Here are copies of the first few WBOTB
posts to rec.music.gdead, as well as a couple of emails that were sent out
to the WBOTB folks. xx posted anonymously to r.m.gd, through the now
defunt anon.penet.fi remailer, because xx did not want to get inundated with
email from hundreds of people who just had to have the tapes right away 'cause
...
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Here's the Initial WBOTB post:
Date: Wed, 8 May 1996
From: xx
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: BETTY BOARDS: Watch This Space ...
Hey now folks,
Would you like some Betty Boards?
An extremely kind taper/archivist (you know who you are!) is seeding a hefty set
of the original Betty Boards on DAT, sixty-two shows from 1971 through 1980.
These DAT tapes come from a source close to the original tapers (bless them!),
and the tapes have no analog tape generations in their pedigree. About twenty
stone lunatics, myself included, have decided to tree these BBD's so that our
fellow tapers, and would be lunatics, can share in this fortunate event. Over
the next several months, look for all sorts of tape trees right on here r.m.gd.
(more on that in a bit)
These tapes are from Betty Cantor's personal stash. For whatever reasons, she
abandoned these tapes (and other property) in a rented storage locker back in
1986. After giving Betty repeated opportunities to catch up on back rent, or to
remove her property, the owner of the storage facility legally sold the contents
of the locker at an auction. The tapes were sold in batches to several people.
One of these batches (62 shows worth) made its way into the hands of some
deadheads, and was put into general circulation in the taper community. Bless
them again!
The first great wave of Betty Boards began hitting the streets by 1987. They
revolutionized tape collecting. I still remember the joy I felt back in 88 or 89
when another batch of Betty Boards would come my way. By 1996, however, a lot of
the Betty Boards in circulation are hi-gen and fragmented. Even many of the DAT
copies out there are actually copies of old analog tapes. Given the quality of
what was in general circulation, most folks have never really heard a Betty
Board. Until recently, that included me.
These tapes are great folks. You don't just get to hear the clang and hiss of a
cymbal, but to hear the wood striking the metal disk, the clang and shake and
wobble of the hissing cymbal. Believe me friends, you ain't never heard a Betty
Board before.
These tapes, although based on two track reels spun directly from the
soundboard, should not be confused with soundboards that have been released in
recent years. For one thing, many of the soundboards that the Dead have allowed
to sneak out seem to have been slightly salted in one way or another to degrade
the sound quality. These Betty Board tapes are pure and sweet, with no salting:
they are better! For another thing, these Betty Boards reflect the limitations
of working with 7" or 10" reel to reel tapes: sometimes a tape breaks
off in the middle of a song; sometimes you can hear the tape spin up to speed at
the beginning of a song. There are a few unpleasant reel flips here and there.
There are several incomplete shows. Remember, these tapes were originally
recorded many years ago by hippies on drugs!
Over the next several months, there will be twenty or so people posting tape
trees and/or tape pyramids of these Betty Boards right here on rec.music.gdead.
Some DAT trees. Some analog trees. Some newbies trees. Some oldies trees. Some
mixed. Some swaps. Some blanks & postage. Some European. There are also
several face-to-face trees up and running. Our point is to make hi-quality
copies of these shows available to regular old Bozos and Bolos like you and me.
No authoritarian trips. No hierarchy. In fact, little hierarchy at all. Friends
are spinning copies for friends. We offer them to the community. Y'all come!
We'll be calling it the "What's Become of the Betty's" tree.
The postings should begin to appear shortly. We'll be going in chronological
order, beginning with the 1971 shows. Eventually we'll even make it to 5-08-77
(tm) and beyond. Which shows? Well, you'll know that when we start posting.
Let's keep this fun. You just won't know what's under the tree until Christmas
morning. Nothin' left to do but smile, smile, smile.
I'm making this initial announcement through an anonymous account mostly because
I don't want to be deluged with email. There are several of us whose main part
of the tree is spinning seed for friends who will do the actual treeing. I'm one
of the seed-spinners. My decks are *full* for the next seven months, which is
how long it will take us to tree these tapes.
Wait for the posts. It won't be long.
Posted on behalf of "The Unindicted Co-Conspirators,"
xx
and
xx
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Here's a post that xx made a few days into the WBOTB project. Someone on r.m.gd
attacked us for spinning low-gen tapes for newbies, arguing instead that only
experienced tapes should get low-gen tapes and that newbies should be content
high-gen tapes. Yup, the poster considered himself to be an "experienced
taper" and he figured that the newbie slots that we included on every tree
somehow prevented him from getting what we owed him. There were a lot of people
who really hated us for getting low-gen tapes to newbies; they liked the
hierarchy, and the ability to use low-gen tapes for leveraged trades. My
response was to make the following "free tapes" offer to newbies.
