NO! I forbid this! I will not allow Thoughts on the Iron Maiden!
I just like this song, braj.
It’s subtle.
The soaring vocals! The submarine that isn’t clearly a model floating in a bathtub! The out-of-place occult references! The bangs!
Enough.
Leapin’ lizards, the man’s bangs!
ENOUGH! This is ridiculous. Enthusiasts come here for Grateful Dead-related content, and there’s been none for weeks. You’ve just been regurgitating whatever you just watched on YouTube and threatening to expound at length on Hair Metal again.
Thoughts on the Guns is coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
At least recommend a show for the nice people.
Fine, but it’s gonna be an ’84.
Whatever.
7/4/84 from the Five Seasons Center in Cedar Rapids, IA, is a hoot of a kick of a nutslapper of a performance. Stranger opener? Yup, you betcha. Sterling yet flawed in the usual mid-80’s way H>S>F? Indeedy-do. One of the six Cumberlands of Power? By golly, sure. Date-appropriate Jack Straw? What band are we talking about? Of course they forgot to play it.
Or you could watch it if you’d like:
The Five Seasons Center is not associated with the Four Seasons hotel chain, nor does it refer to an assortment of spices; the name is the result of Cedar Rapids, IA, being somewhat less than the Mount Olympus of the advertising world. When New York City wanted a logo, it went to Madison Avenue and got the iconically-fonted I ♥ NY; for almost 50 years, the graphic has been slapped on as much bullshit as the Stealie. Texas needed a catchy slogan to keep folks from throwing taco wrappers and spent shotgun shells out the windows of their Cadillacs and pickup trucks, and so they went to an Austin firm that came up with this:
But the best Cedar Rapids could do was “The City of Five Seasons.” What is the fifth season, you ask? It’s Iowa, and it gets colder than Mussolini’s prostate in Iowa; perhaps the fifth season is some sort of super-winter. This could be corn-related, you think. Everything else in Iowa is corn-related, so maybe this is, too. What about love? Is the fifth season like the fifth element? Enthusiasts, you would be wrong (and weird) to make any of these guesses. It’s so much stupider.
The fifth season, we are led to believe, is “the time to enjoy the other four seasons.” Which you’ll notice is just straight-up announcing that Cedar Rapids is boring. Hi, we’re Cedar Rapids, and the most exciting thing that happens here is that the ambient temperature rises and falls in a cyclical 12-month pattern. That’s what “five seasons” means.
These are the people we let choose Presidential nominees.
That is a pretty good representative example of all IA Stories. The marketing geniuses in the city where I live spent millions of dollars and involved hundreds of local luminaries (I had to participate because of my work) to come up with a marketing concept, and when all was said and done, what they picked (and still use) was “Catch Des Moines.” We are akin to a common cold or dengue fever apparently. (My personal motto for explaining why I am here would be “Des Moines: It’s Where Your Wife Works.”
And having lived here on and off for most of the past decade, I can tell you that Iowa is a uniquely, incredibly BAD first state for our political process. But being a good sport, I did craft these helpful marketing explanations for it before the 2016 Circus:
https://jericsmith.com/2015/01/27/why-iowa-first/
And if you want the full resource guide to understand the lunacy . . .
https://jericsmith.com/2016/02/01/iowa-caucus-day-2016-resource-guide/