- Despite the seamless and legendary transition linking Scarlet Begonias and Fire on the Mountain, racism still plagues us.
- First set is rather first-settish.
- No MIDI-off during Space.
- No Space.
- Tendentious about its atheism.
- There is little to no chatter about how awesome it is to be in Ithaca, partly because the Dead didn’t do that, and partly because it is not awesome to be in Ithaca.
- Which is admittedly better than their 1980 show at Barton Hall when Bobby starts singing “Playing in the barn” to make fun of the place, which they all apparently hated playing.
- Which is admittedly the Grateful Dead thing to do.
- Losing the master reels of the show is also the Grateful Dead thing to do, but that’s off-topic.
- Always funny to bring up, but off-topic.
- 5/8/77 once threw a Hungry Man Frozen Dinner at an old man who wouldn’t get out of his way in the supermarket.
- Really winged the fucker.
- Keith’s farty little Moog that he’s baldly uninterested in playing.
- There are bits during the first set when you need a break from the Dead. This is a good break from the Dead:
- If you don’t like AC/DC, then go eat ice cream with your butt: you’re a louse and a subversive; neither kith nor kin to the righteous and rockin’.
- AC/DC valued rocking so much that if you were merely about to rock, they would salute you. To be on the mere precipice of rocking–not yet actively rocking–that was enough for AC/DC to award you a triumph.
- After very few minutes of YouTubing and googling, I have realized that there will be a long post on AC/DC soon.
- This can’t wait, though: did you know they played Coachella?
- This year? Like, a month ago?
- It did not go well because, among other things, they brought their giant inflatable stripper and shook it at hipsters, who went to watch the DJ at the next stage.
- Also, there was a fill-in drummer because the regular one is in jail now for hiring a hitman.
- There will be a post about AC/DC soon.
- The second set is so good that it sets unreasonable standards for second sets, and promotes a culture in which some things are seen as “better” than others; when, in reality, we know that all second sets are valuable members of the community, whether they be officially released gems or from the Nineties.
- These unfair and arbitrary standards lead to second set-shaming
- Kinda short.
- That’s what she said.
- But, also: statistically provable to be among the shorter shows, and especially second sets, of the era.
- Why is St. Stephen so slow? Hop to it, hippies.
- 5/8/77 cannot be crowned the Best Evar by the Grateful Deads because they used performance-enhancing drugs for this performance.
- All of them had been smoking doobies since rising, and their doobies were so very dank.
- The only thing that could facilitate their rising was two fatty rails of the finest yay. Those fatty rails were the first of so very many fatty rails.
- Mrs. Donna Jean had begun her day with Irish coffee, hold the coffee. Then, she started drinking.
- Phil joined her, but stuck to his Heineken until 5 pm, when he switched to red wine because Phil is classy.
- The previous night, Keith pulled a Drugstore Cowboy and hid up in the tiles at a local place and nabbed a fuckton of pills and currently the only way to tell that Keith is alive is that he intermittently shits himself.
- Garcia, both the drummers, and the current road manager all have varying levels of heroin dependence.
- Very few bands have had to deal with the problem of both the drummers being junkies.
- Dealing with one junkie drummer is an unimaginable hell; I’m impressed everyone survived.
- Everyone didn’t survive.
- I reiterate: because of all of these performance-enhancing (in the Dead’s case) drugs in the band’s system, this so-called “Cornell show” is no better than Mark McGwire’s shameful dingers and shriveled testes.
- The Morning Dew really is quite a thing, though.
- Only 364 shopping days until Cornell Day.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: 5/8/77 (Page 3 of 3)
- Donates a lot to charity, and not just that: the right charities, y’know?
- Stops the car to help turtles across the street.
- Ducks, too.
- The greatness of the sound of the Betty Boards is very rarely better demonstrated than on this show; her soundscape is like an army cafeteria tray: everything has its own space; those spaces fit together into a whole.
- The holes make a whole.
- The Lazy Lightning>Supplication. When Bobby starts ranting about how dizzy ain’t the way that you’re making him feel, you believe him just a bit.
- Bobby dizzy.
- Phil. Just: Phil. So much Phil. Too much Phil?
