Notes:
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-r-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 harddisk.   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!

Art Notes:  Yes

 Easy Wind
 Good Lovin'
 Dark Star >
 The Other One >
 Dark Star >
 Uncle John's Jam >
 Dark Star

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