Now before you think this is just another maudlin post mourning the veggie burritos of yesteryear, give me another 140 characters or less to state my case:

There was a time when getting your hands on tasty concert bootleg meant something more than it does now.

With the recent rebirth of Phish, getting back on the train after nearly a four and half year hiatus, fans both young and old (or older…present company included) were sent clamoring for tickets. Demand was high, supply was low and many were left wishing for a miracle. And others, like myself, went back to their regularly scheduled 9 to 5 life. But through the miracle of modern technology, Phish announced that the first three nights of their tour would be available as limited time free downloads at their LivePhish.com site. 

So there I was, the morning after every show, quietly downloading the entire previous night’s set in all of its 256kbp MP3 glory. The music was great even though the band sounded a little loose at times, but the vibe was strong. Meanwhile, the act of kindness was not lost on the community of fans at large. Yet it got me thinking: what has technology wrought?

Compared to the grizzled trading veterans of the past, I’m a relative newcomer. Even in the early 2000s, which is when I first got into trading, the practice of “blanks and postage” was still rather prevalent. Peer-to-peer networks were still in their infancy and demand on FTP resources and serving bandwidth made for direct downloads to be neither easily accessible or fast, even though a few intrepid ‘heads-turned-IT-professionals managed to rig a rogue server here or there to their company’s network in order to serve shows with unthrottled bandwidth. (Many of those would rise and fall with the same reliability of a Grateful Dead keyboardist.) At the time I happily took advantage of my company’s T1 line to suck down as much digital music as I could, covertly running an FTP client in the background on my work computer all day and dumping down files to a stack of ZIP disks via a drive I had set up underneath my desk before I left at night. This was in my early days as an ad hack, a year or so before I could afford the luxury of DSL and I was still rocking the 14400 baud modem at home.

So all this still translated into the fact that building a bootleg collection was a real exercise in networking and my first real foray into online social networking. Through the digital friends I made at Sugarmegs.org, I acquired some of the sweetest shows that still loom large in my live concert collection: a thorough education into the glory of the legendary Betty Board recordings…rehearsal tapes from the Band as they prepared for their “Last Waltz”…the liveliest and funkiest Steely Dan you’d ever find outside of their studio work…more live Van Morrison than I thought could ever exist on this planet…and much, much more. Along the way I made contact with some of the kindest kindred spirits always eager to share their music and passion.

So what was I left with last week? Well…it was a transaction. A cold and lifeless web site that doled out the goods with a push of a button. While I’m grateful for the music, I’m still left pondering and pining for what’s been lost along the way.