45. Thank a Taper, aka Blanks and Postage

Certainly, the Grateful Dead pioneered taper culture by allowing (or giving into) and then supporting, even encouraging, fans to record their shows. Tapers brought their own audio equipment, bulky and rudimentary in the early days, and slowly built a taped catalog of live shows and a community and distribution network through which to trade and share those tapes.

While tapes exist of Grateful Dead shows in the 1960s, the band didn’t sanction taping until the mid 1980s. And when they did, selling “taper section” tickets, they allocated a space near the soundboard, what is agreed to be the best area of a venue for sound quality.

Tickets immediately sold out and fans came in droves to set up their Digital Audio Tape (DAT) machines and boom-hoisted twin microphones to record the shows. What was widely prohibited, often printed on tickets No Audio Recording Permitted, was suddenly legit.

The only covenant here, the only rule, if you will, was that these taped shows were not to be sold. But you could trade them. The Grateful Dead played 2,317 shows, and Phish has played roughly 1,700 shows. That’s a lot of tapes!

Well, with Phish now it’s almost exclusively streaming apps and membership services, though they still release live show CDs and YouTube has a good amount of shows available. Don’t get me wrong; traditional tapers still set up inside the venue, there is just a lot more options and practically instant access to live show recordings. Also, with live video streaming, the hashtag #couchtour has given a new relevance and real-time access to live shows. (See chapter 55.)

Despite the seemingly instantaneous access these days, there are still people who love to record and trade live shows. But instead of trading tapes or CDs, some folks trade hard drives that contain audience copies of every show in history. We’re talking terabytes, man!

Of course, the Grateful Dead pioneered the taper culture. And Phish was smart enough to continue to encourage the tradition. Both bands can ascribe much of their success to the tapers, the historians, the grassroots marketers. These bands welcomed an army of tapers to their shows who then proliferated recordings through the decades with tapes multiplying like some kind of cellular mitosis: one tape would become two tapes, which would then become four tapes, then eight tapes, introducing new fans to the music and even inspiring more tapers to join the crusade.

These days, there are plenty of websites out there where you can stream or download Phish music, most notably Etree.org or phish.in or phishtracks.com. Back in the 1980s, 1990s, even the early 2000s, before the Internet became widely used, the only way you could really get your hands on taped shows was through friends or pen pals, the latter of which was colloquially referred to as “blanks and postage.” If you mailed a taper blank tapes and a self-addressed, stamped envelope requesting a specific show, said taper would copy that show onto the blank tapes you sent and return them to you shipped in your envelope. Back then, you had to seek out physical tapes and CDs of shows, some more prolific than others. Some shows, some tapes were rare and even elusive.

In the late 1990s, I sent out my fair share of blanks and postage, eagerly awaiting the treasured tapes of seminal shows like Dark Side November 2, 1998, and Paradiso, Amsterdam ’97.

Back in the day, we had to walk both ways to and from the mailbox to send out BnPs for music that wouldn’t return for weeks. We had to use dual cassette decks to make copies for others on Maxell XL2 cassettes, which cost around $4 per show. It certainly wasn’t free, and it took time. Heaven forbid that you tried to high-speed dub those tapes!

Without blanks and postage and the kind tapers who worked to document and deliver, most of these shows just wouldn’t have been heard twice.

Tapers are the archivists, the historians of this music.

I think it’s safe to say that some of you first heard Phish’s music playing on a stereo off a cassette tape. Maybe your older brother hit you with some tapes when you were in high school or middle school? Maybe it was “Wolfman’s Brother?”

My introduction to Phish and Phish tapes was through a classmate in middle school, a hippie girl named Jennifer. We were close friends for a short time before I moved away, but I’m ever grateful for the tapes and CDs she shared with me. Thanks, Jenny!

And so, your mission, dear reader, if you choose to accept it, is to thank a taper! Send a friend one of your favorite shows…BitTorrent, mp3, CD, whatever format you prefer, but bonus points if you gift a cassette. And if you can give back or send thanks to the person who gave you that first Phish tape or CD, even better.

Share a tape or thank a taper today!