, it was easy to mess it up.

You kind of had to be sort of a semi-professional to be able to figure any of this out. The cassette wasn't really the best format in most ways, but it was the most useful format. Mark's book has stories of all kinds of cool scenes that were only made possible by the use of cassettes. Underground home recorded, lo-fi, and view-at. Early hip-hop blasting from New York City Boomboxes. A treasure trove of Cambodian tapes stashed away in the Oakland Public Library. But there was a chapter that made me realize there's one band that represents the ultimate triumph of the cassette.

The Grateful Dead. Look, I am very much not a deadhead. Sorry to our listeners who are, but honestly, up until now, I thought they sucked. The music's fresh herein are solely that of Martin Gonzales and do not necessarily represent an MPI stature or serious exam. Alright, I've come around a little bit on them, but it's just, I was like, Mr. Cool Music guy, you know? I'm the type of a corner you had a party to tell you. Actually, my favorite

Beach Boys song is the title track from their 1968 album Friends, which I think is probably the apex of their post-pets sounds there. Let's be friends. I thought the dead were for a very different type of person. You know the kind I mean. The ones whose natural habitat is in the parking lots of jam band shows. Old schoolies and people my age kind of living an old school

Hippie life where they're just like in a van. They're selling burritos there white and they have dreadlocks and they're like wearing no shirt and they're selling mushrooms out of a bag. That's writer and dead head Sophie Hagueney. Like a lot of people my age, I got into the dead biosmosis through like my dad, and then it was just like what we had in the car growing up. She knows what people think about dead fans. I approach loving the dead with some amount of self-deprecation just because I'm aware that it's not for everyone to listen to like endless jams. It can be, I think, really alienating for people who might not have a natural way in. My way into the dead was through cassettes. I found it so charming to imagine total strangers

united by their love of this band, mailing each other tapes of shows that maybe neither of them even went to. But let's rewind the tape back to the beginning of the Grateful Dead. I gotta admit, this kinda rocks. What you're hearing is their first known live recorded from the January 1966 acid test.

These were happenings thrown by Ken Keezy and his group, The Mary Pranksters. Everyone was dozed on LSD and there were crazy lights and experimental spoken word performances. The dead became the de facto house band. They became close with the era's most prolific producer of acid, Ausley Stanley, also known as Bear. He became the band's patron and first sound engineer, building gigantic high fidelity PAs for them. Bear started recording the band in his quest

to improve the quality of the live sound. They explained this in this 1991 interview. My way of doing that was to constantly play in the tapes back, listen to the tape, listen to the house, adjust them, listen to the tape. Listen to the house. After every show, we gathered in the hotel and played back the night skates. It was always a tape being made. Throughout the late 1960s, the dead expanded from their Bay Area roots and started touring nationally. They became a focal point for the counterculture. Their shows were never the same twice. They would make up the set list as they went linking songs together with extended improvisations. The magic of their live shows didn't quite translate into their studio albums. They released a few official live albums that were closer to the experience, but people really wanted

to hear every show, to hear the differences, to hear if there might be something new they're playing, if there might be some new take on an old song. Intrepid fans would sneak in their own tape recorders and microphones to try to capture the elusive raw magic. Early tapers were mostly still using bulky real-to-reels. When the tape ended, you had to unspool the whole reel to switch tapes. It was a difficult and time-consuming process to do mid-set. And it wasn't quite accepted yet, so you might have to hide it somewhere, It was a difficult and time-consuming process to do mid-set.

And it wasn't quite accepted yet, so you might have to hide it somewhere, you might have to try to figure out a way to put a whole real-to-real deck like in your pants or something. Mark isn't kidding. Tapeers resorted to elaborate measures, like disguising a mic stand as a leg brace, or burying their gear in the stadiums field a couple days before the show. In those early days, illegal bootlegging was a widespread concern in the music industry. And at first, the band was opposed. The crew would confiscate the tapes or even snip their cables. The taping quickly became so widespread that the band came to a sort of grudging acceptance.

Here's the 1971 recording where guitarist Bob Weir and bassist Phil Lesh poked fun at a taper who is a little too close. Hey, you down there with the microphone. If you want to get a decent recording, you got to move back about 40 feet. It sounds a lot better back there, believe me. And Jerry Garcia had taped bluegrass shows when he was younger. So his philosophy was, when we're done with it, they can have it, you know. New York tapers formed clubs to trade recordings. They were the first to establish an important principle. The tapes couldn't be sold for a profit. You had to either swap for another tape

or simply give it away. The music was a communal resource to be shared freely. The band came to understand that people were taping simply to enjoy the music, not to make a profit. They also realized the tapes acted as free advertising for their concerts. And most importantly, they didn't want to be narks. The earliest cassette recorders were still mono and lower fidelity.

