A4: Olompali Aoxomoxoa Visions

Artifact 4: Olompali Aoxomoxoa Photo Visions............... 

Well DSP-freaks, I'm slow.  I meant to get more of my 5/8/77 goodies posted...(spoiler since I'm so late: tix from show/backstage pass/concert poster will be featured), but I went ahead and started working on my other website and arty farty projects.  Apologies.

So, to tied you over, I am going to post some AoxomoxoA flashback pix for you. I have a half-finished blog post on Olompali, and these shots were meant to be a featured part of it..but as I'm so damn pokey, I'll just get these up so you can enjoy.

Dig the original back cover shot by Thomas Weir (no relation to ole Bob that I know of...) and see if I didn't find that damn near same tree 41 years later! No acid Indians attacked me while I was there with my family (that I saw anyway)...though Phil and Garcia claim they still haunt that sacred adobe site .  Anyway, I don't want to go into too many details on this Olompali magic haunt, as it will make a killer post when I honor Aoxomoxoa in 2069, so just enjoy the pix.  Hope to be back soon with more fresh cake.

A3: Betty Cantor-Jackson Signed Ampex 456 Tape Reel: 5/8/77 Madness!

Happy 35th anniversary of 5/8/77!! Those are magic numbers, eh?  5-8-77.  5/8/77.  May 8, 1977.  Any way you write it, it jumps right out at you.  Cornell 1977.  THE Betty Cantor-Jackson deluxe recording.  Many a DeadHead's best sounding soundboard in their collection for a good many years/decades/lifetimes.  Serious Funk Factor.  Mutron III boogie-down. A Scarlet-Fire that could go on for days.  There's so much to say.....  In honor of this epic show, Dark Star Palace will be presenting a few 5/8/77 artifacts in the coming weeks relating to this Cornell gem.  We've got tape reels, backstage passes, tickets, posters, photos, audience recordings, BettyBoards, Matrix recordings....it's DSP's Cornell MADNESS!!

Betty Cantor-Jackson and Unterfunken with the DSP BettyBoard Reel

So, back to so-called sanity, Artifact #3 is a 10.5" reel of Ampex 456 tape that was signed by Betty Cantor-Jackson, with "Betty Boards" thrown on by Betty for good measure.  A nice Steal Your Face is on there as well. Ampex 456 is considered by many an audio freak to be the best sounding tape formula of all time.  It was Betty's favorite.  It was the Dead's favorite.  Listen to 5/8/77 and Lesh's bass....hear how it has this amazing creamy low-end analog smear that just sounds like a juicy plum?  That's 456.  The tape formula came out in the '70's and was the defacto studio standard for years. The Dead used it up through the '80 Warfield run at least.  Running it at 15ips (inches per second) and it's the bomb.  Run it at 30ips and it's a little smoother and more hi-fi, but not as juicy.  Dark Star Palace got rid of our Studer A810 some years back, but we now have an Anamod ATS-1 with a 456 tape card on it (with an Ampex ATR102 deck card) that just sounds amazing.  If you have the cash and don't like to be a tape machine mechanic, this is a sick way to listen back to all your dead CDs.

I was lucky enough to meet Betty through a mutual dead freak / friend: Dark Star Dan.  DSD is well known in the bay area as he ran the Grateful Dead night in the Haight for years doing some serious Dead DJ'ing.  Dan is a fellow audio engineer and currently works with Betty doing sound work at Glide in SF and other venues.  DSD invited my wife, son and I down to Glide one Sunday and we got to spend some time with Betty after the gig.  What a hoot!  Betty is still the hottie and still has a biting wit that will take off your toes and tongue.  Don't mess with this chick!!   Betty and I had discussed doing an interview for Dark Star Palace, but she went shy when I had mentioned I had thought of doing a remastering series through the Dead's old gear of some classic tapes and would she like to help do the Mastering?  That was the wrong line, as Betty really feels that folks have taken advantage of her over the years and she hates..more than anything...people fucking with her tapes.  Upppps!!!  Anyway, she was sweet about it and we emailed a few times on some other things, but I never pushed it or brought it up again.  I ran into Betty and her son a year or so after at AES in SF (the Audio Engineering Society) and we had a good laugh on it.  Betty was checking out the BAE (Brent Averill Enterprises) new 1073 modules that had just come out...a near-exact replica of the Neve 1073's that were in Garica and the Dead's Neve 80-series console that was at Front Street that Betty worked on over the years.  Seemed very full circle.

So there you have it... a BettyBoard reel, a recent photo of hottie Betty, and there is much more to come in the next few post to help celebrate this 35th anniversary of 5/8/77.

