53 Days on Digital Crack

DISCLAIMER: While I would love to reveal the artist mentioned in this column, I fear record company executives (or their goon squads) will break down my door in the middle of the night, destroy all the really cool CDs I have created, and steal my computer system. For this reason, the artist, and his unwavering fans, shall remain anonymous.

In 1989, reporter Jefferson Morley wrote a powerful opinion piece that was published in almost every major metropolitan newspaper about his one night on crack cocaine. Only several weeks after my own 53-day "digital crack" odyssey came to an end, can I really begin to appreciate technology’s addictive power and why record company executives are shaking in their boots over the possibilities of the Internet.

My digital crack ordeal begins with an Internet Discussion Group on the artist mentioned in the above disclaimer. With a fervent fan base of misfits, malcontents, alcoholics, and a sordid array of the best society has to offer, this Discussion Group is one of the liveliest on the Internet. Their conversations are absurd, thought-provoking, and poetic at the same time. (To illustrate how cool these people are, I traveled nearly 400 miles each way this summer to see this artist, and I joined a dozen Discussion Group members for dinner before the show. Even though we had never met and our ages ranged from the late teens to the mid-sixties, we all clicked. The night was magical.)

But I digress. The Discussion Group ignited my digital crack addiction, but the demonic eBay fueled my foray into digital crack hell. When the above artist announced his first tour in twelve years, there was no doubt that tapers would be busy making bootleg recordings. In fact, someone in my dinner group recorded the show on a Sony MiniDisc Recorder and then sent each of us a CD copy. However, greedy recorders started auctioning CDs on eBay, fetching up to a $100 a concert. And as great concert reviews poured in, eBay frenzy drove up the price for CDs and concert tickets as well. Tickets in New York were fetching for as much as $375 a piece.

In retaliation to the price gouge, some Discussion Group members began offering extra tickets at face value and the artist’s tour manager (an occasional Discussion Group contributor) even worked deals for group members to get advance tickets to shows. Then, once the tour ended, a Discussion Group guardian angel did the most amazing thing. In response to the eBay bootleg rapes, he set up an FTP site where members could upload and download concerts to share. He asked only that members didn’t use the site during his business hours and didn’t make copies to sell.

Sounded harmless enough. I figured I would grab one or two shows to add to the one that I saw. So, I downloaded demo FTP software with a 30-day evaluation license and started poking around the site. There, before my eyes lay a drool-inducing harvest of 1999 concerts, bootlegs dating back to 1975, outtakes, CD cover art, screen savers, concert photos, and just about anything else imaginable. My original plan to get just one or two shows now seemed ludicrous.

The first night, I chose one of the numerous New York shows I had read so much about. I waited until after 11 p.m. and selected the entire show — 27 songs — figuring the download would finish while I slept. After nine hours, I only had about 15 songs completed. To add further anxiety, I was tying up our only phone line and I knew sooner or later, my ISP would kick me off the continuous connection. So I killed the download and grabbed the rest of the New York concert the following night.

Then, before my wife’s eyes, I became an addict and the feeding frenzy began; next came a show from Chicago then Denver then Berlin then Los Angeles. I was in so deep that I purchased a second phone line and soon had seven shows worth of MP3 files on my hard drive. A friend explained the CD burning process, so I started converting the MP3 files to .WAV files and burning the concerts onto CDs. Each converted show was around a gigabyte in size and in no time I was banging up against my computer’s capacity again. But it was too late. There were more and more shows to download as additional were being added to the FTP site.

At first my wife took a polite interest in my endeavor, but after a while I was met by "the look" when she was heading to bed, followed by comments about "another night of me feeding my addiction" or "mainlining tonight?" When my demo license expired on the first FTP browser, I downloaded a second evaluation copy. Soon I started sneaking to set up the computer while my wife brushed her teeth, and soon we stopped talking about it all together. It was my dirty little secret.

But then, as quickly as I was hooked, I hit rock bottom. Downloading, converting, burning, and creating artwork soon became a digital death spiral that wasn’t fun anymore. And although I ended up with eleven concerts from this year’s tour as well as four shows from as far back as 1977, the thrill was gone. In the end, seven days before the second FTP license expired, I uninstalled the software and even dumped a few partial shows and outtakes that I had hoped to burn onto other CDs.

I dove headlong into the digital malaise, but through the fog came a moment of clarity. Somehow, I killed the beast. Many of the CDs still sit on my desk awaiting finishing touches, and I’m sure in the future, I will probably trade these shows for others, but the digital crack was too much for me. I left tons of music behind, but at least I escaped.