But throughout the 1970s, new higher fidelity portable cassette decks were released, made by brands like Nakamichi and Sony. Some even came with microphones. Tape-ing became more and more accessible. Suddenly with cassettes, it really all you had to do was pop it in the machine and hit record. There was almost nothing else to it. As the cassette spread, so did dead tapes.

When the band took a break from the road in the mid-1970s, the tapes kept circulating without them. By the end of the decade, the band was a cultural phenomenon. Caravans of deadheads would drive around the country following them around from show to show. At that point, cassette decks had widely replaced eight tracks in cars, so as you drove from one show to the next, you could listen to your dead tapes the entire way. The vibes never had to stop. Much like the dead's shows, every cassette was a little different. There are two main types of recording, soundboard and audience.

This is a soundboard recording. It's clear, tight, dry, very little crowd noise. These were recorded by the Dead's Road Crew, though sometimes they'd provide a feed to friendly tapers. Some of these leaked out to the tape trading community, but most of them went into the archives and weren't heard until much later. Audience recordings were much more common. There's a lot less clarity, but you get more overall blend of the band, the room sound, and the audience. This one was recorded at Bob's recommended 40 feet back. I mean, this sounds pretty good considering it's just a guy who stuck a tape deck down his pants and hoisted a mic up above the crowd. In order to share the tapes widely, they would get copied over and over.

People would have dubbing parties where they'd all each bring a tape recorder and they'd chain them all together, and later dual-deck cassette recorders could make copies without needing a second machine. But those copies didn't sound exactly the same. Every time you made a copy, you would reduce the fidelity of the tape further and further. The sound degrades a little bit more every time and the tape hiss multiplies. That's called generation loss. So a pristine first generation soundboard recording.

Sounds much worse after being copied just three times. You can hear it's way noisy. And if you copied it too many times, say, ten, it gets pretty rough. The music gets buried in noise and everything is all barbaric. Dead fans were willing to put up with these sonic drawbacks if it meant that they could listen to more dead, the sound even had an advantage over the official live albums. Cossets became associated with sort of a more authentic experience in a weird way. It didn't go to some recording studio and get polished.

It's just direct expression. This isn't something that's being passed through a lot of gatekeepers. All of this taping meant that deadheads could listen to virtually every single show. It led to this kind of extreme scholarship. Sophie Hagueney again. There's a kind of obsession with encyclopedic details,

but I think that it's really boring to hear someone talk for six hours about some minor point of some keyboardist from 1989. Unfortunately, if I were a deadhead, this is exactly the type of deadhead I would be. Dyerhard fans didn't just listen to the music. They collected it, organized it, and cataloged it. Labeling cassettes became an art onto itself. Fan magazine's published set lists and

had classified sections,peer seeks tape. I talk to the person who, by all accounts, has the single largest collection, Mark Rodriguez, an artist who builds massive sculptures out of copies of dead cassettes. My collection probably around 13,000 tapes or so. That's going to be multiples or doubles and triples of certain shows. The dead channeled almost their entire artistic energy into their live shows. These tapes make them perhaps the most documented artist across any medium. Say if you had a video recording of Van Gogh visiting his studio every day and making his paintings and knowing exactly what brushes he used.

You'd be like, oh yeah, like when he painted Starry Night on such and such a date, he used that Mongoose brush. We see their development, we get all the hiccups, we get all the flubs, we get all the successes. Dead fans can debate about the best versions of songs or best eras of the band, but because everything was captured, people sometimes even have their favorite detritus. Sometimes you want to listen to a song and you don't want to listen to the part where they're like, oh, the guitar is not really working that well, but I think that's also part of it. I like listening to Bob we're talking about like how hot it is in Oregon that specific time out like every time before it's been raining.

I know this may be the first time I ever been to Oregon. It didn't rain now. It's 2-DM hot. It wasn't like Bob's off the cuff comment about the weather was meant to like live forever and yet it kind of does. I don't think the band expected that half a century later, people would be listening to their tuning and stage announcements. Jonathan D. Stevens of Boston University 036369705, valid only with current label. Your wallet is up here.

But people weren't just listening to the tapes for the music. It was a way of carrying the atmosphere of a dead show into your everyday life. The tapes were kind of a hang. Fast forward to the early 1980s. The set sales had finally overtaken vinyl. The newly introduced Walkman created the power to soundtrack your life at all times.

