By Lindsay Deutsch, USA TODAY
Early Grateful Dead shows, 1964. Aretha Franklin's 1968 performance with Ray Charles' guest encore. The Tanglewood Music Festival, 1970. The last Sex Pistols show, 1978. It's the head-banging, generation-defining stuff of history. And now, like everything else, it's free streaming on the Internet.
Wolfgang's Vault, the website best known for its archive of live music recordings and memorabilia, has launched its Video Vault, consolidating for the first time a collection of more than 4,000 restored concert videos from the past 50 years, many of them previously unseen. And the collection is growing daily, with more than 6,000 never-seen videos waiting to be released.
"If YouTube was an abyss of time, this would be it," says Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis about the plethora of historic footage that has already been released.
Readying the fully curated collection, which is available online and on mobile platforms, was no small feat. After Wolfgang's Vault acquired legendary promoter Bill Graham's private collection of concert footage, along with other collections such as those of syndicated radio's King Biscuit Flower Hour, the small company was tasked with restoring film in various states of decay, says Bill Sagan, Wolfgang's Vault's president and CEO.
"We would open a canister of film and it would literally be turned to vinegar. There were canisters with bugs in them," Sagan says. "It was a long and expensive process to transfer the video so it would be watchable online." He says the company has spent about four years and $7 million so far and is two-thirds finished with the project.
The footage ranges in quality from crude black-and-white, one-camera shots to multi-camera recordings of contemporary indie-rock shows. Vault employees had to convert a variety of obscure video formats, some of which had deteriorated so much they only had one play left in them.
Music of the 1960s and '70s "has continued to hold such a grip on the nation," says Alan Light, programming director for PBS' Live From the Artists Den concert series. "Rock 'n' roll is the high-water mark on which everything is measured.
"Whether it was Elvis dancing or The Beatles' haircuts, what bands look and feel like on stage is a big part of the music. These videos define a certain moment in time and will be important forever."
"The stuff they have is so iconic that the value is inherent," says DeCurtis, who says the videos bring up his memories of spending time at Fillmore East, the New York rock venue. "The rawness of the footage is part of its appeal. A lot of this content comes in a time before they could take 40 shots of something. There's an immediacy to a live performance, and that's the power of this."
The lure of such iconic live shows isn't limited to the generation that bought out those venues decades ago.
"Much of what current bands do is a pattern of the past," says Spin interactive director Peter Gaston. "Maybe someone listening to MGMT wants to listen to Pink Floyd. Someone listening to Beach House might look back to Fleetwood Mac. There are so many parallels to today."
No live performances have been cut, Sagan says, with mistakes and between-song banter left intact. Genres range from jazz and punk to R&B and ska.
The catalog will be constantly growing, as Wolfgang's acquires old collections and adds new material from in-studio "Vault Sessions" and sister site Daytrotter, an indie music hub.
"It's a commitment to the future of the music industry," Sagan says.
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