Here’s a double-play for the evening: an early Brent-era gem recommended by Ministry of Information for the Cascadia Liberation Army Mr. Completely: 11/23/79 from San Diego–specifically a set-ending beginning Music Never Stopped>Sugaree that was so powerful that it temporarily de-stabilized the Deutschmark, the Franc, and the Kroner. (TotD officially misses all the old money.)
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: 1979 (Page 4 of 4)
Not pictured: everything outside the camera’s range.
Couldn’t think up a joke?
YOU’RE A COULDN’T THINK UP A JOKE.
…
Really?
For Phil, every night in 1979 was Chimichanga Night. This man is one ham sandwich away from not being able to see his dick.
Also, Mickey is portraying his character Jerry Over Easy, a short-order cook from Philly who sells stolen furs on the side.
I speak of Bombs and the Phil.
He had all kinds of Bombs in his satchel, along with three warm Heinies and some soft pornography, and Phil parceled them out carefully. (Not the beers: those were for Phil and Phil alone; if you reached for one, Phil would bite you. He would share his soft pornography.)
There were the Cluster Bombs, those huge BRAP’s and BWAOH’s all the way down the neck, where chords–especially from the bass guitar–need POWAH! just to get out of the starting blocks. Those massive fifths and sixths with a low F? That can’t be accomplished with human amplifiers, only ones fueled with hypermatter that the Dead had stolen from the Vordronulan Imperiex on Barka XIII, where the–
Knock it off with bad Douglas Adams impressions.
…
You’re hurtful and small.
Be that as it may. You were speaking of Phil Bombs?
There were the Surgical Strikes: these were farther up the register and gained their strength not so much from the note, but from Phil’s attack. He would dig in under the string with his pick and KWAONK the shit out of a passage in Wharf Rat.
You could, if you were unlucky, find yourself in the path of a Bouncing Betty, most famously at the beginning of Cornell’s Scar>Fire: bah-WHOOOM, shattering stereo speakers and old Hispanic women’s pelvises. (There was something about the combination of osteoporosis and a diet high in chimichangas that made the pelvic bones particularly susceptible to this Phil Bomb, and it became a problem on the road. Out of compassion and following legal advice, Phil could only allow people of Nordic descent to clean his room, and, you know: that’s gonna cost you.)
This show’s got every last one of Phil’s Bombs on display: 9/1/79 in Rochester, NY. PLUS a second-time-ever Saint of Circumstance with some utterly foolish argle-bargle about Ophelia or whatnot instead of the lyrics we’ve come to know. And love, and love.
But the second set’s where the Bombs live. A half-hour Scar>Fire that needed every second, a Miracle with a killer (!) jam (!!!) after it into Bertha into Good Lovin’ and Phil’s just losing his fucking mind the whole time, like “BOMBING YOU, MOTHER FUCKER. HEY, YOU: IN THE TIE DYE. Got something for youIT’S A BOMB!”
Life is short; listen to ’73. But life is also too short to only listen to ’73. Check out this overlooked gem from the dawn of Reagan’s America.
The Dead burbles up nowadays, a weird uncle that comes round for the holidays ten days late unannounced. Not for us, the ones still here. We’re like that Japanese soldier who held his island until the ’70s. People mock that guy, use him as a shortcut for pointless insanity and the futility of war: that’s twaddle, and those who think it, easy cynics. Because what happened is: that motherfucker held that island. No fucking round-eyes gaijin number-10 motherfucker DARED to step foot on that island. He fulfilled the mission. For thirty years, that guy had a goal.
What did you do with your day? Did you hold an island by yourself?
No, the Dead burbles into view for the rest of the world. The ones who’ve maybe listened to Skeletons in the Closet a couple of times ten or twenty years ago and didn’t care much for it And no wonder: it was an odd little record and the there was no flow to the songs’ order, which used to matter an unbelievable amount, for the younger Enthusiasts out there. There was, if I recall, a rather good edit of the Live/Dead Lovelight, which might seem blasphemous, but was helpful as a teen in hair-metal-soaked Jersey in proving that the Dead weren’t pussies. The five most rockin’ out with your cock out minutes of that Lovelight are enough for not only the dorks in marching band, but also the guys smoking in their cars with the Metallica denims.