Meanwhile, the dead were bigger than ever. They chose to fully focus on touring and went seven years without releasing a studio album. Even casual fans were mainly listening to the tapes. That was the only place to hear new songs outside of a concert. But there was a problem. Some of these tapers were driving other fans' nuts. Another person they were driving nuts was Dan Healey, the Grateful Dead's longtime sound engineer.

He told the story in a 1989 interview. Tapers got an inflated version of their own importance for a while there. They were beginning to lean on non-tapers who had seats that they wanted and stopped. One thing led to another and a concept of the taper section was like either band taping all together or organizing. So in October of 1984, the band set up an official taper section. Tapers would buy special tickets to sit behind Healey, where they wouldn't bother the other fans, who simply wanted to listen and vibe in peace.

At that point, the band's finances were dire. For their entire career, they'd struggled to break even. Their ticket sales were massive, but so was their overhead. They started considering their tape vault as a potential source of income, so they hired a prolific tape collector to help them sift through the archives. Hi, my name is Dick Lahtvalla and welcome to the Gravel Dead Vault. In 1974, I started collecting tapes and then I did nothing else for about 10 years. Dick Lahtvalla had struck up a friendship with the band and the crew over the years.

Sometimes they'd slip him copies of Soundboard recordings. He and other tap, had long advocated for official releases of these tapes, but the band always thought they were too low-fi to put out. Eventually, they came around. In 1993, they released the first CD of the Dix-Pix series, which was an instant success.

The advertising played up the rawness of the tapes, recognizing that fans had come to see it as a virtue. By 1991 CDs replaced cassettes as the most popular format. Many tapers had also switched to digital recorders, but those were much more expensive and CDR burners cost thousands of dollars at the time. The easiest way to share the recordings from fan to fan was still the cassette. The easiest way to share the recordings from fan to fan was still the cassette. Jerry Garcia, the lead guitarist and co-founder of the band known as the Grateful Dead, died today, reportedly of natural causes. He was 53 years old, he'd been in for a car... The Grateful Dead split up in 1995 after Jerry Garcia's death, but the story doesn't end there.

Similar taping networks sprung up around other bands. Dead tapes continued to circulate, and tapers still followed around the Dead's offshoots and solo projects. Deadheads congregated and communicated on the internet, which they've been doing since the invention of the internet. Their early home base was close to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, where many early internet protocols were developed. The lab was full of deadheads, and the bandwidth sometimes dropped by, too. One of the lab's first uses of email was to organize outings to dead shows.

As the internet slowly developed, deadheads were there every step of the way, from 1980s UZNet groups to AOL keyword dead. They're using the Internet to connect, but they still had to trade tapes and CDRs by mail. But it wasn't long before all physical media was rendered more or less obsolete by the MP3. In the early 2000s, fans embarked on a collective project to digitize and organize the recordings, which found a home on archive.org. Deadheads no longer had to cultivate their own personal libraries or track down rare recordings

themselves. With one click, they could pull up virtually any moment from the dead's entire history. And if they had a tape that was missing, they could share it with the rest of the fandom. The Walkman couldn't compete with the iPod. The cassette simply wasn't useful anymore. And so people started getting rid of them. The tapes are literally kind of worthless. The value that they hold is really only sentimental

and for people who possess this particular obsession, they function more like literal memories like souvenirs than as collectors items. 2023 saw the last shows by the final incarnation of the great full dead. Dead and company featured a couple of original members, plus some other Jam Band veterans, and your body is a wonderland singer, John Mayer, standing in for Jerry Garcia. There were still tapers, but now fans could livestream professional recordings of every show. Taping was no longer a necessity, but more fans could livestream professional recordings of every show. Tapping was no longer a necessity, but more of a hobby.

Sophie saw Dead and Co many times, including their July farewell shows in San Francisco. The culture of going to a massive stadium dead show that includes original members of the band. That feels like it's ending. I can't really see what replaces that. And that's really sad. Like, I think I'm like, what will I do next summer? Sophie is not the taper type,

but of course she did have her phone. Phone cameras have turned us into a culture of compulsive documentaries, simply because it's so easy. I asked Sophie if she had any videos from that last show. I actually did not take very many phone videos, but I did, you know, I have some, so let me just see what I have. They weren't exactly Cornell 77. All my videos are like six seconds long in low quality.

