When famed 1960s LSD cook and live soundman Owsley “Bear” Stanley died in 2011, he left behind 1,000 reels of high-quality concert recordings of The Grateful Dead, Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Fleetwood Mac, Janis Joplin, and many more. The Owsley Stanley Foundation has launched an Indiegogo campaign to save those deteriorating tapes.
From the campaign page:
Bear expected sonic excellence. The team is restricted to engineers who worked with him in his lifetime and shared his exacting vision. In parallel, his family and friends are cataloging the reels to identify their contents—some of the tapes are unlabeled or mislabeled—and to triage the most brittle tapes.
Our ultimate goal is to get the music out into the world, but we’re not there yet. The first step is to preserve the tapes. Once the tapes are preserved, we will begin the process of collaborating with the artists to hopefully make this music come back to life.
“Rescue the Legendary Owsley Stanley Sonic Journals“