Thoughts On The Dead

Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

Tag: 1980 (Page 3 of 4)

And They’re Off

May 7, 2016 / / 8 Comments

Totally forgot about this one, but at least Spencer got something wrong, too, so I don’t feel alone in my dopitude. I guess there’s also Going the Distance by Cake; Horse With No Name was not about a horse race, but there was a horse.

Of note in the video:

  • Bobby spent as much time on his hair as the rest of the band combined.
  • Phil is really into it, but I don’t know if his bass was plugged in; Phil never quite figured out what to do during the acoustic segments.
  • The song is less than two minutes long, and yet this is the Grateful Dead.
  • From 2:00 until the end is Billy’s greatest moment; even if you don’t watch the whole thing, go to 2:00 and check Billy out.
  • Garcia doesn’t get enough credit for his backup harmonies.

Sittin’ On Top Of The Bench

January 12, 2016 / / 0 Comments

brent uptown 80Pic of Brent I hadn’t seen before, from that set from the Uptown in 1980. The best part is the piano bench that looks like the road crew stole it from one of their aunts’ houses. That bench is 10/10 Grateful Deads.

“Ramrod, what if I need to play the other keyboards?”

“Slide down.”

“But, I thought that–”

“Slide.”

…

“Down.”

And that was how Brent learned where he sat.

West, High

October 5, 2015 / / 12 Comments

A brief respite for the negativity and disappointment: join me, won’t you, in Anchorage for the rubber show of the Dead’s only Alaskan run. 6/20/80 may or may not be the best of the three; it may also place second or third: I’m not taking anyone else’s word for it, and though I’ve certainly listened to all three I have no memory of any of them besides that both the band and the announcers keep yelling at the crowd to stop smoking inside.

It’s a well-recorded 80’s show and I’m sure there a highlights and lyrical flubs, but who cares: listen to the Grateful Dead; their music makes people happy.

April Foolish Heart

March 31, 2014 / / 1 Comment

There will be no April Fool’s Days shenanigans from these bloggings, for a number of reasons. I’ve hated the semi-holiday since my childhood. When I was four or five–and I remember this clearly–my parents pulled a “prank” on by telling me that The Muppet Movie was airing that night on TV. This was, of course, before Netflix or the internet: hell, it was before VCR’s were common, so every American living room had a TV Guide sitting on the coffee table, the shows you wished to see circled in ink. “Appointment viewing” wasn’t a catch-phrase: you watched things at a certain time or not at all. Maybe you could see an episode again during the summer, but you couldn’t bet on it.

And I loved The Muppet Movie. Not so much for Kermit and Miss Piggy; as a child, I couldn’t get enough of Charles Durning, so my little-kid heart exploded with joy at the thought of spending two hours with my furry friends: Fozzie and Gonzo and the scruffy, shaggy, slightly-sad piano player Keith Brent Rowlf the Dog!

Ha-ha, my parents cried after a few minutes. What an April’s Fool you are! The Muppet Movie isn’t on, just that comedy about the Korean War! (Sitcoms were allowed to be about proxy wars between us and the Commies back then, children.)

I pitched a conniption. Partially because of the disappointment, but mostly because of how shitty the joke was. Looking back, I can at least take solace in the fact that my parents weren’t doing it at the behest of a thoroughly untalented talk-show host, but still: this was the best they could do?

Pranks are the opposite of pizza or naps or boobies: even when they’re great, they still kind of suck.

The Dead never cared much for April Fool’s Day. Once, they opened a show on each other’s instruments. Garcia and Brent sat behind the drums, Billy strapped on Phil’s bass, and Mickey sang precisely as well as you would expect him to. When Bobby needs to help you remember the lyrics, something has gone horribly wrong.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRKeLuCevRI&w=560&h=315]

 

That was about it as far as Dead-related celebrations of the Feast of Fools went. Billy had been legally enjoined from pulling any pranks because they always ended up with refugee camps been set up and Doctors Without Borders being called in. Bobby pranked Keith one year by sleeping with Mrs. Donna Jean, but in all honesty, Bobby had no idea what the date was; he can’t help it if he’s lucky. People would occasionally try to prank Mickey and then Mickey would fly into a rage and break their collarbones.

The Dead didn’t care for April Fool’s Day for the same reason alcoholics stay in on New Year’s: they were Pranksters, and everybody hates a tourist.