Tape of the Week?  Duh!  Get your BettyBoard tape of 5/8/77 out and crank it up!!!  You can check out several versions that are streamin' over at the Archive HERE.  Dancin', dancin', dancin' in the street...........

A2: The Grateful Dead's Meyer Sound VX1 Master Stereo Equalizer

 

Artifact #2.  The Grateful Dead's master stereo equalizer (serial #VX1-H910041...which makes it likely it's the 41st EQ manufactured) for front of house sound at their 1990's gigs (from 9/91 on).  This is Dan Healy's territory.  It's the Meyer Sound VX-1 Program EQ...the top of the line mastering-quality EQ made by Meyer just across the bay in Berkeley, CA.  It's been 22 years since this EQ was built and sent to the Dead while they were on tour, and Meyer Labs is still manufacturing the VX-1 today.  Wow. If that doesn't show you how well these were designed...mmm, analog sweetness. OK, now I know you're asking this, but where in the heck did I get this gem....right?

Well, this is one of those amazing weird little things that you just have to shake your head at.  As most of you know, one of the great Grateful Dead artifact incidents of all time was when some savvy Deadheads got wind that Betty Cantor-Jackson's storage facility was long overdue to have it's bill paid.  It was so overdue that the entire storage locker got auctioned off to...you guessed it...  some savvy Deadfreaks who pooled there $$$ together and won the winning bid for the locker contents.  Thus, today, we have pristine digital versions of so many great Betty Boards (like 5/8/77!). What a haul that box of tapes was (and the Dead turned down the option to bail out Betty and/or buy the contents for their own vault...tsk tsk, naughty Dead!).

Fast forward a few years / decades and I found myself in a similar situation....2 times in fact!  The first was a haul from a unknown roadie (Robbie Taylor?) who sold the majority of his Dead gear to a Russian studio musician north of San Francisco after Jerry died.  The Russian went down to the storage locker and got the entire haul: Meyer bass cabs from Phil, McIntosh tube amps from the 60's, McIntosh solid state amps from the 70's, Hard Trucker protoype cabinets, Alembic gear...and on an on. What a dream! I was lucky enough to get a good chunk of this sale, and will feature some of that gear in future posts.

The 2nd haul was via a famous custom-amp maker, Jason Moore, of MooreSound fame (check out his amps: http://www.mooresound.net/).  Jason put up this VX-1 on ebay a few years back, and I was intrigued when he said it was owned by the Dead, so I gave him a ring.  We hit it off right away, and by the end of the call I was STUNNED to find out that Jason didn't just have the Dead's old master EQ, but he had stumbled on and now owned the entire Bill "Kidd" Candelario storage locker.  Say What?  Turns out Jason had a family friend who owned a storage facility that had a locker that was so overdue on payments that they now become the owner of the contents. Whoa! Deja Vu!

Jason Moore and Kidd Candelario at Kidd's storage locker clean-out (copyright Jason Moore)

They called Jason when they saw that the contents had audio gear in it (figuring he might want it), so Jason came up from San Diego to the Bay Area and went to check out the locker.  Guess who was there to show him what was what?  That's right, Kidd.  So Kidd ends up giving Jason a private tour of all the audio gems he had amassed over the years. While Jason isn't a Deadhead, he did realize that this was special gear, so when he heard Dark Star Palace was trying to preserve as much of this old gear as possible, he was ready and willing to help me make it happen.  Thanks to Jason's help, I was able to purchase several items from this amazing Kidd collection, from the Dead's old 60's-70's mic locker (6 EV and Sennheiser mics) to various EQs (Meyer Sound, White Instruments).

This unit was signed off by Meyer, with complete audio spectrum scans, on 9/9/91.  It was shipped directly to the Grateful Dead (as can seen on the shipping label on the box) while they were staying at the Dumont Plaza Hotel in NYC.  This means that Healy could have added this EQ to the Dead's sound system for the remaining run of shows at Madison Square Garden (which started on 9/8) through 9/18/91 and continued to use it throughout the '90's and the Dead's final touring days.

Dark Star Palace currently has this EQ hooked up into our 24-track recording studio setup, where it sits happily alongside API, EMI, Chandler, Siemens and other classic EQs.  We have toyed with doing a Dark Star Palace series of remastered Dead shows through the Dead's old gear, but that will have to wait until another day.  In the meantime, we hope you have dug Artifact #2!  Onwards to #3.........

Until next time at Dark Star Palace.....