- If you think there’s such a thing as too much Phil, then you can’t sit with us at lunch anymore.
- Jill sometimes has too much Phil and slips a xanax in his smoothie and the afternoon is so much quieter.
- 5/8/77 did not throw a Hungry Man Frozen Dinner at anyone, let alone an old man, anywhere.
- Getting back to Phil, and the muchness he displays this evening, his opening notes to Scarlet Begonias are perhaps the most joyous he has ever played, almost overwhelming – a violent joy.
- There must be a point at which superballs no longer superball, right? Even baseball-sized balls of the bouncy rubber don’t do that neat whipping-around-the-room thing that terrifies the cat so much, so the threshold at which mass supersedes boing must be rather low.
- But, what if Bear got a hold of the formula and emboinginated the shit out the rubber to the point where you could make half-ton cannonballs out of the stuff and they would be just as bouncy as the little toys?
- Then you get a helicopter and a pilot with nothing to live for and drop the fuckers onto downtown Los Angeles during lunch hour.
- ZIP! ZAMP! WHOPP! SPRANGG!
- Buildings would come down, right? I’m neither an architect nor a civil engineer, but I would imagine some new piles of rubble would be built that day.
- Your helicopter would be shot from the sky, but rightfully so.
- Anyway: that’s what Phil sounds like – a superball the size of a pizza oven ricocheting off the Staples Center and taking out an overpass for the 110.
- Also, probably killing a shitload of people.
- Am I alone in saying that Phil’s tone from Barton Hall this night was not worth the lives of several dozen strangers, all with lives and dreams and families? Some of whom had their pets with them?
- There will be collateral damage in the animal companion sector. Mistakes were made.
- Phil during S>F is like: “Oh, that’s what you do. Okay. Got it now; no more questions, Mr. Lesh.”
- And then Garcia starts playing twiddlydwam and hootywow with his MuTron.
- The MuTron has the greatest name of all the effects pedals, and those were some good names, but it wasn’t on-the-nose like the Wah Wah or needlessly vulgar like the Big Muff
- Y’know, just to break character and be honest without the silly surrealistic nonsense: they are absolutely killing this Scarlet>Fire and I fucking love the Grateful Dead. They make a good noise.
- The spring tour was Keith’s last consistent one with the band. There are shows from November of ’77 that his drugged-out droning make nearly unlistenable, but he is still playing his ass off here.
- DEWWWWWWWW.
- Fuckin’ DEEEEEWWWWWWW, brah!
- Bro, I need you to here and chest me in the manliest of fashion: thrust your pectorals into mine, for they are jacked and stoked and knock-out and turned-around – I say “yes” to being bro to my bro. I will be your Bromeo, but you need to motherfuckin’ RECOGNIZE this DEW that THE BOYS are puttin’ down, Bro J. Simpson.
- Okay, I’ve never done this before, but fuck it: Cornell Day. Here’s a list WITHIN a list.
- Things The Dew Is Better Than:
- Mountain Dew.
- Voodoo.
- Sussudio.
- Israeli pop singer Dudu Fisher.
- Da Doo Ron Ron by The Crystals. (That’s a damn good song in its own right, though.)
- Scooby Doo.
- Scuba Doo. (This was a Hanna Barbera cartoon about divers with a talking seal friend who solved underwater mysteries. It was not a hit.)
- Sodoku
- Dog doo.
- There is no try; only do or do not.
- Deuteronomy
- The Dew is not better than doobie, but it is most certainly better with doobie.
- Until next year, Enthusiasts.
Barton Hall at Cornell University is one of the Seven Mystical Wonders of the World; not only is it a mid-sized hall with shitty acoustics for privileged children who couldn’t get into Yale, but also the Shfincter of Sherfa’glasz, from with the Abandoned Gods extrude their way into our dimension.
On May 8th, 1977, such a God was extruded.
No. Try again and with not so many made-up and/or imaginatively capitalized words.