Okay, you can't even really, that's fire in the mountain. Let's see what do we get here. ["The Fire in the Mountain"] ["The Mountain Mountain"] So there you go. She told me the clips were so short because she kept having a sudden realization. It's a familiar feeling to me and probably to you too. You're having a great experience, so you plug your phone and take a photo or

video, maybe you've been posted right away. But then you realize, now I'm just looking at my phone. Documenting and sharing is so easy that it's become our new default, but this old man is going to shake his fist at a cloud right now and tell you, there is no way around it. Capturing a moment makes it harder to be in the moment. Dead cassettes are an artifact of when recording was rare and sharing took work. Tapers were volunteering on behalf of Deadhead's past, present, and future to try and capture every fleeting moment, to capture the entire moment,

not just the music, the feeling of being there. There's one place where cassettes are still the most useful format for music. We'll take you there after the break. take you there after the break. Back in 2016, we ran a story about a place where cassettes remained the most useful format. Documentary in Alex Lambert takes us there. The United States prison system has the largest prison population in the world. And when the more than two million prisoners in this country have access to music, it's often on cassette.

Well, my number one thing to keep around here is my walkman, my tape, my legal papers, and some bottle water. They had everything else. That's Adolfo Davis. At 14 years old, he was involved in a gang related shooting. He was tried as an adult in sentence to life in prison. Adolfo is 39 now and he's serving his sentence at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois. Listening to music on tapes is one of his only means of escape. That's the only way I think I've made it so far because I have a good imagination. I just close my eyes to my ear buds and I just begun.

In 1990, the year Adolfo was incarcerated, everybody was listening to music on, because that tapes. In fact, Adolfo had some with him when he went to prison. Yeah, I got locked up with a Waltman and I think like seven tapes, yeah, when I was in the field, drugs, I have a fanny pack and I have my Waltman and my fanny pack with my tape. And I've been listening to the Waltman while watching out for security for the police.

A fanny pack. Really caught up counts, but it's a fanny pack. Let's let's be real. Just a few years after Adolfo was locked up, the cassette tape would be all but replaced by the CD out here in the free world. But in prison, the cassette lived on. I've been telling my family, like, I need order to take the younger generations that I can tell you know the tape years.

And not just any old cassette tape is allowed in prison. Some prisons require a very specific type of cassette tape. It has to be clear. It has to be sonically welded, so it can't be taken apart and put back together. And the box it goes in has to all be also be perfectly clear. That's Steve Step, owner of National Audio Company, America's pre-eminent manufacturer of cassette tapes. The reason you can't have a five-screw cassette or maybe a colored cassette that's opaque is they don't want a razor blade or narcotics or something else to be enclosed in a cassette. They do have people in the correctional facilities who look at and inspect incoming materials and they have to be able to see through or they won't allow them man. Steve has gotten familiar with this subfield of cassette tape manufacturing even though it is not

the focus of his business. Mostly he makes normal cassette tapes for a number of different markets. Music labels, spoken word, audio books. Steve's factory in Springfield, Missouri produces both blank tapes and tapes with audio already on them. The machines collate all those parts together, transfer them across on a conveyor, and then wrap them with cellophane and put a tear strip in. Steve was one of the first people in the cassette industry, and he's one of the only people still in it.

We're the only people I know of. Most of the people left in the cassette industry are mom and pop shops or small operations. If you purchased a cassette recently from anywhere, from Radio Shack or from the merch table of some punk band you just saw live, it probably started out in Steve's factory. His company ships out up to 100,000 cassettes a day. And a small number of those cassettes are special orders for prisoners, made with clear plastic and without screws. Once the tapes leave here, we don't really see where they end up.

That's the part of the business that we can't see from where we are. As for why cassettes have stuck around in prisons all these years, it's hard to get a definitive answer because every prison is different. But there's one theory we heard from a few different people. Tapes are allowed because CDs are easier to weaponize. They say that it's the most safest way for them to listen to music because a CD you could break and maybe cut somebody with. That's Chris Barrett.

This tape of him was recorded a couple years ago for a short film. Chris used to run a service that helped families and packages to people in prison in New York State. He had a warehouse full of items that had already been approved by the prison authorities. Everything from food, clothing, boxer shorts, and yeah, cassettes instead of CDs. But he never really understood the logic behind it. They let me sell tuna fish cans that, you know, you pull off the top and that thing is metal. Like, it's much more dangerous than a CD is my point to tuna fish cans and a CD.

So I don't know why they come up with some of the rules that they come up with. We just try to stay within those guidelines. Chris, whose package sending service recently went out of business, also sold a lot of cassette walkmans. Walkmans used to be available for purchase in prison commissaries, but they generally aren't anymore, which makes them extremely coveted items. I'm out of here, so I take your care of it because it is breaking like I start crying. And where and tear is not the only threat to the life of a walkman. But when it's like a major shakedown and they bring other officers from other institutions,

they would just break your TV, break your radio, take your TV, take their radio, take those effects, once you destroy my walk, man, I cannot get another walk, man. It's probably one of the most prized items for theft. People try to hold eyes as much as they can, protect them as much as possible. That's Eifrin Paredes, Jr. He was a 15-year-old honor student when he was tried as an adult on a murder charge and sentenced to life without parole. He's always maintained his innocence.

