Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: 9/3/77

Do You Remember…

March 17, 2020 / / 3 Comments

Fuck Captain America; that is America’s ass.

OR

Hey, Ramrod!

OR

There may be no outfit that places the wearer in the 70’s more than “shirtless, jean shorts, white tube socks with green/yellow calf stripes/Adidas low-tops.”

OR

Keith’s placement on stage was decided via Random Walk, otherwise known as Brownian motion. All the observer could know for certain is that the piano wasn’t going to be in the same place it was last show.

OR

There are two (2) extant photos of Bobby playing that Ibanez double-neck. This is the other one:

Parish looking thicc.

Four Score

March 15, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Hey, Philbert.

“Not my name, choad.”

Happy birthday, sir.

“Another year defeated.”

Defeated.

“Life’s a battle, monkeynuts. Just you versus Death, and I got that boney fucker’s balls in my teeth.”

One way to look at it.

“You wanna know what I do every morning?”

Sure.

“Me and Jill get up real early, throw Grahame out of bed, and we do our P90X.”

Grahame’s in the bed?

“He has nightmares a lot.”

Okay.

“Then one of the Busboys makes me my coffee and I walk out to the porch. Faces east. Faces the sun. And you know what I do?”

What?

“I show the sun my cock. Just so the yellow fucker knows I’m not scared of him.”

That’s very metal.

“I don’t need your approval.”

True.

CELL PHONE NOISE

…

CELL PHONE NOISE

…

CELL PHONE NOISE

You’re not gonna answer that?

“Fuck, no.”

What if it’s Jill?

“Then she’d call on the Jill Phone.”

Is that like the Bat Phone?

“Obviously, dullard.”

What if it’s Grahame?

“Grahame doesn’t have my phone number. He used to, but he would call a dozen times a day to tell me about about dogs he’d seen.”

CELL PHONE NOISE

Just answer it.

“It’s some dumbfuck who’s gonna say dumbfuck shit, isn’t it?”

…

…

…

Noooo.

“Ah, for Christ’s sake, I’ll answer it if it’ll shut you up.”

…

“Thank you for calling Terrapin Crossroads, home of the Ross James sandwich and Ross James. Out of caution, we have closed until April 2nd, but the gift shop is still open 24 hours a day. This is Phil.”

“Spicy Phil!”

“Don’t call me that.”

“So spicy. Love to give and take. Like Larry David, but with hair and no Jewish.”

“What do you want, lardass?”

“Worried about Spicy Phil. Want protect. I send bubble.”

“I don’t need a bubble.”

“Like Travolta. You go in bubble. Stay healthy.”

“Fuck off. I’m not going in any damn bubble.”

“Is top-quality bubble! Custom! Is no Walmart bubble!”

“I don’t give a shit if it’s bespoke. Keep your bubble.”

“Is done. Bubble send.”

“No bubble!”

“You bubble!”

“No bubble!”

“Is send!”

DIAL TONE EVEN THOUGH PHONES NO LONGER DO THAT

“Asshole!”

Me?

“I will send the Busboys to your house. In real life, not in here. Out there where you and your loved ones are. I will have you beaten if I have to talk to that ball-gargling pantload one more time.”

I understand.

“Do ya?”

Happy birthday, Phil.

“Thank you. Fuck off.”

Easy To View You

February 16, 2020 / / 3 Comments

I have uploaded to my channel this newly-discovered clip from Englishtown not to steal anyone’s thunder, simply to spread its wacky goodness further. The news segment popped up this morning on Facebook, and then migrated to the Archive, and neither of them are YouTube. (Just put everything on YouTube. Don’t embed shit on Twitter, don’t use Instagram Stories, and for Christ’s sake stay away from Daily fucking Motion. DailyMotion is the Golden Corral of video streaming sites.) If anyone has any proprietary feelings towards the video, please inform me.

Otherwise, enjoy.

Best Practices Mandates Immediate Fencing In

August 27, 2019 / / 4 Comments

In the last installment of Your Festivals and You, we discussed the above semi-debacle, Summer Jam ’73 at Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway in Upstate New York. The promoters sold 150,000 tickets and then 600,000 kids showed up. This kills the Thruway. Once again, the producers and backers are not placed in the stocks for, oh, about a week or so, and once again New York’s governor does not call out the National Guard. (Reagan ABSOLUTELY would have sicced the Guard on the hippies, and had them set fire to a few black neighborhoods on the way back to their barracks. You couldn’t have gotten away with this bullshit in California at the time.) There is no way to keep the fans out.

Because–as I’ve mentioned before, and you can see for yourself in the posted photo–the Watkins Glen Grand Prix Raceway is located in a field.

Terrible strategic positions, ranked:

  1. John Travolta when he was in the bathroom at John McClain’s apartment and left his Uzi in the kitchen. That is the bottom. Worst possible place to be. Cannot be defended. 2/10, would not pet.
  2. Alley in between two buidings with lots of windows. A skilled operator tries to avoid this situation. There could be a sniper in any window. Or maybe just a guy with a brick. Literally no way to gain an advantage over your opponents from this position.
  3. Food Court. You cannot hold the food court. That’s the first thing prospective SEALs are taught during their training. Can’t be done, maggots! Food Court is a chaos engine! the instructors scream. The young men sound off in the affirmative, though they have no idea what their instructor means. They will learn. Oh, they will learn. And then the instructors try to drown the trainees. (I’ve watched several documentaries on SEAL training school, and it seems like 90% of it is just holding the recruits underwater and not letting them sleep until they go insane.)
  4. The upstairs closet. Michael Myers knows you are in there, Laurie. Stop being such a dummy.
  5. A fucking field. You can fight in a field. Until this very century, that was what war was (except for the navy stuff). Your guys and their guys oiled themselves up and ran at one another. Field is a great place to fight. Think of the alternatives! Swamps, mountains, forests: all wrong for fighting. You want a good field. Gettysburg is a field. Flanders Field is a field. Nothing like a field. But you can’t fucking hold a field.

Unless you build a wall.

This was Englishtown in 1977, and it was the next mega-concert on the East Coast after the Summer Jam. California had their Jam at the Ontario Speedway in ’74, and drew 350,000 for ELP, Deep Purple, and Black Sabbath; the show was well-received, and the kids were well-behaved, and so there was another California Jam in ’78 that drew in equal number. Missouri also had a massive rockyroll event you’ve never heard of in 1974 called the Ozark Music Festival. 350,000 teens showed up there, too, but everyone overdosed and fucked in public and shit on the ground, and the Missouri legislature immediately passed a law against staging a concert that size.

Anyway, Englishtown is a racetrack just like Watkins Glen and Altamont and Ontario; same problem, therefore: How to limit attendance to ticket-holders only. The promoter John Scher’s inspired idea was to circumplant rail cars around the track like Caesar at Alesia. 150,000 (or so) came out, which is what the producers had prepared for, and–but for the scorching heat–everyone had a good time. There were enough hot dogs and bathrooms for everyone.

So: it could be done. A multi-act, all-or-several day(s) festival-style show could be produced in America without the governor getting involved, just a lovely weekend  listening to hairy men playing Chuck Berry covers in a field.

Many in both the music and business industries found that to be interesting information.

Thoughts On Englishtown Without Research

September 4, 2018 / / 6 Comments
  • Name is a lie.
  • The town is an American one.
  • Has been since 1776.
  • I mean, the town was only incorporated in 1888, but the parcel of land has been under control of American authorities since 1776.
  • