Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 10:56:20 -0800 To: fjb From: Jonathan Seff Subject: Re: Weir 5/10/92 I just got this VERY LONG message about the show, pasted below if you're interested. Jon ---- This is more information than you want to know but it will prove the TRUTH, I hope. My name is Bob Aronson. I taped nearly every west coast appearance of the Grateful Dead, JGB, Bobby, and others from 1990-till the first end. The day Jerry died all of my masters where sealed and have not been circulated at all. If you have that tape, then it descended from a few of the best human beings alive, and you are blessed. May it roll forever. One day I will come out of seclusion and ALL of my material will be digitized and posted. This will be a **Slack** process so I don't know when exactly. My tapes are very unique. I worked very hard at it. I traded with a select few, several in Europe, but mostly I became a taper to turn on people WHO DID NOT TRADE, so many of my best gems are traded in NON TAPER circles. My mission was to give the "have nots" something that the "haves" all wanted. Also I like to tape as much of the audience as possible: half time music, post show, etc. Incedentally my collection is alwayes available to the members of the Grateful Dead organization. Everyone in the organization. That particular Bobby tape was made with a Denon DAT machine hooked into my cheapest mics: Sonics Mics made for that model TCDD3 DAT (sony sized) designed by a very talented guy up in Oregon named Guy Lombardo - who I later had the honor of meeting at a Radiators gig at the Hyatt in Eugene a few years since... He makes custom mics for a variety of Digital and Video apparatus, and the mics are worn directly on YOUR HEAD. I higly recommend them wher mic sre not allowed. I preferred to wear FBI or Elvis Costello glasses, unless at the Warfield where I would wear a nice homosexual looking pair of fruity pebbles glasses. I NEVER got busted (or laid) with sonics because I was fucking disciplined, and I'm not gay, not that I have anything against Jerry Seinfeld. I never moved my head laterally, and I could run my deck BY FEEL and would never expose any apparatus to security even though they had long suspected what I was up to. I drove them nuts. On the original tape you can hear me at the bobby gig, then talking to Bobby directly after the gig, (Mike took my photo with bobby) and then getting into my car and RACING 150 miles to Jerry/Grisman at the Warfield at which point you hear my conversation with Cheryl (BGP Security at the Warfield door) who searched me, and failed, and then let me into the interlude of ARABIA at the end of Jerry/Grisman's first set. I had started the tape again 10 feet in front of the door. Man I was sly. 2 shows, one tape, one day, 3hours and 150 miles apart. Its a great story and its true I swear. Let it be known that Bobby was known to perform off the record throughout the years. Occasionally, a sneaky boy like me would get in on that action, even at private gateherings around a campfire. So if you have'nt heard of the information on a tape please DO NOT correct it logically with guess work. It becomes like a game of telephone and has fucked up deadbase for years. Pompous arguements have no validity as to misconstued details. Always trace the source. The sound system in Cachagua was borrowed from a local band at the time known as "The Young Presidents". There was one large JBL Speaker on stage left and a smaller Altec-Lansing on stage right. The stage was in the south end of the back yard and faced north to the back deck of the house about 60 yards up the slope. I stood like a statue about 12.7 feet in front of the big speaker, with my FBI glasses on. Therefore, it is a binaural stereo omnidirectional recording with a mono source (One speaker). A mono source in a feild of space with a stereo pair. This is the tried and true best method of recording with Sonics. I got results like this everytime I used them in this way. Those silly text book readers who would position themselves in center, equidistant from left and right simply moved themselves too farr away from left OR right. Being close to THE SOURCE can not be out done by any other positioning. Fuck stereo sourcing: two mics create stereo without needing two sources, silly rabbits. Standing stiff in my DEA glasses, wiggling my feet like a russian bottle dance, without moving my head, Bobby knew I was a weirdo, but he never figured out why....or maybe he did. He impressed me that day because he works just as hard no matter what the gig, just like I did, and the sound guys. There were about 20 kids down in my general area in front of the imaginary stage, and the rest of the "Grown ups" were eating the donated food and asking about who Bobby was and when Jerry Brown would arrive. I particularly love the dog that barked during a tune and Bobby had to warn to "Quiet Down Out There!" That should dispel any INCORRECT assumptions that my recordings ever came from a soundboard. They don't. The band does that quite well all by themselves EXCEPT FOR THAT DAY THERE WAS NO BOARD TAPE. Ask the dude from Ultrasound (I believe) that had the long dark hair and handle-bar moustache. He was always with Healey and gang at the dead shows I never knew his name because I was not a brown-nosed taper and I never told him that I recorded the gig. One hint: He was the same guy at the David Grisman/Tony Rice GIG in Carmel Sunset Center at 5/28/94, where I handed david Grisman masters (ran two decks) of the show directly afterward. Otherwise, I was known as the "Mad Taper from Hell" (affectionately) because I would haul 100 pounds of gear to a show: a four mic mix of AKG C414b TL and C460B into a custom Hollywood Sound Corporation M-S stereo mixer with every feature imaginable (made for Nagras ie) and lots of lead acid batteries, extra tape, every adapter invented, 48v phantom, purple and red and blue cable, special sauce. I was really friendly and somewhat in a hurry all the time and I would allow anyone to hook into my system and have a patch, unless I simply ran out of space, like at Shoreline. I would offer to run your deck, and usually not fuck it up. My tapes have a unique signature of "live mix" since I always fucked around with the phase and with your minds. I wore tha cans often. I broke every known rule of stereophonic recording because I am an obsessive seeker. Often I would get the best results imaginable. Sometimes they were pig vomit on toast. Every time they were more than the sum of their parts and SOMETHING DIFFERENT THAN THE SAME OL PERFECT STEREO PAIR 17.5 feet in front of board....or the board itself for that matter. That shit (no offence) was always available and always just peachy in the same ol homogenized way. Anyway, that bobby gig took place on somebody's personal estate in deep Carmel Valley, CA not far from the Los Padres Dam. There were grapes growing on the estate. Jerry Brown never showed up but if you follow your sources on the tape you will hear that he phoned into the event. you will also hear that I spoke directly to Bobby afterward, as I had my picture being taken with him by my buddy Mike from Alabama, who at the time worked at the Highlands inn in Carmel (as bartender), where Phil Lesh likes to hang out. Mike took excellent photographs and who in fact let me know about this gig. He has since moved back to Montgomery Alabama, and I've lost track of him, so please pass that along to him if you know him. May tapers live on like the Dead in the various incarnations of form and space and time. I can be contacted at Bob@who.net anytime. Love, peace, and Da-Da, Boobers San Mateo, CA http://members.tripod.com/~baronson Bob@who.net ***Slack is a reference to Slack, if you know what I don't mean, in which case do not worry, just give money to Bob Dobbs*** App\Http\Controllers\Api\FileDownloadController::download(): Return value must be of type string, none returned