Breaking Bad ended last night or 8 months ago: I have been trying to avoid it. It seems like a brilliant show and all the people whose opinions i respect like it, but Cancer Dad and Crystal Meth are not how I’m spending an hour of my TV fun. Those two things, specifically. If it was that new neausmare (that’s a nightmare so scary that you wake yourself up by puking) drug called Krokodil and, like, a cousin with rabies, then I would watch that show. Admittedly, that would be a short series. ACTUALLY: that would be the greatest reality show EVER. Which would win? The rabid dogs, cats, and vermin of our dying cities against hordes of Krokodil addicts, terrified and jonesing, throwing hunks of their rotted flesh to satisfy the animals.
The finale was name “Felina”, after the possessor of the two lovin’ arms that our dumb, doomed protagonist dies for in El Paso ,and that, combined with the soundtrack from Sunshine Daydream hitting #19 on the Billboard Listing of Things, has put the Dead (maybe, kinda, sorta?) a little bit higher in the general consciousness lately. Which is a good thing, and a thing we need more of.
Speaking of the Marty Robbins classic, how the hell do you forget the words to El Paso, Bobby? (No fair bringing up that Nokia Theater incident. Quite honestly, I think the shorts{?} he was wearing were far more tragic than the lyrical flub(s).) 8/13//79 in Denver, a town full of degenerates and reprobates. Please invite me to Denver.
Is the Shakedown opener wonderful? Yes, it is. Does Garcia start Candyman in the neatest little sneak attack way? Yup. Does every mammoth, pristine, super-addictive FLAC file need to start with four minutes of Tuning? Apparently so, according to the information at hand.
Anyway: hold your island.
Phil Tesh – John’s brother, stays in the guest place out back. Watches the kids, takes care of the house when we’re gone. Good guy, glad to have him around, good guy when he’s not drinking. 4 months, knock wood: we’re proud of him. Oh, damn, is it 3 o’clock already? I have to get Simon to soccer practice. Nice talking to you. Wait: who are you? How did you get in my backyard? JOHN! COME HERE! COME HERE AND PROTECT YOUR LAND, JOHN TESH!
Donna Bean – Cousin to the lima, pinto, refried, Mexican jumping, and the Funky Winker.
Drums/Spade – That time in 79 when, after the drum solo, Phil, et al, sat at a card table Parrish had set up and played Spades for a good 35 minutes, which is impressive when you realize that Bobby didn’t know the rules, Brent was losing on purpose to get people to like him, and Garcia had snuck back into his dressing room two or three hands into the session.
Winterhand – The nickname of the groupie with poor circulation who liked giving tuggers.
Sex Luthor – All of his elaborate plans involve Superman’s butt, and doing weird stuff to it. Supes has had it up to fucking here, man.
Wall of Hound – One time, Billy got high as fuck and piled three or four dogs on top of each other and made people come and look, repeating the joke all afternoon, and then he got bored and punched one of the dogs in the dick, and I’m gonna tell you something about dogs: they have no concept of the proper deference due to a rock star, so no matter what band you’re in, if you punch a dog in his dick, he’s going to completely lose his shit on you, plus the other dogs were mildly annoyed with Billy anyway, so they joined in and all of them chased Billy around for an hour or so; he was bitten repeatedly, and let’s face it: he simply could not have deserved it more.
Knob Weir – What Bobby calls his dick sometimes.
Cob Weir – What he calls it other times.
Throb Weir – Bobby also calls his penis this.
Mickey Fart
I’ve been to Chicago only once; they have a zoo in Grant park which is both free and seamlessly incorporated into the park. You’re taking a walk, not bothering anyone, and all of sudden you realize you’ve been looking at tapirs for five minutes. There is also a restaurant called the Billy Goat Tavern that the “Cheezburger cheezburger” sketch was based on and the burgers are so good that for hours afterwards, I was purposely belching just to retaste them.
And I went to the top of the Sears Tower, because it’s the law.
My connection to the Windy City is, I’m trying to get at, slight and superficial at best. Which is why the choice to listen to every single Dead show (within certain stringent, yet highly arbitrary limits) ever played in Chicago confuses me.
