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Not the whole show, just 'picks'. This show is available from Dicks Picks now. I'll still trade this, but I'd recommend going to dead.net and getting the whole show.

Jim Wise's essay About 11/8/69



It wasn't too long after I met Dick in person when he let me in on what
he really was into for a 2-track pick from 1969. When he started coming
east for Dicks Picks parties several years ago he found comfortable
accommodations at my home. I had already an internet & telephone
correspondence with this fascinating man for 2 years prior but had never
met him in person, & luckily for me, Dick & I had several long time
mutual taper friends who vouched for me, so the ice was broken in
advance. I credit my wife Dani for rounding him up. He could have fun
with her (and vice versa) & we could bullshit about tapes all night
long.



I had 11/8 in my collection in several different forms for years, but
never really sat down with it the way Dick showed me how to. Dick was
like Santa Claus & whenever he would show up (once he called with little
advance warning & said he was only one hour away, so get ready for him)
he literally had a bag full of tapes, both cassette & dats. He good
naturedley would love to see me squirm in anticipation & enjoyed teasing
me, 'cause he knew that I was a tape addict, much like himself.



On a visit 2 years ago he sat me down in my living room, we smoked a
fatty, & he pulled out his dat of 11/8 & said "sit down, shut up, &
listen". As the opening notes of "Dark Star" rang out I watched him curl
up, close his eyes, & immerse himself in the sound. The last words he
uttered for the next hour & one half were" Its quiet now, but it gets
LOUD" This is when 11/8 really made it's impression on me, & so did the
infamous clicks!



This was Dick's dilemma; he loved this set so much, but knew that there
were tech flaws on the master. He also had enough experience with his
teammates John Cutler & Jeffrey Norman, to realize that this would be
extremely difficult to persuade them to do the work in order for its
official release as a DP. He was also afraid that it would be rejected
as a pick, like so many other shows he wanted in the past were.



It was only a few months prior that I had started experimenting with a
PC based hard disk recording & editing system, so we grabbed his dat &
downloaded a sample to look at the wav file as it appears on screen. We
farted around for a bit & I found some clicks visually & zoomed in &
simply re drew the glitch with something called the "pencil tool". This
smoothed out the wav & that single click disappeared both visually & on
more importantly, on playback, auditory.



When Dick's business was concluded on the East Coast, he left his dat
with me the play with. His aim was to give John Cutler a reasonable tape
to listen too, in order to introduce him (JC) to the performance. What
Dick had left with me specifically was a dat clone from his personal
cassette copy of Bears 7inch-?-track 7/5-ips master reel.



The redrawing of the glitches was unbelievably tedious, but relatively
easy during the quiet passages, so I spent several days working & sent
him back a dat of the first few minutes of "Dark Star". He called me
back in a whirlwind of enthusiasm & a week later the Dat clones direct
from the masters arrived at my PO box. Now I really went to work &
believe me when I tell you this was truly a labor of love.



Upon inspection this is what I found; the clicking was present on the
right channel of the entire show to 11/7, & the entire show of 11/8,
that is up until the reel flip in the "Other One", when it mysteriously
vanishes! I uploaded the 94-minute Dark Star & ensuing jam onto hard
disk. There is a brief segment before Dark Star begins where you can
really capture what's known as a "noise print". This was basically just
pure clicks without any music, or other noise in the background, & would
be needed if it I could determine that a noise reduction run would be
effective.



The 3 facts that saved this recording are; #1 the clicking is only
present on the right channel, #2 it's most annoying during the quiet
passages, where they were the easiest to eliminate, #3 the clicks stop @
approximately 20 minutes into the "jam". So, I began the tortuous
process of manually redrawing the clicks one glitch at a time. I soon
detected a pattern of precisely 7 clicks per second & measured the
distance between them & found that it was consistent. This was
instrumental in finding those pesky glitches while they were hidden in
the wav's of the louder passages. I knew where to look & got good enough
so that I was able to actually see what was the glitch, & what was
music.



I did some experiments with the "noise print" I previously captured, in
the hopes that the noise reduction process would be effective, but was
not happy with the results. I spent the next one hundred and fifty eight
hours (total) glued to my computer screen with headphones on, redrawing
every fucking glitch I could detect within the 1st 20 minutes of the
right hand channel. When I finally did all that could be humanly
accomplished, I used a helpful tool (called appropriately enough "glitch
finder") to locate even more abnormalities then could be possibly be
detected by the human eye. This is a programmable tool that was
instrumental in helping me locate & putting finer touches on the
smoothing of the wav's. Only when I was satisfied that absolutely no
more could be accomplished by hand (thirty additional man hours) did I
turn to the NR process, which was used extremely sparingly, & only on
the most obnoxious areas. Levels were "normalized", two important
cross-fades were implemented, & that's about it!



With great anticipation & pride I sent a back up back to Dick, along
with his original dat master to set#2 so he could a/b them. He called me
back as ecstatic as only Dick could get! Mission accomplished!!



Dick said that "Now I can die a happy man!" He wanted 11/8/69 to be a
DP & now it was one step closer to becoming a reality. He planned to
railroad it through in time for DP 16 when he realized that the timing
was off for it to come out on it's 30'th anniversary.



As far as track list goes I was originally of the opinion that only the
jam, spread over 2 discs would be a good pick. Rob Bertrando designed
that layout to include both "Easy Wind, & Good Lovin". It makes for a
better pick & I agree. Those two songs were left "pure" because with the
birth of my baby boy, I can't find the time to work on them : (
You will hear some artifacts, but the two songs are loud enough to
mostly mask the problem.



Dick, I'm glad I was able to repay you in some small fashion for your
friendship & all the generosity you bestowed on me. I love you & miss
you every day! You will always be in my Grateful Dead taper heart, most
especially when I play 11/8/69!

Jim Wise

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