…
As usual, Big Dead conspires against us to withhold the truth: there was no 5/8/77 show. The facts are these: the Scarlet>Fire is clearly from February of ’78, the Morning Dew is from 8/2/76 – a show, a show, a show which we have been LIED TO about for YEARS by reptile people MASQUERADING as Canadians; the lie is that THERE WAS NO SOUNDBOARD but there WAS: it was on the CORNELL TAPE that the CIA has used for YEARS as the HOLD MUSIC on their phones.
ATTICA. ATTICA
Jesus, knock it off. I mean: really, man.
I was going to tell the nice people about how the Jews were involved.
Yeah, I know you were, but let’s don’t, huh?
Aw.
Yeah, you’re a tough batch o’ pudding. You’ll snap back. Wanna try again?
Sure.
…
This is the part where I blather on about DeLillo or metafiction and metanonfiction and the impossibility of unseeing something. There very well could be nonsense about baggage of belief; I am entirely capable of referring to an object’s level of “thingness” and will certainly use quotations to denote that I am being clever.
Can any contest not involving a set distance and a timer be judged? Does the label of Best Evar preclude any logical thought or criticism thereafter? Furthermore, is any and all said thought and/or criticism not inherently about the status of bestness, and not about the music? Can this show simply be listened to anymore? These are questions I will ask, because I am just about the worst.
Dick joke, dick joke, dick joke; a reference to Betty Canter-Jackson and her recordings.
Harrumph.
Hey, I got a “harrumph” out of that guy!
Did you go triple-meta on that one?
Yes. And now, if you’ll notice, I’m talking to myself.
Yes. Wow. Your head is completely up your ass, yeah.
It’s warm and quiet.
Try again?
Okay. How about one of those lists?
You love those.
Everybody does.
Sure they do.
…
Metals that Cornell Would Smelt, due to the Show’s Hotness Levels:
- Bronze.
- Iron.
- Copper.
- Aluminum.
- Silver.
I’m sorry, but you need to stop doing this. There’s nothing here and you’re doing it on purpose to bother the nice people.
I was getting to the jokes.
Such as?
Some of the metals have absurd and laugh-generating names. Manganese? Get the fuck out of here, manganese.
I hate you.
Molybdenum. Seriously? Who does that with letters?
And the premise doesn’t even make sense: is it that the show was melting stuff?
No. What I said was, “Were the levels of rock and roll good-time party juice translated into units of heat, and you had a foundry or a smithy or something of that nature at that measured unit of heat, then these transition metals would transition, or ‘smelt.”
Still makes no sense.
When metal melts, it smelts.
I don’t think that’s precisely right.
It’s a mystery, I guess.
One more time?
Sure.
…
What are you going to do, not listen to 5/8/77? One of those types, huh? Knew a fucker like you in grade school.
Weird Wally.
Pity the Weird Wallies of the world; he had a rough time. “No, I won’t,” Weird Wally said about the things everybody was doing; “No, I don’t,” he said about the things everyone liked. There were rebels, who marched to the beat of their own drummer, and then there was Weird Wally, who had long since stabbed his drummer and now wore the drummer’s skin as a warning to other drummers.
Don’t be a Weird Wally. He lives under a bridge now, and not even a nice bridge. When he makes water, rats laugh at his wiener.
But, he makes his own schedule. Weird Wally is his own man; he is an island, and he has his integrity.
Fuck Weird Wally: join the club. People are nice, sometimes. Listen to Cornell tonight. Everyone’s doing it.
That one was okay.
Yeah.
You know it. This one’s indelibly scratched into you; it won’t buff out. Does that opening Take a Step Back take you back, raise the hairs on your arm, the boner in your soul? The dynamic tension of the intermittent instrumental stabs and barks bouncing on both sides of your head, then there’s Mickey on the right, then Billy opposite, Mickey again, and one of these days some kid’s gonna die with this general admission bullshit, and Keith–high up and sprightly and hard left on this sterling example of Betty’s Boards.
And then: swooping like a sex pterodactyl up to the most perfect note he’s ever played, Phil sounds like a 20-ton Super Ball.
That was the magic moment for me when I was just a small Thought on the Dead, that bombombom phWOOO kicking off the hour-plus second set that has been enshrined in the Library of Congress and in an even more patriotic honor, blasted at detainees at Gitmo. (The only effect the psychological torture had, however was a request for “some ’72, as a palate-cleanser, praise be unto him.”)
