Days of You

[Big Wooly Mammoth]

drift....

the Wired article on the WELL is available here:

wired article

(I meant Sausalito, not Sacramento in my earlier post)

[PassedOutGuy]

Some of my best times of the early 90's was at DoY shows at either the Rivoli or the upstairs room at Sneaky Dee's... Also had my first sld experience at a summer solstice show that was held at the park alongside the Don Valley as ur driving into the city... stage was powered by the sun as well... crazy day that was...

[MuleMomma]

I elect Mike Lowcock!! (or maybe even Kevin Bishop).

For those youngin's, Kevin Bishop was the keyboard player in the original band "The Other One". Mike Lowcock joined the band as well in 1987, as 2nd keys and harmonica, and shortly thereafter "The Other One" disbanded to form two bands, one with the drummer Chris Oleschuk and bass player Chris Cain, and the other with guitarist Mark Thackway and keyboard player extraordinaire Mike Lowcock, which became Days of You. Seeing as how my best bud was engaged to Mike, we saw about every single DOY show ever played in Toronto until about 1992-93 when the band underwent a dramatic change. We saw them through all configurations, including the era during which Mike's brother Vincent displayed the Mandala (the computer-generated-virtual reality instrument playing simulation?). As a footnote, Vincent's company, Vivid Effects, is still thriving, they have an office on Adelaide, and they install Vincent's ever-evolving invention throughout the world.

For those folks that saw Timothy Leary out at one of DOY's shows at Rock & Roll Heaven, that was a result of Vincent's friendship with him through the computer world. Keep in mind, at that point, that virtual reality was still a really new idea, and the only folks who even had internet (besides the CIA) were a group called the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link), which I don't know much about, only that you had to subscribe and you could get GD tourdates off it, instead of calling the west or east coast hotline numbers incessantly.

Ah, to reminisce...

[Big Wooly Mammoth]

>>>the Mandala (the computer-generated-virtual reality instrument playing simulation?)

That’s the thing that I was referring to. Saw it at a couple of The Other One shows (El Mocambo and Rock and Roll Heaven come to mind) That was pretty cool and way out there at the time. I remember hearing Vincent being interviewed on the radio years ago talking about the business applications of the product.

>> and the only folks who even had internet (besides the CIA) were a group called the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link),

sort of.....the internet was being used basically by universities in the 1980s. I remember being amazed that you could send messages to people you didn’t know across the world while sitting in some computer lab using a terminal attached to the mainframe running unix. I can’t recall when exactly the WELL was formed, but it was basically the first “virtual community.” Everything since then, from Compuserve to this place, has tried to copy the formula of the WELL. A group of Deadheads found the WELL a great place to get together while not on tour and made up a large proportion of the community back then. You needed some way of connecting - either via a telnet connection (usually through a university) or by dialling in to the server which was in Sacramento (which could lead to very expensive phone bills). In the early 90's you could telnet from new internet providers. The reason you could get the tourdates was that someone would post them after getting through to the hotline. (You’d also get rumoured dates in advance of the official announcements as there were WELLperns with the appropriate connections.

(There was a really good article about the WELL in Wired magazine a few years ago fwiw.)

That’s this old fogies history lesson for now...

[MuleMomma]

Hey thanks BWM - cool to learn more about that. It seems so primitive these days to think back that it was only in 1990 that I was calling Europe in the middle of the night to try to get tickets for Europe Dead tour. I was trying to get Essen and Berlin and I'd call some number, perhaps from Germany's information number and get someone on the phone speaking German, and I'd say "tickets?" and they'd say something else in German and I'd say "Grateful Dead?" It still boggles my mind that I was able to get tickets for anything. I guess we got the hang of it because I was later able to get Frankfurt, and I had a French-speaking friend call for Paris. Things would've been a whole lot easier with online capabilities