You were the hardest working man in show business.
“Nah. The ol’ Pig was lazy as sin an’ you know it! I liked to screw an’ watch teevee!”
Nothing wrong with that.
“Me an’ Garcia met the Godfather. I ever tell you this story?”
No.
“1969. Him and us was both playin’ in New York City, so we went uptown to see him. Invited us backstage, gave us cold beers, treated us real nice. Talked to the man for twenty minutes!”
About what?
“I got no idea!”
Sounds right.
“Couldn’t unnerstand a damned word!”
I’ve heard that about James Brown.
“An’ then he fined us fifty bucks apiece.”
I’ve heard that, too.
“We tried tellin’ him that we wasn’t even in his band, but he jus’ doubled the fines on us. That man ran a tight ship!”
You guys played one of his songs.
“It’s a Man’s World. Yeah, I liked doin’ that number.”
It is a Super Trouper
It doesn’t turn on
It powers up
fweeeeeeeeEEEEOOOOO
And then light
Over here
Over here
Teddy pay attention asshole
On me
Tighter
Tighter
Now out real wide
Back in
At my waist
Right there that’s it leave it don’t touch it
Where’s the fucking band?
Soundcheck next and
Then the kids
fweeeeeeeeEEEEOOOOO
There they are
I told you they’d be here
Right there in the spotlight
By the end of the night
It will be too hot to touch
When the shutter opens it lets light into the camera. Just for a split second, maybe less. The lens focuses the incoming light onto a small square of plastic that has been treated with chemicals, which is called film. The light interacts with the chemicals and leaves an image. If another drop of light hits the film before it is processed, it will be ruined forever.
In a darkroom, you essentially reverse the process: now you blast light through the film, and onto a piece of paper which has also been treated with chemicals. You then take this paper and dunk it in several tubs of poison. You need to get the order of poisons right, and the timing, too. Otherwise, the picture will be ruined forever.
And after all that, you have a photograph.
But sometimes, just sometimes, a hair will fall into the works and be caught in the negative and live forever as a spectral addition to the picture, a thin and unerasable reminder that human beings make art with their hands.
Fun fact: the Dead’s impromptu show is nowhere near the most impressive Rock Nerd trivia about the Château d’Hérouville. The Boys went to Europe twice before the famous ’72 tour, both times to play only one show because it took the Grateful Dead a while to learn about scalable economics. (That was actually a theme before Cutler taught them how to make money touring: they would play a week in New York, and then fly to Hawaii, and then back to California, and then one night in Texas. It’s like the schedule was decided upon by stoned hippies voting on stuff.)
Both trips were to play at hippie festivals: the European kids had heard about the Be-Ins and Woodstock, and they wanted a piece of the California dream. The first one was 5/24/70 in Newcastle.
“Hey, Jer.”
“Yeah, Bob?’
“We’re bringing dope to Newcastle.”
“Good one, Bob.”
It was cold and muddy, but Elvis Costello was there and the band played as well as they could with their stiff little fingers.
In 1971, the Dead flew back to perform at another festival, this time in France at a place called Auvers-sur-Oise. But it rained, and so the show was cancelled. As usual, the band had found a benefactor to keep them in the lifestyle they’d grown accustomed to: Michael Magne was a French film composer–he did the score for Barbarella–and he hosted the Dead’s whole party at the Château d’Hérouville.
He had the space. The main house was built in 1740 and had 30 rooms in two wings. Chopin used to live there. Van Gogh painted it.
Look:
And now it was occupied by a bored horde of hairy Americans, one of whom kept walking up to viscounts and asking them how to say “Please punch me in the dick,” in French, and when they told him they would get punched in the dick. If you don’t give the Grateful Dead something to do, then they’ll amuse themselves through destruction; they’re like border collies with arrest records.
Well, why don’t we do the show right here?
Precarious had to be talked into leaving America, but he didn’t let his reluctance affect his skills.
The Dead kicked ass that night. It was loose and groovy and people got wild and real with each other. (Obviously, the punch was spiked and–as in all of these stories–the cops wound up taking off their clothes and dancing.) You can listen to it.
Hell, you can watch it:
(I suspect the film crew was there to shoot the festival and got invited to the party.)
You might say, “TotD, what could be cooler than an impromptu Dead show that somehow became one of the handful of performances captured on video?”
And I would say, “GODDAMMIT, DON’T HELP ME. I CAN DO IT ALL BY MYSELF.”
And you would be like, “Whatever, asshole.”
And I would buy you flowers, but the wrong kind and you would make a face, and then I would beat you with the bouquet of flowers, which is an on-the-nose metaphor but it’ll do.
After the Dead played the Château d’Hérouville, Michael Magne converted it into a studio for rock and rolling types, and all sorts of silly-looking people came by to record albums.
How about Bowie?
He recorded most of Pin-Ups there, which was the covers album and is not the reason people were so sad when he died.
Or the Pink Floyd Sound, maaaaaan?
Hey, look: it’s Roger Waters! And David Gilmour! And another guy! Maybe he’s Pink? (They recorded Obscured by Clouds at the Château.)
And Iggy and T. Rex and the MC5 and Joan Armatrading and Cat Stevens and Bad Company and Elton John. This was the Honky Château, and Elton also recorded Goodby, Yellow Brick Road here.
He looked like this:
Yellow Brick Road sold 30 million copies, and it’s nearly perfect: sloppy and bulging and fizzing over like a proper double album, but it’s still not the coolest thing about the Château.
The Bee-Gees recorded this and How Deep is Your Love at the Château, and now that Van Gogh doodle doesn’t seem so impressive, does it?
Rareness abounds in this shot: Peanut makes an appearance, and the ultra-hyper-mega-super-rare tie-dyed Bobby.
Also: what the fuck? Please explain the greengrocer’s apostrophe. I don’t understand anything about what that is. (After the most minor of research, it seems that the opening act was called Michael and the Messenger’s [sic] and Pig was borrowing the organ. Which just brings up more questions. This was 3/21/71 at the Exposition Center in Milwaukee (only that partial AUD exists) and they had been on a mini-tour of the Midwest; did they not bring Pig’s organ? How did they break that to Pig when they were leaving for the airport? Did Pig threaten to hogtie anyone in retaliation?
And what the fuck to Michael, too. Was that sign printed seconds before the show, with no time to correct the mistake? Michael and the Messenger’s [sic] were a local Milwaukee band (I’m assuming) and back then a local band would play high school dances, and high school dances have chaperones: was not one of these chaperones an English teacher? Or any sort of teacher, really? Or a bright student? Or an average student?
I’d walk out. If I went to see your band and you fucked up the language that badly, I would lose faith in your ability to rock. Bands are allowed to spell their names wrong deliberately, or employ the superfluous umlaut, but they may not make errors in grammar or punctuation within their names. That’s a rule.
As I said yesterday, Enthusiasts: Bobby never played a Les Paul. And though this shot may seem to belie that claim, let’s look a little closer. It’s excellent Photoshop work, but here’s how you can tell this picture is not real: those amps are stacked in the way a normal human would do it. Ipso facto: FAKE.
Also: I have never seen Bobby wear his potato salad in that configuration before. FAKE.
The denim work shirt: for Commies and rock stars. It was a shirt of the people, and instead of buttons, it has shiny snaps that made a pleasant PONK when you opened them and a satisfying SNOCK when you closed them.
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