Date: Fri, 24 May 1996
From: xx
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: What's Become of the Betty's, 02-18-71 Pentecost Newbie offer
Hi folks,
May 26th is Pentecost Sunday, and it's time to make another newbie offer.
I will spin analog cassette copies of the Port Chester, NY, 02-18-71 show for
five newbies. Although I hope that you will offer to spin for five more people,
there is no requirement that you do so. In fact, you don't even have to send me
blanks and postage; I'll spin the shows on Maxell XLII tapes and cover the first
class postage on my end. I'll even print up J-cards with set lists and tape
pedigree.
To give people with slow newsfeeds and digests a chance, I will only consider
email requests that are *sent* between noon and six pm on Pentecost Sunday, May
26th. Shortly after sunset I will pick five people more or less randomly.
Since there will probably be more than five requests :) I will only respond to
people who get picked. If you don't hear from me by Monday morning, you didn't
get picked. Don't worry though, there will be plenty tree and pyramid offers of
this show during the coming weeks.
These tapes are part of the current Betty Board project, and they're really
sweet sounding. Your copy will be cassette-2. Their pedigree is:
7" Betty Board reel (probably Betty's copy, not a master tape) > PCM-1
PCM-1 analog output > dolby A decoder > analog input PCM-2
PCM-2 analog output (to increase volume level from -20db to 0db) > DAT-1
DAT-1 > Cassette-1 Cassette-1 > cassette-2 (your tape)
Tape One: 90 minutes
A:
Bertha (first one)
Truckin'
It Hurts Me Too
Loser (first one)
Greatest
Story (first one) >
Johnny B. Goode (first one)
Mama Tried
B:
Hard to Handle
Dark Star >
Warf Rat (first one) >
Jam (similar to 06-24-70) >
Dark Star >
Me and My Uncle
Tape Two: 90 minutes
A:
Casey Jones
Playin' in the Band (first one)
Me and Bobby McGee
Candyman
Big Boss Man
Sugar Magnolia
B:
St. Stephen (reel change in middle) >
Not Fade Away >
Goin Down the Road Feelin' Bad >
Not Fade Away >
Uncle John's Band
Well, that's the offer my friends. As we have received, so might we give.
Have a blessed Pentecost!
xx
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Date: Tue, 28 May 1996
From: xx
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: BETTY BOARDS: Watch This Space (2) ...
Hey now folks,
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain ...
The next batch of the "What's Become of the Betty's" project will be
appearing here shortly. Several people are going to be offering trees and
pyramids, so don't get all cranked if you don't get picked up by the first
offer. There will be plenty of chances. Also, there will still be lo-gen analog
and DAT trees of the first batch turning up over the next few weeks. Patience!
This project is just beginning. If you missed out on the first wave, worry not;
there will be plenty of others.
A reminder too: let's keep the fun in this, making it an adventure to find and
share some sweet music rather than a shopping trip to tank up on your share of
the entitlements. See Matthew 10:8 for clarification.
Now for a few other notes:
The batch of Betty Boards that we are working with on this project derives from
the only complete set of PCM copies ever made *directly* *from* the original
Betty Board 7" and 10" reels. Most of the other tapes in circulation
derive from Beta HiFi, Reel to Reel, or other analog formats. Further, about 25%
of the Betty Board reels were encoded with either Dolby A or dbx, and most Betty
Boards in circulation are not decoded. Except for two shows (02-19-71 and
04-07-71), all of the NR encoded Betty Boards that will appear in the
"What's Become of the Betty's" project *have* been decoded and have
had the noise reduction *removed* using professional equipment. That's another
reason why these tapes are so crisp and clear.
Then again, a couple of folks have said that these tapes don't live up to all
the hype. Well, no one is forced to sign up for tapes.
Watch this space ...
Posted on behalf of "The Unindicted Co-Conspirators,"
xx
and
xx
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Here's a note that I sent out to the WBOTB folks about midway through the second
batch.
Date: Thu, 6 Jun 1996
From:xx
To: The Unindicted Co-Conspirators
Subject: Note on BBD's
Hi folks,
I've been talking with our source on these BBD's, and thought of passing on
something that I took for granted, but never really mentioned cause I assumed
(bad idea) that everyone knew it. As pretty as the Betty Boards are, we gotta
remember that they are not the band's tapes of these shows, but the *crew's*
tapes. They were tapes that Rex Jackson, Kid Candelario, Betty Cantor, and
others spun on two track reels and on 60 minutes cassettes (we don't have any of
these latter). Although patched into the soundboard, these are not what tapers
generally call soundboards, that is, they do not derive from the 16 track tapes
that were cut for live albums, nor do they necessarily derive from the two track
reference tapes that were spun most nights for the band to listen to. There will
be a lot of tapers out there who actually have better quality soundboard tapes
of these shows, and you have to remember that the soundboards are not the same
thing as the Betty Boards, at least not necessarily.
