So its early 1989, and I’m wearing through the vinyl copies of the first two Big Dipper albums Heavens and Craps, and putting “She’s Fetching” and “Ron Klaus” on all my mixtapes. I talked my friend Mary into seeing their gig at CBGB’s because she worked at A&R at A&M Records. To my surprise, she and the rest of the industry insiders were already following Big Dipper and the CB’s gig ended up being an event where half the crowd worked for a record company.

Big Dipper eventually signed with Epic and released an entirely forgettable album, and broke up without recording again. Mary moved to Nashville and opened a music store. My copies of Heavens, Craps, along with the ultra-rare single cover of McCartney’s “Jet” (pictured above) gathered dust along with the rest of my vinyl collection.

Now its nearly 20 years later and those memories came flooding back when I saw this post on brooklynvegan. Merge Records resurrected one of the great forgotten bands of the 1980s, compiled all their Homestead releases (minus “Jet”), and released a 48 track 3-CD set Supercluster: The Big Dipper Anthology in March.

In support of Supercluster, Big Dipper will do three very special live performances — their first together as a band in over 18 years. Here are the dates:

04/24 Maxwell’s (Hoboken, NJ)
04/25 Southpaw (Brooklyn, NY)
04/26 Middle East (Cambridge, MA)

And the bonus…thanks to the wonderful people at Merge Records, in agreement with the band, nyctaper will be recording the Southpaw concert! Its not CB’s and Mary won’t be there (I think), but the buzz will be the same. Big Dipper is back!

Sample the music:
Big Dipper: She’s Fetching MP3

Purchase the Anthology from Merge (here).
See you at the concerts.

Readers often compliment nyctaper in email and comments on the site, and sometimes note that there should be more sites like this one. Well, there are! Here is a list of a our “brethren” — the best taper’s blogs from the web.

Southern Shelter: Atlanta GA
Besides being a super nice guy, Sloan from Southern Shelter also captures excellent recordings. Like nyctaper, Sloan uses Neumann microphones and records a terrific array of bands from a variety of genres. Sloan has been a tremendous help to us in securing permission from bands he has taped in the past, including Pylon and Mission of Burma.

Baltimore Taper: Baltimore MD
Jeff is an indefatigable free promoter of the Baltimore music scene, often recording multiple acts on multiple nights in a week. His site is such an amazingly comprehensive collection of Baltimore music, that he has been featured as a lead story in the local arts newspaper, City Paper.

Bradley’s Almanac: Boston MA
Brad publishes one of the top music blogs on the entire web, and has been recognized as such web-wide, and in a feature in the Boston Globe last year. While Brad is primarily a top flight music blogger, he also records quite a few shows and features them on his site in his archive.

Waves and Wires: San Francisco CA
Dave makes terrific recordings of Bay Area performances by top alternative acts. His recording of Bjork from Shoreline last year is one of the best I heard all tour. After a recent brief hiatus, he returned to form with an excellent British Sea Power recording.

Iamserious: Seattle WA
I believe Brian’s site may be the first actual “taper’s blog”, as it appeared in 2005. While he makes terrific recordings of Pacific Northwest shows, and also authors DVDs (available through bit torrent), the site was fairly inactive for a while last year. Brian seems to be back and recording again, which is great news for his readers.

Sometimes I Tape Stuff: Portland OR
I don’t really know much about this site, nor do I know the owner’s name, but she has recorded some excellent stuff recently including a rare post-tour-cancellation Decemberists show in January and the Shins in December.

BrooklynVibes: Brooklyn NY
This is the coming-soon taper blog of our friend Matt. His site will make NYC the first town with multiple taper blogs and will afford New Yorkers double coverage of the live music scene. Matt and I plan to avoid overlapping our recordings. Like nyctaper, Matt uses top flight equipment, but also offers the added dimension of being an outstanding photographer. We are really looking forward to his offerings.

Did I miss anyone?

My lossless friends will undoubtedly call me a sell-out, but there are quite a few good reasons to also offer MP3 files of the recordings for readers to download. The mp3 files would be offered as direct downloads on this site in zip files. This would permit the return of limited direct downloads from the main site without stretching the limits of the server. Flac files would still require an email to nyctaper.

The offering of MP3 zip files would also be advantageous for the bands. There are several tracking sites that provide access to blogs that offer mp3s which would give further exposure to the bands. The file format would also permit the less technologically advanced readers to hear the excellent bands we offer. As of this point, the i-pod still does not support flac as Apple stubbornly refuses to permit competition to its own lossless format.

The downside of course is that we expend an enormous amount of energy to capture these performances in the best possible quality. We use top of the line equipment and often master in 24-bit format to increase the sound quality. Offering MP3s, which compress much of the quality of the recording and sound “tinny” and flat compared to the flacs is in a way also a compromise that is not necessarily advantageous to the artists.

I would like to hear feedback from readers on this issue, either in email or by posting here.