Oh, God. Who gave you a monkey?
“Hey, Thoughts on my Ass! Meet Pinball.”
I don’t wanna meet Pinball. Why is there a chimpanzee around the Grateful Dead?
“The question is: Why HASN’T there been until now!? This fucker’s a hoot! Literally: he fucks and he hoots.
Who is he fucking?
“Bobby’s leftovers, same as the rest of us.”
This is not all right.
“He’s a show biz monkey, too. Knows all kinds of tricks. Watch this. Pinball! Card!”
CHIMP PRODUCING A NINE OF DIAMONDS NOISE
“Was this your card?”
Holy shit, it was.
“Rides a unicycle, juggles, everything. He’s a triple threat.”
Is he toilet-trained?
“Quadruple threat. The poop is the fourth threat.”
Those animals are dangerous.
“So are me and Mickey.”
He should be in a jungle.
“And I should be in skank. But the world isn’t fair, and so we’re both on tour. Besides, it’s not like he’s got nothing to do. Mickey’s teaching him how to play the timbales.”
How’s that going?
“Not well. He fucks ’em. Oh, and–”
Mickey keeps dosing him?
“–Mickey keeps dosing him.”
Jesus.
OR
Hey, Mickey.
“MONKEY!”
Uh-huh.
OR
That would be Mr, Jiggs, who was indeed a show biz monkey; he performed in between sets of the Dead’s 8/4/76 show at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City. There is easily-found video of the poor animal’s minstrelry, and it is unbearably sad. Don’t search for it. The past was terrible.
There is also one on Bill’s left shoulder.
I skipped Mr Jiggs, yeesh, but there’s some really good Keith footage in that there video document of the show . . . they somehow avoided the usual camera placements that always seemed to put him in every blind spot of every shoot . . .
https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/photo-of-lynyrd-skynyrd-allen-collins-and-artimus-pyle-at-news-photo/86099103
As he tells it, Artimus Pyle was tripping at the time and could not handle what he was seeing.