Efren is 43 now, and during his 28 years in prison, he amassed a pretty big collection of music. Some of my favorites would probably be Kendrick Lamar, I like young GZ, Rick Ross, Nick Mills, I like young GZ, Rick Ross, Nick Mills, I like the way. At Muskegon Correctional Facility in Michigan, where E-Fren is serving as sentence, prisoners can actually have MP3 players. Inmates can purchase an MP3 player through the prison commissary and then download music to it through a kiosk provided by a company called Access Entertainment.

Before downloading, they have to transfer money to the company and receive a credit for a certain amount of songs. But there's a catch. And Michigan, there's a policy that they try to restrict as much music that would be labeled as parental advisory. In other words, the state of Michigan will try and sentence a 15-year-old as an adult, but when he becomes an actual adult, the state won't let him purchase music deemed inappropriate for a teenager.

It's interesting that the Department of Corrections has never taken any steps to restricting cassette tape purchases. We couldn't confirm that there were no restrictions on cassette music but Eiffren hasn't encountered them. And that's why he says a lot of inmates still prefer cassettes. They listen to them all the time, on their personal walkmans, and sometimes out loud. Actually, as we're talking right now, there's a gentleman in the bathroom washing clothes with his radio lines playing the song song play at your own risk.

Rudder, the part of the prison where Eiffren is locked up, is the wing that houses the prisoners in solitary confinement. We hear guys all the time yelling up to us saying, hey turn the music on, turn some music on, turn on Turn Rick Ross on turn on me You know something so that they can hear down there Something that's you know music from upstairs I used to pray for times like this the rhyme like this so I had to grind like that the shine like this and a matter of time I spit on some like the, and the matter of time I spit on some like

the fish in the back of the penny wagon, cuz like the wrist, see my dreams unfold. Prison's tend to be late adopters of technology, so maybe one day all prisons in the US will just make the switch from cassette to digital, or maybe they'll go to CDs first just to be illogically chronological. Whatever the format, the most important thing about music to E-Fran and Adolfo is escape and connection. Here's Adolfo again. Music connects us all together. Everybody's shared music with each other. You know, music allows everyone to escape in this place.

I can't, I can't do it without my music. In the days I rest my Waltman. I bought a walk man with somebody else to live stay with me. But I can go to sleep. But the days that you don't have your walk man? No, like I play my walk man like three days and I let it rest like two days. Well, he rests his walk man. That is love. Wow, he rests his Walkman.

That is love. That story was originally produced by Benjamin Walker and Alex Lampert, a slightly different version of the story aired on Benjamin Walker's degree of everything. Benjamin's got a new series coming out in January. That's going to be great because everything he does is great and groundbreaking. Go subscribe to the degree of everything. Benjamin's got a new series coming out in January. That's going to be great because everything he does is great and groundbreaking. Go subscribe to the theory of everything. Now.

99% of his work was produced and mixed this week by Martin Gonzales, edited by Chris Barube, fact-checking by Graham Haysha, music by Swan Raal and Martin Gonzales. Mark Master's book High Bias is out now is so great you can also hear him on the Waste Boy's podcast, Mark Rodriguez's book after all is said and done is a gorgeous object. Thank you to Jesse Jarno, who provided editorial support. He co-hosts the official grateful dead Dead podcast and his book, Heads, is a definitive resource on psychedelic counterculture. If you're dead curious but don't know where to begin, our website has a list of which tapes to start with.

It's a public service right there, and if you tune in to channel 23 of 3SXM, you'll find the official Grateful Dead channel, all dead, all the time. 99% of visible's executive producer is Kathy too. Our senior editor is Delaney Hall, Kurt Colstead is the digital director. The rest of the team includes Jason Dalyone, Emmett Fitzgerald, Gabriella Gladney, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Leigh, Lashmiddon, Jacob Moltenado Medina, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, and me Roman Mars. The 99% of visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north

in the Pandora building, and beautiful. Uptown, Oakland, California, home of the Oakland Roots soccer club of which I am a proud community owner. As other professional teams leave, the Oakland Roots are Oakland first, always. You can find us on all the usual social media sites. We are not on Letterbox, but Chris and Martín keep telling me it's the only good social media. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI and 99PI.org. Okay, here's none. Stitcher, serious ex-sum, Stitcher, I'm too sweaty I can't do.