What A Long Strange Trip

What A Long Strange Trip

The Grateful Dead Radio

Streamed audio (Mp3), 4 years and 186 days
 
This radio is playing all public recordings of The Grateful Dead in an endless loop.
It is 1646 days long, with recordings from 1965 to 1995.

 

Since my early teenage years I am a Deadhead, a dedicated and peaceful follower of the Californian hippie legend, The Grateful Dead. This band is probably the most recorded and documented music act in the world. There are 15,682 concert recordings available on archive.org (and countless more on YouTube, although they are mostly the same recordings), with an average length of 2-4 hours. This link puts all the concerts in a continuous stream from 1965-1995 (when they abandoned the name due to the death of Jerry Garcia) in chronological order. The website is not interactive, it just plays the entire live history of the Grateful Dead for approx. 4.5 years, and then loops.
When you go to this site, it will play whatever song is on the timeline at a given moment (for ex. October 12, 1981 at Olympia Halle in Munich, the only precious time I have seen the Dead, at age 16), and you will know that for the next months you are in the 1980’s, Grateful Dead-wise. Obviously, you can also continously play them 24/7 for more than four years on your stereo, probably the longest continuous stream of music in the world. The Dead allowed taping and the trading of recordings of their concerts. This created a massive tapers’ and bootleggers' cult, which is one of the reasons for the extensive vault of material. So to create this spin-off of archive.org, a technically limited but content-wise universal bootleg is likely in the spirit of their philosophy.