Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
“How many cables do we need, Precarious?”
“All of them.”
“Gongs?”
“All of them.”
“Amplifiers?”
“Put everything we own on the stage.”
“Gotcha.”
OR
They must be playing one of their bibbledy-boppidy songs that Pigpen can’t understand, because look how sad he looks with that stupid tambourine.
“Are you all right, Troy?”
“Yeah, Bob.”
“You’re hunching.”
“I’m going with the music. I’m really feeling it.”
“You gotta use the can? Shouldn’t hold it in.”
“I’m good.”
“Okay.”
…
“Is it your back? I got pills for that.”
“No, thank you.”
The only Grateful Dead who wasn’t in Jerry Band at one point was Bobby.
OR
Ronnie Tutt is sitting there thinking, “He’s not gonna do any karate?”
OR
Is that a long-sleeved guayabera?
…
…
…
I don’t know how to respond to this.
“The guitar?’
Nope.
“Shirt?”
Yup.
“Well, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m the Bobby.”
I know that, Bobby.
“I’m the handsome one.”
You were and continue to be, yes.
“And, you know, the internet’s real big nowadays. So, uh, hashtag.”
Hashtag what?
“Hashtag handsome.”
Wait. Did John Mayer buy you that shirt?
“No.”
Okay.
“Josh Meyers did.”
Sure.
“Are you back in the band?”
“Just siting in, Bob.”
“The kid’s working out, but if you want in, then say the word.”
“I got plans this summer. We’re playing the Garden.”
“When?”
“This summer. We’re gonna start playing Memorial Day and end on Labor Day.”
“Wow. Do you wanna borrow Red Metal Stool?”
“I’d rather have a seat that wasn’t sentient.”
“It’s not optimal. He’s a bit of a whiner.”
“You could just buy a normal one, Bob.”
“Not the Grateful Dead way, Troy.”
“Sure. Hey, you wanna play a Lady Gaga song?”
“You bet.”
Physics The king of the sciences. (According to physicists.) Throw a watermelon at a traffic cop, crash two stars into each other; same thing. All describable by equation, thereby predictable. Newton invented it. Except it’s not all the same. Physics is relative; size matters. Real big things going real fast doesn’t behave the way Newton predicted; Einstein had to figure it out. And small stuff plays by its own rules; nuclear particles are like renegade cops. (And I’m just talking about the normal small stuff here, electrons and protons and whatnot; let us not delve into muons and gluons and quarks, which make no damn sense.) Here’s the fun part: quantum physics (the small stuff) and classical physics (the big things) don’t reconcile. Physicists have looked for a Grand Unified Theory since the schism became apparent in the middle of the 20th century, but haven’t found it yet. Maybe they should ask Jared Kushner.
Geology Rockfuckers. An entire substrata of the academy who become aroused by boulders.
Chemistry The most deadly and/or lucrative of the sciences. Yes, yes, I know that you could work to benefit the world and in furtherance of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but if you didn’t have a conscience and were really good at chemistry, you could do some real damage. And, you know, whatever, chemistry is medicine. Literally all medicine is, is chemistry in pill form. But you could also make sarin and meth.
Biology Adenosine triphosphate turns into adenosine diphosphate, photosynthesis, etc.
Volcanology No sympathy at all when these fuckers get eaten by the lava or sucked into a fissure, none. It’s a volcano. Stay away from it. Volcanoes no longer need any study, as I’m about to tell you everything that there is to know about volcanoes: stay away from them. There you are, volcanologists. Stop hiking up Mt. Doom, please.
Oceanography Better than the volcano weirdos, but just. (Although, technically, volcano beats ocean. Hawaii used to be ocean, and then volcanoes said, “Fuck you, this is an archipelago now,” and the ocean was like “What’s an archipelago?” and the volcanoes said, “A chain of islands,” to which the ocean replied, “Well, why didn’t you just say that?’ and the volcanoes were all, “Because the word for ‘a chain of islands’ is an archipelago, you moron,” and then the ocean and the volcanoes had a slap fight. This is the native Hawaiians’ creation myth; it’s quite beautiful.)