A1: Dark Star RSD LP (Paris '72)

 

Artifact #1.  Where to start?  Well, this little guy was just born today, so as it's the birthday of the first LP called "Dark Star" by the Grateful Dead, we have our first artifact.  I headed down to Amoeba in SF as early as possible as I figured the line was going to be long.  It was already in the high 70's when I got in line, and just a gorgeous day in San Francisco..and whoa..Record Store Day 2012 is absolutely out of hand!  I got there at 10:10AM and the line was already 1/2 way around the block...several hundred folks in line in front of me.  In 10 more minutes, it was closing the loop on the entire block.  I figured I had little chance at all to get one of the 4200 copies of this one-day only gem as each mom and pop record store was only getting a certain handful.  But, I was feeling my mojo, as I was able to get the 2nd to last copy by the time I got in.  Not to mention some amazing gems from Tinariwen, Pete Townsend, Bill Evans, Little Richard, Skip James, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Peter Tosh, Miles Davis...I mean, wow.  Good stuff.  Lots of colored vinyl.  Hope it was all analog sourced....

The Dark Star LP is 180 grams of nice inky-black vinyl.  The cover is in the '72 box set theme art vein with a Parisian Notre Dame gargoyle with a wreath of roses giving a distant Dark-Star-Crashing the tongue.  Not Bad.  The back is an simple circle/white Dark Star motif.  The inner label is classic Warner's 1970's green label.  It looked good. Felt good. Played good.  Why has it taken this band almost 50 years to come out with a LP like this?  1 song, 2 sides, a lot of weirdness.  Good mix overall (better than this weird Live Dead remix on Moble Fidelity..more on that later.) Hope you all can track down one of the 4200 copies. How come these weren't numbered? Don't pull a "limited" Beatles Mono box on us. Anyway, happy 4/20 +1.

Until next time at Dark Star Palace....

Introducing... the Dark Star Palace Archive

Greetings Heads!  

Long time and little seen!  My apologies for this brief 9 month vanishing act I just pulled. I mean, I do like to do this at parties after I'm a bit too tipsy, but 9 months is pushing it.  I DID get so many nice emails from DSP readers being concerned that I had pulled a Garcia or gotten so pissed off that the finish on my Alligator guitar wasn't perfect that I gave up the blog.  Not true!!  Thank you for those notes btw, but alas, after the Weir Symphony last year, my work and personal life took a dive for...well not the worse, but let's just say I was in dealin' mode!  My wife and I have 2 boys, currently aged 2.5 and 1.5 years old...and that should say it all.  Those boys needed some Grateful Dead education, and that meant the blog had to hold.

It's too bad too, as I have this wonderful interview with Dennis McNally I've been sitting on for over a year now....as well as great posts started on Olompali, 5/8/77, hanging with Betty, visiting Dan Healy in his studio, an afternoon exploring FM waveforms with Ron Wickersham, having Bob Weir cut me off in traffic...etc. etc.  All this weirdness that I know you weirdos will love to get wigged on.  Oh well, we all need to prioritize and focus.  

SO.... as I was laid up in bed with a thrown out back this weekend due to picking up my little beasts from their cribs, I started thinking of Las Vegas '92 and '93 and how MAGICAL it was to be up in those stands as lighting was striking all around the stadium and dust storms were brewing up behind the band...and how the rain clouds all cleared as they opened the 2nd set with Here Comes the Sunshine.  Man! How did those wizards do that?!? How lucky to have been bitten by that nasty little Dead Bug all those years back!  I though right then and there that I'd get up off my ass (mentally at least) and get this blog rolling again.  How to do it so that I don't get in my mode of turning each post into a mini-novel and picture book that takes up more time than I seem to have from now on...... then the answer came:

THE DARK STAR PALACE ARCHIVE!!

I figure I can start to do an inventory of DSP's Grateful Dead collection of STUFF, and using the Artifact of the Week model we started so many years back, would post a few quick pictures of said Artifact and then write up some interesting info on the item (if I have any).  It won't be as fancy, detailed and together (!) as I've done in the past, but at least you can check out and enjoy some of the truly insane and silly things in the collection.  I mean, the Chia-pet Garcia? A set of signed Wall of Sound documents and drawings? The Dead's main sound system equalizer by Meyer Sound?  One of 21 custom silver Steal Your Face belt buckles made by Bob Thomas?  A home video of Garcia tickling a Eel while scuba diving? I mean, really?

So what do you think?  Is this worth the time and effort?  Is this still of interest to all you Heads out there?   Post a comment and let me know.  If it's sounding promising, I'll start up the engines and light a match.  We'll see what and who get's lit first!

Until next time at Dark Star Palace....