In the early 2000’s, I was involved with a group of about 30 guys, all of us determined to spread as many recordings of the Grateful Dead as we possibly could, via the relatively new technologies allowing us to burn CDs at home, to create files of the songs, and to distribute those files via peer-to-peer networks on the Internet. We called our work “The Music Never Stopped Project,” and searching that phrase will still bring up some references. Each of our servers had a name — Chris had the “Candyman,” Steve’s was “StStephen,” and the guy with the most bandwidth, Torbjorn, across the pond in Sweden, called his “Tol,” a contraction of his names, and the origin of our making a “Tol call” to download songs at then-insane speeds — an entire concert, in lossless compression, in only about six hours! My server, a cheap PC doing nothing but sitting on the floor, dealt in “phantomtides,” swells of digital bits that magically expanded into music we knew but had not yet heard. The phrase came from “The Days Between,” the last great Grateful Dead song, and one relatively unknown outside the congregation — a pity. In part because the song is a haunting piece of work, and in part because the phrase is so rare, I’ve adopted it in any number of online settings, not least of which is this site, of course.
Almost a sonnet, “The Days Between” is a meditation on the seasons of one’s life (even if the “seasons” appear out of order). Steve Silberman’s stupendous essay, “Prospero, the Rose, and the Worm,” contains a phrase that I’ve ruminated on ever since: “beauty at the edge of terror.” That idea illuminates some of what was so special about the Dead to me, the sense that a universe of emotions, sometimes harmonic, sometimes conflicting, could exist in the same moment. A couplet in the third verse, the “winter” stanza, always suggested to me the adventures that we found as part of that tribe: “[We] walked halfway ‘round the world, on promise of the glow” — adventurers chasing, each time, just one more great adventure.
These days, the "Days Between" refers to the eight days between the anniversaries of Garcia’s birthday (August 1) and his death (August 9). It’s nothing structured, but there is annually a little flurry of Deadhead activity in recognition of what’s lost, a time when “bells of Heaven ring.”