We begin with 12/3/79 at the Uptown Theater. (What a wonderful name: it grounds you in place and lifts you up simultaneously, poetry by excision…plus, none of that excruciating use of the British spelling bullshit. Theater is an American invention, and for that matter, so is the English language. Fuck England. Y’know why? Because it’s Friday night and I’m home eating fried chicken and blathering on semi-nonsensically about a band led by a man who married a woman named fucking Mountain Girl. I can’t decide whether I’m a fox or a hedgehog when it comes to bad decisions: have I made one big awful choice, or millions of tiny horrid one? At least I have my chicken.)
A show without much acclaim, from a year that gets very little attention, in a city that at first glance looks like it was more immune to the charms of our favorite drug-soaked gibbons than other cities. They played Boston, an exponentially smaller city, the same number of times; Philly, an exceptionally smelly and pointless place, more.
Maybe it was the relative dearth of colleges. Maybe the Dead made the (entirely righteous and Godly) decision that if these pork-infused Chicagoans insisted on calling that gooey tomato abortion ‘pizza’, then they were people to have no truck with. Maybe it was the fact that the Picasso sculpture used to have a dick before a certain someone punched it off. These are all logical and historically plausible reasons, especially the thing about Billy. The entire day before, he could be heard muttering darkly, “Modernist bullshit. Its eyes are like the eyes of every slum owner who made a buck off the small and weak. And of every building inspector who took a wad from a slum owner to make it all possible. I’m gonna punch it in the dick.”
Anyway, check out the propulsive Jack-A-Roe, slathered in Brent’s Fender Rhodes (the shag carpet of musical instruments). Compare the warm, friendly sound to Keith’s BLOCK CHORDS OF DOOM during the his last years with the band. (They’re actually even quite notable as early as Fall of ’77, the entirety of wich I recently finished listening to. Sweet sweaty Christ, I need a woman in my life. Or a tapir.)
Douglas Adams had his Infinite Improbability Drive, but he didn’t go far enough: I introduce the Infinite Infinity Drive.
Assume infinity.
Assume the multiverse.
Therefore, if where you are is not where you want to be, then in one of the infinite universes where you are is where it is at. One can figure which is which by building a computer large enough to calculate infinity. Since such a computer would necessarily have to be larger than infinity, it might seem impossible, until one remembers that infinity must by definition contain, say, infinity+24.
It’s bigger on the inside.
You are teetering on the brink, my friend.
9/5/79 at MSG (Do I favor East Coast show over West Coast? Am I a Coastist? Do I believe that the West Coast is fine and all, just as long as it stays over there? Yeah. Sue me.)
I am hissing at you. Hissing. Hssss.
It is, obviously, a Brent. Much like strangers at airport bars, I’ve always had an iffy relationship with Brent, but I’m going to give him a concentrated listening, at least until I can staunch this bleeding head wound. I woke up to vomit last night, like you do, and I THWACKED my head into the samurai swords I keep loose in the bathroom, the one room you’re almost guaranteed to roam around in like a piano tuner nightly. (I’m sure blind people must have gone to Dead shows, but did they bring the dog in with them? It seems mean to the dog, what with the dog-hearing and a Dead show had to be, like, the most INTERESTING SMELLING PLACE IN THE WORLD to a dog, but a guide dog has to be like those guards outside Buckingham Palace.)
(BUT, if you were blind, would you ever go to a concert or put on headphones without your dog, or the biggest, strongest, most loyal buddy in the world with you? Like, your brother just happens to be The Big Show. And I’d rather have the dog: some drunk asshole will have a go at The Big Show just because, but nobody messes with dogs. Music would cut off all your connection to the outside world; you wouldn’t be able to hear anyone sneaking up on you and people sneak up on blind people all the time)
My equivocation towards Brent lies with his playing and his voice. His playing is tremendous: he fit in with the band instantly and added new layers with his adroit B3. His playing stepped up everyone’s game and though his Rhodes could sound tinkly, it was still a welcome relief from the constant piano block-chords of the later Keith years.
I just never warmed to Brent’s voice. It always sounded like a hack comic doing a Michael McDonald impression. I’m sure there are those of you who disagree. I am sorry for your wrongness.
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