Tons of music -- all free and legal

Hey kids, have you heard about this thing called the "iPod"? Did you know that you can pull songs through the tubes of the Internets and cram your little digital music player with all kinds of stuff?

Well, Mark Swed, the L.A. Times classical music critic revels in the possibilities of his very own iPod in this longish piece, which did serve to clue me into a very cool site: Archive.org.

Funny, I couldn't find much in the way of classical music, or even jazz, but if you're into the Grateful Dead, they've got 2,842 full concerts for you to peruse.

OK, I'll admit it, I did listen to a 24-minute "Playin' in the Band" with enough noodling to keep a Japanese restaurant in udon for a decade, not to mention the tell-tale caterwauling of the still-living Donna Godchaux. (I had her pegged as dead until my good friend, Mr. Bradley Hotzman, Deadhead extraordinare, clued me in to her "alive and kicking" status.)

Hey, I went to school at UC Santa Cruz, whaddaya want from me? Also Santa Cruz-friendly -- 119 concerts from the great Camper Van Beethoven.

Back to the Dead. Brad tells me that Archive.org is the site that used to have all the Grateful Dead "mixing board" recordings, which had to be taken down (or at least made stream-only) when members of the band protested. It was Bob Weir who had a beef, not Jerry Garcia, he being dead and all. Bet they buried him in a faded black T-shirt. But I digress.

Archive.org is pretty ungainly. Start here for an artist listing. So far, I've been pleased to discover a bunch of Tenacious D -- who doesn't love Jack Black, am I right?

And in case you didn't thing archive.org was anything more than a front for jam-band enthusiasts, there are a whopping 1,044 Moe. shows on there. (But no Phish, points out Brad -- guess they don't what their junk out there for free.)

And what about the best L.A. band of the 1980s? Three Dream Syndicate shows.

There are tons -- TONS -- of stuff I've never heard of here, 38,516 total concerts at last count, and that makes it hard to find the "good" stuff. Hey, maybe some of this obscure junk is good?

But it's all free and legal, and that counts for a whole lot.

Going beyond music, the main Archive.org page offers more than 41,000 videos, 95,000 miscellaneous audio recordings and almost 31,000 texts.