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Steak?
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: 1989 (Page 4 of 4)
Tell me again how 1989 was the Dead’s best year.
You playing that Hofheinz from ’77 again, buddy?
We forget how long ago it was, what a different world it was. To understand my point, you must listen to Pig absolutely fucking KILLING IT on It’s A Man’s World. That was April 15th, 1970. Listen to how crisp and present the recording is, how clean and separate the instruments sound: I would wager most lay-listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this recording and an official release from the era. Marvel at how such a recording got made in the same world where there is absolutely no record of a show from that same month: no tape, no poster, certainly no film but there is a contract and cancelled check, so it must have happened. There are shows as late as 1973 just…gone. Compare that to today’s DeLillo Barn of a culture, all of us pointing our iThings at each other the second anything notable happens. Holding our phones vertically, all of us.
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Everybody’s new favorite fun game: Play in One Key, Sing in Another!
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Is the most terrifying moment of your day the Silence that comes before the Fretting that comes before the Waffling that comes before the Choosing? An ’89? Surely, a Summer ’71! The wrong choice–it’s like throwing the i Ching, only to lodge the coins in your cousin Kevin’s throat and Kevin dies right in front of you and you just LOSE IT and decide that you can’t get in trouble if EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD, TOO, so you kill your way halfway down the street before they take you down. No matter which Ching translation you use, that’s an unhealthy omen.
I almost had one of those rolls today. I chose an ’85 (4/27/85 Frost Amphitheater, Palo Alto, CA) to start off the morning. The 80’s are a giant tushee: fun around the edges, but dangerous in the middle. (I apologize for that.)
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I’ve written before about Garcia’s guitar tone being friendly, but the entire band had an ethos of friendlyness-ship. (Of course that’s a word. And if not a word proper, at least wordish.) All those references to following and leading and sharing (women, wine (Not Persian, though. Persian was not a share-y kind of substance.).) There was very little aggression in the music: no one will ever enter the Octagon with Brokedown Palace blaring. This made them a different band then–say–Slayer, who once wrote a song about Josef Mengele from Mengele’s point of view. While many Dead songs featured unreliable narrators, none of them were so unreliable as to have committed war crimes. Committing war crimes is the very definition of being unreliable: you need to be watched, apparently. The second everyone turns their back, BOOM: you’re sewing twins together.
Slayer’s always been a bit of a mystery to me. Not the “why are they popular” part: there will always be ugly 15-year-old boys and money to be made catering to them being all evil and shit. I’m referring to the actual music. A friend burned me the Compact Disc. My good friend, Inter-Natalie. You should see her record collection. I like to listen to the hard-charging angry stuff when I am up in the gym working on my fitness, Sabbath and Titus Andronicus and the Boom Boom Satellites, so I tried a little Slayer and halfway through the third verse describing what can only be classified as “atrocities,” I quietly bowed out. I prefer to keep my tunes free of graphic descriptions of torture labs. Cartman was right: hippies hate Slayer.
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Who was it, precisely, that was clamoring for the return of Dupree’s Diamond Blues?
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In May of 1969, the Dead jammed with legendary conga player Mongo Santamaria. Also legendary was the lecture given to Bobby afterwards concerning his giggles upon hearing the name.
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Merl should have been the keyboardist after Keith. They would have looked like the Celtics in the 80’s, racially. Also, Walton.
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I don’t care if Putin has turned the place in to a Latveria-of-the-mind: THEY’RE THE BAD GUYS, FUCK THEM. They were THE BEST bad guys: evil enough (gulags, proxy wars), but not, you know, too evil (that thing that made the 40’s such an inherent downer.) They had an ideology and an aesthetic, none of this “at night, it is my bed; during the day, my clothes” bullshit these Al Qaeda fuckmuppets smell up the room with.
Best Set: First!
Second-best Set: Second!
Set List: Fairly standard for the era!
Show Highlight: SUGAR BEGONIAS! Seriously, do yourself a favor and listen to the seamless perfection of the transition. It got a round of applause in the theater. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn they practiced.
Small Favor: This film was not presented in 3D.
Shortest shorts: Wild guess!
Highest Light: Bird Song! Nice laid back jam at the end and Garcia’s voice still had its last tinges of sweetness. (You ever hear his voice crack on a high note, or slip and slide around the pitch like the rest of them? No…and no fair bringing up the laryngitis shows.)
Lowest Light: Eyes! That they at least had the courtesy to not play it for thirty-five minutes is the kindest thing that can be said about this particular rendition.
Love Light: And leave it on!
Goddamn Bullshit: $12.50 for the ticket, 11.50 for the popcorn and coke! (I am physically unable to stop myself from ordering the Jumbo Combo Snack Pack. I have watched precisely one movie in my life without popcorn and a coke: Super Cop with Jackie Chan. Atkins diet. Never again.)
Nicest Tradition: Smoke break during drums/space! You meet the nicest, most reasonable people during the drums/space bathroom-smoke-wander around break. They, too, refuse to coddle those muppets for the 85 minutes an evening they took to whack on things and play bloopy noises.
