A decade after Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack while at a drug rehabilitation facility on Aug. 9, 1995, the legacy he and the Grateful Dead left is stronger than ever.
That's not so much a comment about the young fans who follow such Dead-influenced "jam" bands as the String Cheese Incident. Nor is the band's spirit to be found in its full flower at Bonnaroo or other festivals furthering the scene the Dead anchored in its heyday.
If you really want to find the legacy of the Dead and its legion of Deadheads today, go online.
In recent months there's been an explosion on the Internet of what used to be called tape trading. This is not the illegal copying of commercially available music that is being fought by the major record companies. This is the free, generally legal exchange of fan-made concert tapes, radio broadcasts and material that was never officially released -- by the Dead and just about anybody else.
It's a world that is growing daily at an exponential rate -- and has its foundation in the community of tapers and traders that initially coalesced around and was nurtured by Garcia and the Grateful Dead.
"The Dead was the real forerunner," says Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of Internet Archive (www.archive.org), which features a Live Music Archive section for concert recordings. "The idea was you sell some things, you give some things away, and that balance really personified the Grateful Dead. They started a model."
The Live Music Archive's catalog of recordings just passed 25,000, up from 20,000 in February and half that figure in March 2004. About a tenth of those are of Grateful Dead shows, and the bulk of the rest are from bands that share the loose jam aesthetic but not all. The list of performers represented runs to more than 1,000 and ranges from aggressive Texas rock outfit And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead to Billy Corgan's short-lived Zwan.
Such other sites as Dimeadozen and the Traders' Den offer a full spectrum of selections. There's everything from obscure jazz dates from the '50s to major rock concerts that happened just a couple of days ago. Want to download Cream's Royal Albert Hall reunion shows from May? A vintage 1969 concert by the same band? They're there. Bruce Springsteen from the '70s? Easy. Arcade Fire at Lollapalooza last month? Yours for the taking. This isn't limited to rock bands with cult followings either. You'll find Mariah Carey and Ashlee Simpson concerts, and videos as well as audio recordings.