4-08-71 is a tape in point. There is all sorts of stage talk and crew talk on
that show, very low volume in most places, but a bit of it. Crank up the volume
and listen in right before Playin, before Loser before BIODTL, or before Casey
Jones. The crew were very stoned that night, and they left some of the mics on
during the show and these got patched into the Betty Board. I particularly enjoy
the "YOU put on the fucking headphones" bit before Casey Jones. We
don't just get to be touched by the music, we get to touched by that very night.
:)
I love this stuff, but it might be disconcerting to a lot of folks. We gotta let
them know that these are Betty Boards; 7" and 10" reels of the
*crew's* tapes that Betty had abandoned to rot in a storage locker. They were
rescued from destruction (mostly, wait until you hear March 73!), and some of
them only barely made it.
Peace & joyful laughter,
xx
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The WBOTB project includes cassette and DAT and VHS-hifi tape and CD trees all
over the world: Scotland, England, Wales, Germany, Australia, Thailand, Israel,
etc. One of our tree admins in Japan got into trouble with his sysop about tape
trees, and that sparked a thread on r.m.gd about the legality of trading or tree
ing these tapes. Our source for these tapes, as well as couple of people close
to the Grateful Dead organization, cautioned us about attracting too much
attention to the Betty Boards, reminding us all that in past years the Grateful
Dead organization had sent out evil SOB lawyers to mess with people. Here's a
caveat that I sent out to the WBOTB folks:
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 1996
From:xx
To: The Unindicted Co-Conspirators
Subject: Operation low profile
Hi Folks (including the kind souls in Japan),
Our source for these Betty Boards has asked us not to get involved in any sort
of a legality thread on r.m.gdead or elsewhere about swapping Betty Boards. A
sysop in Japan is giving one of our fellow tapers a bit of a hassle about the
legality of trading GD tapes that contain covers of other people's music. The
last thing we need to do is to get the attention of the GD corporate structure.
The GD are still *very* aggressive about the Betty Boards, and still consider
them to be somewhat outside the pale of normal taper activity.
Peace & happy spinning,
xx
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Here's the third WBOTB posting, including caveats about some of the damaged 1973
BBD tapes:
Date: Thu, 5 Sep 1996 02:02:23 -0400
From: xx
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: Betty Boards - Watch This Space Again
Well folks, The Unindicted Co-Conspirators are about to start offering up
another round of Betty Boards as part of the What's Become of the Betty's
project.
For this batch of tapes, we're finishing up 1971, 1972, and getting into 1973.
For various reasons, we've dubbed these BBD's "the batch from hell,"
partially because there are a lot of incomplete shows, but partially because
several of the March 1973 reels suffered mold and water damage while in the
storage locker, and there is distortion on some vocals and some peaks. As these
shows are offered, we will include descriptions of which shows are damaged, and
how they sound. CAVEAT EMPTOR!
DAT: Mostly we'll be offering the DAT trees on the BUDD and DAT-Heads mailing
lists. To subscribe to the BUDD list, send mail to Majordomo@io.com with the
following command in the message body: subscribe budd <your email address>
To subscribe to DAT-Heads, send mail to dat-heads-request@virginia.edu with the
following command in the message body: subscribe dat-heads <your email
address>
The DAT trees will be a bit more hierarchical, and the r.m.gd offers a bit more
anarchistic, as with previous offers. This allows us to plant DAT-2 seed all
over the country over on BUDD and DAT-Heads, and allows us to keep things loose
and fun on right here on r.m.gd. And believe me folks, we've gotta loosen up a
bit here on good old r.m.gd ...
As regards analog cassettes, there will be general offers, as well as offers
that are specific to European or Asian deadheads. There will be trees, pyramids,
and all sorts of variations in-between. Several people are going to be offering
these tapes under the WBOTB moniker, and they will be doing so for months, so
don't get all cranked if you don't get picked up by the first offer.
A reminder too: let's keep the fun in this, making it an adventure to find and
share some sweet music rather than a shopping trip to tank up on your share of
the entitlements.
And speaking of anarchy, here's a reworking of a fine old Wobbly song that was
originally written by Joe Hill, everyone's favorite Wobbly.
There's a power, there's a power,
In a batch of Betty Boards,
When you hold them in your hands.
That's a power, that's a power,
That must sound for every man,
In one hundred tape-trees grand.
Posted on behalf of "The Unindicted Co-Conspirators,"
xx
and
xx
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