Saddest Thought: Maybe there’ll be a lady there and…I don’t want to talk about it.
Secret Hero: Brent! Brent was all over this show–musically–and he got as much camera time as anyone but Garcia. He’s fun to watch, too: throwing himself up and down his B-3 and smacking at its keys to produce that ‘ducka ducka’ sound. Plus, he’s got very large, very blue eyes that poke out from the Gimli of Gloin beard covering the rest of his face, and he zeroes in on Garcia with utter joy. I think there were pictures of his little girls taped to his piano and then he would look at Garcia and it was all very sad.
Average Age: Not all that young! Lot of sandals, too. Plus: a crazy guy! Old grizzled hippie-biker guy who apparently thought 7:00 PM at the Boynton Beach Plexiplex was going to turn into an acid test and we would all lube ourselves up with butter topping and do some sort of movie-orgy. He did have one good line, though: when Garcia lit up on-screen, Biker Guy chastised him, “Those things’ll kill ya!”
Best Factoid: Floor mats! Bobby, Phil, and Garcia had, laying on top of the rugs, what looked like floor mats right in front of their mikes. I was confused until I half-remembered that they were pressure pads that turned the mike on as they stepped up to sing. Which is clever, in an over-engineered, MythBusters sort of way.
Worst Pope: Bobby Knucklesandwiches VI! Seriously, that guy shit the bed.
Secret Secret: Phil! He didn’t get a close-up until halfway through the second set, when he terrified the entire audience by stepping up to his microphone to sing backup on Dear Mr Fantasy. A visible shudder went through the crowd, I swear to you. The only shots we got of him were immensely unflattering. Remember the sweatpants with the elastic on the ankles? Yeah, those. Plus, he was playing my least favorite of his basses, the headless Modulus. There is something unpleasantly fidgety about those headless guitars and I don’t trust them.
Biggest Surprise: Tyler Perry’s cameo as Madea!
Nicest Try: The Covers Project! Before the show, they showed three videos: classical guitar guy playing Bird Song endlessly, hipsters with too many Gram Parsons records wearing artisanal suspenders playing Brown-Eyed Women, also endlessly. Finally, a fat guy showed up and just awesomed all over his bass to accompany himself on I Will Take You Home. Pretty decent, that one.
Secreter Hero: The Director! (And the editor! and producer! as well, I guess.) Completely avoiding almost every annoying rock concert cliché. No swooshing Video Toaster effects, no split-screen, and quite clearly no over-dubs: coming out of space, the MIDI controller on Wolf crapped out, leaving Garcia standing there doodling noiselessly.
Shitting Me: 22 minutes and 28 seconds! That is the combined length of drums/space.
Best Face: Billy’s! Halfway through drums, Mickey called his usual audible and turned the promised Beating of the Drums into the predictable Berating of the Roadies. Billy just smirked at him and continued whacking his bongos.
Worst Hair: Mickey! He looked like the hostage with whom you didn’t empathize.
Bobbiest Bobby: Bobby! Good sweet mammy, was Bobby as Bobby as he could be tonight! Doing his little duck-neck shrug and the lunge and those thighs! (In the spirit of truth-telling, Bobby does have a kick-ass set of gams. Bobby is up in the gym, working on his fitness.) His hair was nothing short of spectacular and he remembered the words to everything, even an awesome Stuck Inside of Mobile, and that song has a ridiculous amount of words. They should have told Bobby they were making a movie every night. (Not only did Bobby remember all the words this show, but check out the next night, when he crushes Desolation Row. BOBBY, WHY YOU REMEMBER ALL 20 BILLION VERSE DESOLATION ROW, BUT FUCK UP PROMISED LAND? Yeah, Bobby: what the Vietnamese immigrant screamed at you.
My God: Phil’s outfit! I don’t mean to harp, but that inch of white tube sock in between the ankle elastic of sweatpant and the top of his New Balance sneakers is simply not doing it for me. The only thing Phil was missing was a mustard stain and a pocketful of food court napkins.
Listen to Not Fade Away, all the way through. Please. I promise you it’s worth your time.
LISTEN TO THE WHOLE THING! LISTEN TO THE WHOLE THING, FUCKER (Sorry for the “fucker,” pal.) NO, I’M NOT! DON’T BE A FUCKER: LISTEN TO THE THING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO!
Did you listen to it?
Got something in your eye, buddy? It’s okay, I got misty, too. Not full-on The Green Mile weeping, the memory of which is still a bit humiliating, but still a suggestion of a tear upon the eye. If you didn’t get a little choked up, then you’re not an Enthusiast, full stop.
This, my fellow obsessives, is what redeems the silliness and utter lack of discipline. The solo albums and the 1972 drum solos with just Billy for six or seven minutes and the fact that, while yes Truckin’ does have tough lyrics, 25 years is enough time to have figured them out–all of these former problems reveal themselves in the true scale of the thing as mere piffle.
Moments that made you remember that, for around 30 years, the Dead were the best house band in the world, no matter how big the house.
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