“Besides standard CD releases, the Grateful Dead is finalizing a deal with Apple’s I-Tunes to make every live note they’ve ever recorded available for download.

‘Everything, sooner or later, will end up being released on the Web,’ Weir says. ‘What we wanna do is digitize our entire catalog, our entire collection of tapes . . . and make that stuff available. I think I-Tunes is up to that.’

The band has recorded all of its live shows since the late ’60s, at first ‘just so we could listen back, see what it sounded like and make any changes.

‘Or if, for instance, we were jamming and something fell together, some little plum came through the sky and landed onstage, it didn’t get lost. We could go back and maybe make a song out of it,’ Weir says.

And compared to most music at I-Tunes, the Dead’s jams are a bargain, he says with a laugh.

‘At 99 cents a tune, it’s a pretty decent price, because most of our tunes are pretty long.'” —Rocky Mountain News