I’ve written about this show before and I’ve never really written about the show before and won’t again this time because the show is almost besides the point: it’s a holiday now (try calling in Cornell to work) and the origins of holidays are almost always immaterial. There were lots of friendly meals between white settlers and Indians, but we picked one and put it on a Thursday. It’s the one day of the Enthusiasts’ year when everyone’s listening to the same show: it doesn’t matter which show, honestly. (Probably shouldn’t be a ’93.)
Not to argue against this one: you can’t. They rocked out with their cocks out on this night in Barton Hall, metaphorically except for Billy, and to take the position of BEST EVAR HARGLEFLARGLE is to take a defensible stand.
But it’s a superfluous one: the greatest show the Dead ever played is the next one you listen to, if you’re an Enthusiast.
To ask “What was the best show the Dead ever played,” is like asking “How many flarns do you want?” In both cases, the word your answer hinges upon (are flarns a yummy, wafflle-like dish or kicks to the jaw?) is completely vague.
Define ‘best.’ For some in the band, I assure you that they think the best show ever was the one in which they got paid the most. For Mrs. Donna Jean, it was a show early in ’73, when she had started singing more songs with the band: someone threw her roses, expensive ones, and she pressed one and she still has it. Someone whipped a used Christmas wreath at Mickey’s head once and he leapt into the crowd and started beating random fuckers with a microphone stand.
Best is where you find it.
p.s. There are a shit-ton of Matrix mixes, “upgrades,” remasters, and karaoke versions of the show on the tubes, but I’ve linked to the original Betty Board, because it’s the best. She got it right the first time.
Q: Why was four afraid of five?
A: Because 5/8/77.
Happy Cornell Day, everybody. This is my gift to you.
Yes, clearly it’s Titanic and Mind-Blowing and Earth-Shattering and Vast and Under-Rated and Over-Rated and Just Exactly Perfect, but the one quality that no one ever mentions is accessible. And 5/8/77 is accessible in spades.
Sure, there’s jamming, but it’s not the Neptunian jazz of ’74, nor the acid-skronk of ’69. There’s no waste; Garcia’s long, liquid lines are building to something, always, and Billy and Mickey have their feet on the gas pedals with a safecracker’s whispered touch–little bit faster here, slower there, bigger now Bigger Now BIGGER NOW and shhhhhhh…
There is command.
The greatest ever? No. not even the best show that week–5/5, with its majestic Sugaree gets my vote–but Barton Hall has something that only Veneta and Egypt also have: mystique. Fame. Perhaps we can’t even make an honest reckoning of that night anymore. Read some Don DeLillo; it’s good for you:
Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides — pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.
A long silence followed.
“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”
Another silence ensued.
“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.
“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?”
If you heard it today for the first time, would you recognize it as THE GREATEST DEAD SHOW OF ALL TIME EVER? Would the shock of genius, the green flash of recognition hit you, run up your spine, Billypunch the dick of your soul?
If you really did meet the Buddha on the side of the road…would you know it was him?
PS I have deliberately not linked to the show on the archive because you have it.
Quick question followed by hysterical rantings, accusations of treachery, cries of poverty (abject, moral, financial), and threats of reprisal.
Why not crowd-source the next Dead release? Put the 6 or 8 shows being decided among online and let the Enthusiasts decide. Why wasn’t that part of the Grateful Dead Game, that feculent folly? Someone explain that thing to me or I’m going to have one of my little fits and we can’t have the couch cleaned again: it’s more duct tape than sofa now.
Here’s my vote for the next one, pulled from a well renowned for its sweetness and goblins, but in fact all the more worthy because of its brethren: to listen to any show from Spring ’77 is to demand comparison and 4/22/77 at The Spectrum in Philly more than holds it own against any comers. The Peggy-O is the equal of the vaunted 5/7; the Scarlet>Fire might be better than 5/8.
P.S. The Scarlet>Fire is better, just objectively better. Don’t argue with me and go eat some fiber. And, hey: if you like what I’m doing, then wave the flag, huh?
