Music a mission for Dead’s Hart

“I might be the most recorded person in the world,” speculates Mickey Hart, longtime drummer-percussionist with Ur jam band the Dead, who gave fan-based file-sharing their blessing long before anyone ever heard the phrase.

Before there was Napster, before there was Kazaa, before there were portable MP3 players, there were Deadheads, armed with “taper tickets” and analog recording machines, gathered for each show in a thicket of tall microphone stands near the soundboard.

They “file-shared” in the 1970s, ‘80s and early ‘90s the old-fashioned way — by hand or by snail mail. They bartered in the currency of traded tapes, T-shirts, baked goods or, ahem, substances that may get one good and baked.

Nearly every show Mr. Hart has ever played with the Dead has been recorded unofficially for posterity. Almost every set list, too, has been cataloged, complete with online indexes that fans can cross-reference.

The tapers are still around, of course, as they were last week when the Dead — the “Grateful” having been dropped in deference to the passing of guitarist Jerry Garcia — and its nomadic tribe of fans rolled through the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Md.

Nowadays, though, Dead tapers are more likely to use lightweight digital tape recorders, converting their audible booty into MP3 files that pass from hard drive to hard drive, rather than from a multigeneration tape source.

Cassette recordings of Dead performances may be outdated commodities, but the basic philosophy remains: Record music, share it, preserve it.

And, because technology is making it so easy, do it quickly.

Through www.dead.net, the band is offering fans digitally mastered soundboard recordings of every show this summer, almost all of which are already on sale.

It’s a process that has long fascinated Mr. Hart, who this month put out a book called “Songcatchers: In Search of the World’s Music,” an illustrated history of the comparatively recent advent of recording technology and a call for world music preservation.

Published by National Geographic and co-written with travel writer K.M. Kostyal, who lives in Alexandria, “Songcatchers” traces the history of recorded music to its dusty roots of social anthropology and ethnography — to “warriors of sound” such as Alan Lomax, Jesse Fewkes, John Wesley Powell and Frances Densmore, all of whom traveled the globe to capture the aural history of the world’s multifarious tribes, clans and subcultures.

The sound-warrior tradition “leads right up to the Grateful Dead tapers and file-sharing,” Mr. Hart suggests from a hotel room in Virginia Beach. “It gives them a sense of belonging.”

Mr. Hart, still an unabashed hippie and no fan of Republicans, has found an unexpected ally in Librarian of Congress James Billington, an appointee from the first Bush administration who has vowed to completely digitize the library’s vast archive of sound recordings.

Mr. Billington is a “great visionary,” says Mr. Hart, a trustee of the Library of Congress American Folklife Center who’s frequently in town lobbying lawmakers on funding music preservation.

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