(As opposed to the Judeo-Christian creation myth, which comes down to “Everything exists because God said so.” Gimme a giant cosmic chicken giving birth to the sun, or a cow licking the universe out of ice. Old Testament wasn’t even trying.)
Zoology Sometimes people will look at, say, a zebra. “I wonder how that works,” they think. If this sounds like you, then you should be a zoologist.
Botany Sometimes people will look at, say, a lilac. “I wonder how that works,” they think. If this sounds like you, then you should be a botanist.
Psychology Not a science. Get out of here with your personality tests and checklists and take your fMRI machine with you.
Political Science Why are you even at this party, political science? You are not a science. There is nothing scientific about politics, especially lately.
Meteorology Meteorology gets mocked and associated with the goofy weatherman, but it is an underrated science. Hurricanes used to just show up. You would look out your window: boom, tornado. Surprise blizzards that killed hundreds. It’s dangerous to walk outside every once in a while; meteorology gives us all a heads up. Good job, meteorology.
Astronomy Pity the poor astronomer, like Moses on the hill above Israel. All their lives staring at places they can never go. Nowadays there are telescopes so large that they take up entire valleys; mountains hold them up. We have telescopes in space, too, freed from the atmosphere’s distortions and feeding data to supercomputers.
But it started with two guys on a hill.
“Look at the red one, Thog.”
“I can’t see it.”
“Just follow my finger. It’s by the bright one.”
“There’s a lot of bright ones, Og.”
“No light pollution.”
“There are some advantages to living in pre-history.”
“Sure. How’s your family?”
“Eaten.”
“Ah. Sorry.”
“It happens.”
“Look at the star I’m pointing at. It’s different. It moves faster. I don’t think it’s a star.”
“Og, the stars are the crusty speckles that remain from where Ankeenrah the bull’s orgasm gave birth to itself, and then shit out the world.”
“Sure, right, yeah.”
…
“I mean, it’s a fun story.”
“Excellent tale with a lot of lessons.”
“But, you know, it might not have happened.”
“Never know.”
…
“Dude, did we just invent agnosticism?”
“We totally did.”
HIGH FIVE NOISE
“What the hell did we just do?”
“The thing with the hands?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. It just seemed right.”
“It was great. We should do it a lot.”
“Totally.”
HIGH FIVE NOISE
“I mean, let’s not kill it in the cradle.”
“Sure. Y’know what? I love these flowers we found.”
“Oh, yeah. I was thinking, though: what if we pick them all? Then they’ll be gone. What if there were a way to make the plants do what we wanted them to do? To make more?”
“Are you talking about growing our own?”
“I guess, yeah.”
“Dude, you just invented agriculture.”
“Holy shit, am I on a roll.”
HIGH FIVE NOISE
“Let’s get back to the stars, Thog.”
“Sure.”
“Five of them move irregularly. Everything else goes in slow circles, but not these five. I wrote it all down.”
“Og, dude, tell me you did not invent written language.”
“No, no. I just made crude marks in a rock.”
“That’s the first step towards poetry.”
“Don’t overreact.”
“Representational symbols are a slippery slope, my neanderthal friend–”
“We’re not neanderthals. We ate the neanderthals.”
“–your hash marks will lead inexorably to drawings, then pictographs, ideographs, and finally some dusty asshole in Phoenicia comes up with the alphabet and then it’s game over.”
“Pshaw.”
“Nothing good can come from writing.”
“It’s not writing. It’s marks on a rock.”
“Warning you.”
“Dude, be cool.”
“I’m cool as shit.”
“Okay, look: if you track the sun’s rise and set, it makes an elongated figure eight that lasts for 365 days. And the moon takes 28 days to go from bright to dark to bright again. The other stars, too, move in a regular fashion. But not those five.”
“So what are they?”
“I have no idea.”
And that was the birth of astronomy.
You know I don’t do the Today in GD History bit too much; in fact, I resent May 8th and that miserable week in August for drawing so much attention to themselves. Some dates need celebrating, I suppose, but not all of them. Certainly not the 38th anniversary of a show in San Jose.
Unless, of course, it’s Brent’s first show. To honor him, I present you with this photo that he’s not in. This would set a tone for the rest of Brent’s tenure in the band.
