El esfuerzo, consciente o inconsciente, con el público detrás de un teléfono me hizo recordar a las personas que anteriormente realizaban esa preservación de la memoria a través del audio, llevándonos a la repetición de un concierto, permitiéndonos descubrir no sólo las diferentes versiones y covers, también que los músicos en la mayoría de las ocasiones repiten el mismo discurso noche tras noche, cambiando únicamente el nombre de la ciudad.
Los bootlegs podrían ser los antecesores de la serie de vídeos que vemos en la actualidad, de la misma forma aparecían con mala calidad, pero en algunos casos la grabación no autorizada intentó ser profesional, algunos bootleggers fueron capaces de vender estas rarezas a veces mediante la adición de ingeniería de sonido de calidad profesional y el diseño de un empaque, sabemos muy bien que Pearl Jam terminó de capitalizar la idea haciendo bootlegs autorizados, pero ese ya es material para otro texto.
La anterior conclusión llegó mientras escribía sobre la evolución del público de conciertos, sin embargo hasta días después de la publicación de la editorial Put That Shit Away me encontré con la historia de los bootleggers de The Grateful Dead en el libro Retromanía de Simon Reynolds, del que les dejo un extracto libre de traducción:
Another aspect of Deadhead culture that's about communality and circulation is tape trading. From very early on Deadheads started recording shows, a practice that was first tolerated by the band and then encouraged, with The Grateful Dead making provisions for a special area for tapers at each of their shows. There was a huge demand for cassette recordings of the band's performances, in part because The Grateful Dead's official studio albums were airless affairs that failed to capture the electricity of the band in full improvisational flow.
Deadhead culture's communal ethos meant that if anyone requested a tape, the taper had to make them a copy. Tapers also got into trading recordings with other tapers in different parts of the country. All the resulting excessive documentation and redundancy anticipated aspects of today's retro culture, like the multiple clips of the same gig videoed on cellphones and uploaded to YouTube.
The taping phenomenon has a paradoxical aspect. The angle on the Dead has always been that you really had to see them live to 'get it': you needed to experience the flow of the moment, the pure quicksilver magic of Garcia's soloing as it rippled out into the cosmos. Taping the shows attempts to capture that evanescent 232 beauty but in the process goes against the 'be here now' spirit of psychedelia. Indeed, the tapers became obsessed with recording quality.
Instead of dancing and getting lost in music, they would spend the show crouched beside their tape-recording equipment, constantly adjusting the recording levels (sometimes listening to the show through headphones plugged into the machine) or repositioning the microphones. They'd admonish dancing Deadheads for bumping into the equipment or chatting too loudly on the periphery of the tapers sections. Like the dad with a video camera welded into his eye socket at his kid's birthday party, the tapers were not fully present; they missed, partially at any rate, the very event they were attempting to save for eternity.
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