Just in time for the annual meltage of the snow — and the end of my skiing obsession until, say, July — I’ve found a new focus for my attention.

We’ve already established that Uncle Crappy can be a little slow on the uptake. Yes, I was the first kid in my junior high school to wear his Q-FM-96 hat backwards, and I’ve worn Chuck Taylors when they were cool, not cool and cool again, but generally I’m a little tardy when it comes to the really hip stuff.

So you may know about archive.org already. If you do, come back in a day or two and I’ll have more funny stories about drinking. Or something.

If you haven’t, let me actually be the first to tell you: Archive.org Is The Coolest. Thing. Ever.

The premise: Somebody in the interweb decided to collect a bunch of servers and store some of the stuff that makes our time what it is. There are web pages, speeches, essays, photographs, video, software, presidential recordings … a rather random record of history and minutae, all at our mousetips.

Oh. And there’s music.

Did I mention the music?

Sweet merciful Jesus, the music.

Tucked into a long list of audio archives is a seemingly innocuous link titled Live Music Archive. It’s the Holy Freaking Grail, my friends. If you go there now, at the moment I’m writing this, there are copies of 21,455 shows, by 921 artists. If you go there later, there will be more.

One of the 921 artists documented in the live music archive is the Grateful Dead. In fact, there are more Grateful Dead shows available — somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,700, for crying out loud — than by any other single artist on their list. Every show I ever attended. Every show The Wife saw before we met. A veritable Who’s Who of the loosely agreed upon best shows ever. Many soundboards. My hands start quivering just from the thought.

All available for downloading. For nothing but your time and the cost of a blank CD.

And, even better, this is done without all the legal ambiguities that have swirled around peer-to-peer downloading sites like Napster (yet another trend I never got around to trying). The organizers don’t accept shows from bands until they have permission from that band to include their stuff. In the Dead’s case, this is a relatively simple thing: The band’s policy is that trading/downloading shows on the interweb is just like trading tapes in the old days, and if no one is making any money, it’s cool with them.

I’ve been focusing on the Dead stuff, but there’s tons more to dig into. Long lists from Bela Fleck, Derek Trucks Band, Cowboy Junkies, Little Feat, Yonder Mountain String Band, etcetera, etcetera. It tends to be heavy on the hippie bands, because most of those folks modeled their taping/trading policies on those of the Dead. And there are some glaring omissions, Phish being the biggest example. Some of the perpetually glass-is-half-empty Deadheads are worried about the Dead’s plans to digitize the vaults and what that would mean for the availability of free downloads. As someone who has just discovered this wonderful place, I suppose it should be a concern to me. But on the other hand, I’m too busy downloading music to worry about it that much. And when it comes down to it, if Weir/Lesh/Hart/Kreutzmann want to fund their retirements by selling shows directly from the vaults, that’s OK with me — it’s the Dead’s to sell.

Okay. Time to wrap up. My copy of Three Rivers 6-30-95 is about done. Time to burn it and give it a listen.

Anyone know where I can get a gross of blank CDs for cheap?