The Matrix Revealed

October 7, 2013 / / 2 Comments

We’ve got to talk about these matrix mixes. I just went through about eight of them, one after another, the digital version of throwing a paperback across the room after an egregious sentence. Etree is full of the damn things, and fuck me if they’re not a solid 95% unlistenable.

In Bill Graham’s great posthumous oral autobiography (seriously), he tells a story about the light show folks trying to get more power and/or control and/and money. He laughed at them. “If you don’t show up, the band goes on; if the band doesn;t show up, you don’t play. The light show is an appendage! ZAYNE HASHEN MEIN TUCHAS, TU ZAF CHARATZIM MITTEN DER PICKLESCHMECKER! “

In a Matrix, the crowd is the light show: it’s there to complement, to heighten the drama, to punctuate and underscore. It can never become a distraction. Rising, falling, cheering, and occasionally singing: all as one, a great human sweaty glob of instant feedback. Technology (and, let’s not forget the hard work and love that Jeffrey Norman and the whole crew do) now allows for a clarity, a precision to the sound that can border on the sterile.

It’s easy to forget that these shows took place in buildings, buildings just chock-full of people going through some real heavy shit, man.

So when David Lemieux announced that the next Dave’s Pick would be November 30th, 1980 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, part of the big news was that this would be the first (?) official release that could rightly be called a matrix and from the small (for the Dead: it’s still a two songs that take up 20 minutes) snippet of the finished product, they’ve just killed it. Go listen to the drums, how you can hear them playing not just in the band, but in the room. They sound like they are fixed in space in a way that hasn’t been so clear before. The crowd cheers them on at every turn,

As opposed to–and I’m not making this up–one I listened to (briefly) where the matrix was where a compressed-sounding SBD met an AUD that was just dudes shouting out one another and yelling out names of songs that could never in a million years be played at that moment in the show. (Seriously, Mr. Bro-tato Head? You’re shouting for Wharf Rat in the middle of the first set? Go jerk off your uncle.)

 

p.s. It doesn’t take more than half-a-dozen comments on the announcement page before someone starts someone starts whining that, while the show’s from the ’80’s, it’s not from far enough in to the decade. Bravo.

 

Jerry Garcia In A Sidecar

August 27, 2013 / / 0 Comments

jerry bill graham motorcycle

Thanks to Friend of TotD, Steveb, for alerting me to the existence of this picture, which I had never seen before, but will now be getting tattooed on my face.

In case you don’t read the comments, he posted a portion of a cool article about the gig (12/6/80 at the Mill Valley Recreational Center) pictured above and in the last post. Check it out:

There’s a sweet story behind this gig, which was on 12/6/80. To quote from an article by Steve McNamara in Marin County’s Pacific Sun newspaper, which I have actually saved all these years:

“The Dead live in Mill Valley

“In New York and San Francisco people sleep on sidewalks for days in order to buy – at nearly any price – tickets to a Grateful Dead Concert. So it was remarkable to spend a mellow Saturday afternoon at the Mill Valley Recreation Center listening to The Dead play, free, to an audience of no more than 70. The occasion was the annual Christmas party of the Marin-Sonoma chapter of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Rodney Graves, who has a form of muscular dystrophy, is a good friend and Alto School fifth grade classmate of Justin Kreutzmann, son of Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann. The boys were talking about the party and how it would be nice to have some entertainment and one thing led to another. ‘We all live in the county,’ said Bill Kreutzmann, ‘and when I explained what was happening to the other guys it seemed like a nice thing to do.’

“Followers of The Grateful Dead – Deadheads – are the most loyal and fervent group in the world of music. They insist that The Dead are more than music, they are a way of life – an assertion that baffles fans of less complex musical groups. An element in this love affair is the low-key decency and intensely human presence of band members. Crazed pop stars they are not.”

In addition to the picture you used, the article includes several others, including one of Bill Graham taking Garcia for a ride in his motorcycle sidecar and one of Garcia, cigarette in mouth, signing an autograph outside on the deck.

As always, the recording of the show is available on archive.org. It was definitely a relaxed event.

EDIT: Go listen to this show: it’s spectacularly fun. Listen for Bobby forget to tell the band what the song was, then count off Cassidy anyway, only to have one of the drummers shout “What are we playing?!”

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