P.P.S. Listen to Keith during the Dancing jam at 7:45: he hits these beautifully dissonant chords with the Hammond, which he uses quite a bit this show, but then he starts playing like a child, a drunken hairy child prone to smacking people, doing smack, smacking smack, and occasionally shoplifting. EDIT: There is no evidence whatsoever that Keith was a shoplifter. The smack, yes, but we have every reason to believe Keith paid for his candy bars.
Thereafter, Keith goes back to the piano to play some of the most gorgeous lines he’s ever laid down (you jive turkey) as if to reinforce his point.
P.P.P.S. They have, collectively, taken this show out back and beaten the living shit of it. BEST SHOW EVER! You stop that, you big bully.
Your opinion of 5/8/77 (and I know that, if you’re reading this, you probably own the show, but check out the Matrix tape on Archive.org I linked to–it might even be better than the famed BettyBoard) has absolutely nothing to do with 5/8/77’s congenital greatness. It’s like the Sun: you cannot ignore it. (Also, it will give you skin cancer, but since everything gives everyone cancer nowadays, why hold that against the show?)
(What if, instead of culture doing what we wanted it to do, we did what culture wanted us to do? A truly memetic view of the world? And what culture wanted us to do was get cancer. That’s something DeadBase won’t tell you, primarily because it makes no sense.)
Now, the first set is spectacular, especially the Lazy Lightning/Supplication and Deal. But, the second set is obviously where the money is hidden. I always loved the very beginning of it:
All right, now we’re gonna play everybody’s favorite fun game: Move Back. Now, when I tell ya, “Take a step back,” everybody take a step back. Right? Right. Okay, take a step back. And take another step back. And take yet another step back. And another. Take a step back. Doesn’t everybody feel better? Whaddya mean, “No?”
And Keith plays his little snake charmer thing, and Garcia says,
Now, see, uh, all these people in front are getting horribly smashed here. So, uh, that means all you people in the back have to move back…
—or feel real guilty–
…just move back some.
Then all your friends won’t be so bug-eyed.
Garcia tocks away the Scarlet chords, soft and gentle, and then Mickey counts it off with this little triplet: dot dot dot…
AND THEN PHIL COMES IN: BOMP-buhWOOOO bum Bum BUM. That immensely confident bounce that the song enters with!
You know the rest of it. Just listen to the music play.
Why hasn’t Barton Hall been released commercially? Not that I’m looking for it, obviously: I can still remember the all-black Maxxell with 5/8/77!!! written on the tag in red ink. Since then, I’ve never not listened to this show. Even though the boys and I drifted apart during the first decade of the new millennium, that second set still called to me. “Just the first little bit,” I would tell myself. “Just the opening to Scarlet: dat dat dat–bom ba WHOOOM!” And then, of course, it would be seventy minutes later and the Dead would have destroyed and rebuilt the world with Morning Dew.
But no official release. They have the tapes, obviously, along with a fondness for releasing Spring/Fall ’77 shows–there have been 5 Dick’s Picks, one Road Trip, one Digital Download, To Terrapin, and the 10 CD Winterland ’77 box set. (Swear I did that by memory, so if I’m wrong, then…I don’t know: nothing, I guess. Carry on wasting time reading this nonsense.)
There’s a great book that came out last year, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes. It might be the definitive history of one of the most fertile musical scenes in history, New York in the 70’s. The author is mugged taking the subway to the train for Cornell and loses not only his money, but also his Dead tickets. The New York Times wrote an article recently about the archive and the sheer volume of shows available nowadays and its effect on ranking shows and whether or not the band should be appreciated show-by-show or by tour. Quite honestly, I think the author of the article was assigned an article covering The Dead’s weary arrival into Manhattan and just couldn’t interview Bobby again. True, there had been no dickpunching since Billy went back to the ocean, but still, you try asking Bobby any other question other than, “When did you start looking like Dad Wolf from Teen Wolf?
- So, who was on Style’s Woof-mobile?
Anyway, what I’m saying is that 5/8/77 is kind of almost vaguely “out there.” And we’re coming up on the 35th anniversary, but no one’s talking advantage of it. New members, fresh blood. Think I haven’t seen hobbies die? I used to work in a comic book shop, man: Hell holds no terrors for me.
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