OR
If you only had this picture, you would think Phil had a head like a Pachycephalosaurus.
Louise Mensch just accused Mickey’s hat of being a Russian operative.
OR
Mickey doesn’t ski. Those are “guy who doesn’t ski” clothes, and I can’t even make fun of him because that’s exactly what I wear when it’s cold. (Except for the track pants. I don’t know why Mickey’s wearing Adidas track pants. Maybe his pants are also Russian operatives.)
What is the death penalty?
Really? The name gives it away.
Don’t be a dick.
The death penalty is when the government kills you for being bad.
I repeat: don’t be a dick.
The death penalty is state-performed murder, a shameful and vestigial remnant of our savage past, and a pathetic reminder of the mean heart and blind dicksuckery of Americans.
There you go. The death penalty is a grand and ancient tradition, though.
Hell, yeah. The first knot humanity leaned to tie was a noose. In fact, throughout most of history, you would be lucky to get the death penalty.
Explain.
“Death penalty” implies that it’s the state executing you, which means maybe you had a chance to plead your case somewhere along the way, or get a last meal; most of the time, criminals would be beaten to death in the street by a mob.
Oh.
Or, you know: a guy that the mob mistook for the criminal. Or a woman accused of being a witch.
The past was terrible.
It was, yes. Luckily, we’ve managed to preserve a goodly chunk of it known as capital punishment. Like historical re-enactors with corpses.
Do any other countries still execute criminals?
Sure, tons of them.
Any decent ones?
Nope. All of the shittiest place, and us.
Yay. I’ve noticed you’ve dismissed the death penalty out of hand. Some people are in favor of it.
Fuck ’em; they’re wrong.
Would you like to make an argument or just curse in a folksy manner?
The state should not be given the power of life and death over its citizens. And holy shit should some of the states not be given that power. You know who runs Arkansas? River otters in glasses, and they’re corrupt. The people in charge of this decision should in no way be in charge of this decision, so my vote is to take it from their hands. Shit, the only reason that capital punishment exists at the state level is that dopey Tenth Amendment.
Which one was that?
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Oh.
Which is such a fucking punt. “Whatever we forgot, you guys take care of, ‘kay?” Reminds you that the document we hold so sacred is the compromise between slavers and people who just wanted to do business with slavers.
This is just a pragmatic argument, though.
Those are the best ones.
But not very lofty.
You want righteousness and morality? Sure. On the question of the death penalty, there are two sides: one of them counts among its members a large hooded man with an axe. He is a murderer, and that is the wrong side to be on.
Capital punishment is not murder.
Of course it is. Premeditated and with malice aforethought
Some would disagree with your definition of “malice.”
Why do we execute? To punish? Because the will to punish is malicious. Is it the will to revenge? To obliterate, to make non-existent? Are these not malicious?
But isn’t the desire for revenge natural?
One of the basest and most primal of needs is for revenge. But a government isn’t a person, and it shouldn’t abide by the rules of vendetta.
What about serial killers?
They are so scary.
We shouldn’t execute serial killers, or child rapists, or terrorists?
Listen, I’m not saying that some motherfuckers don’t need to die. I’m saying that the government shouldn’t be the to one do it.
Which method of execution would you choose?
Giant slingshot against a brick wall, and everybody can watch. Put on a show for the people.
You’re a good guy.
I am, yeah.
This is 6/18/67 at the Monterey Fairgrounds. I don’t know if I’ve listened to it; I will now, though. This show was the Monterey Pop Festival, legendary for its unlegendariness (at least as far as the Dead goes). The Boys were scheduled in between The Who (beginning a long inter-band relationship) and Jimi Hendrix (beginning his and Bobby’s best friendship); both acts put on high-volume shows punctuated by instrument destruction, arson, and explosives. In the face of such showmanship, the Dead countered by standing there and playing Viola Lee for 14 minutes.
They also refused to be filmed for the movie, which gives them a perfect record for avoiding being in iconic Rock Films: Monterey Pop, Woodstock, Gimme Shelter. Dead missed ’em all by thaaaat much.
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