This is an irregular
group meeting regularly, these days at Tiny’s Tavern.
Some folks are here pretty much every week, some less often. Everyone’s always welcome.
What we do is hang out,
visit as friends, listen to whatever we’ve thrown on the PA—and trade tapes!! Oh wait, that was in an earlier age: now it’s
nearly all discs! Here’s how the
“system” operates: People bring in whatever they feel like sharing, and put it
out on the table, and whoever wants to borrow it takes it for the week—it’s as
simple as that!
Of course, sometimes
people bring in specific requests, and so those are reserved and not up for general grabs.
Used to be, in the world of tape decks, there was always some concern about what kind of machine someone might put a tape into. Nowadays, though, no one seems worried that machinery will hurt a disc. So the only concern in lending material out is the borrower’s integrity—and we don’t worry about that much, in this good old deadhead crowd (we sort of take it for granted).
The general rule of
thumb is consideration. When you borrow
something, you should plan on being back the next week—and if in the event it turns
out you can’t make it, you should call the person from whom you borrowed it and offer
to return it some other way.
Also, you should bring in your new copy to lend out next round. It’s not fair to expect the original offerer to always be lending his disc out week after week. If it’s a choice item, everybody’s gonna want it eventually, and it’s proper to share the lending around.
The music? Well, anything goes, but there’s definitely a certain level of Grateful Dead fanaticism that originally brought us together. Most of the discs floating around are Dead shows. But we all dig and seek older and newer good stuff: Floyd, Marley, Fugs, Who, Beatles, Zero/Kimock, Cheese, etc. Many folks have on-line lists and do on-line trading; there’s even a web site for Eugene Tape Traders: http://home.earthlink.net/~deadtraders/
There’s some
history here. In ’88 two, then three,
then four guys started meeting every week for lunch and tapes at the Collier House on UO
campus (they all worked on, or near, campus). Of
course, discussing the latest shows and set lists was fun, too! And it so happened that Tangerine, one of the old
Prankster crowd and close friend of the Dead, worked there and often was our waitress! She was very intrigued by what we were doing.
Eventually we moved over
to 19th Street Café, ‘cause some off-campus folks joined us and parking
was easier there—plus, it was a welcoming environment.
April was our regular server there for years at our Friday lunches. And we grew!
In January of 2001 Peter Wilde was trying to set up night activities at the relatively new Chez Ray’s restaurant downtown (the “venue with a menu”). He asked our gang if we wanted to take over Tuesday nights there, and it sounded like a plan! So for a year we did that, enjoying the excellent PA and video system and the perfect ambiance. And we grew more! Folks were often pulled into our scene by the drawings we did to give away discs—casual diners (and drinkers) caught up in a web of generosity and Grateful Dead! But around Christmas Ray closed down, and we found us another spot here at Tiny’s!
So, welcome! Come on back—bring stuff, borrow stuff, make
friends, bring friends.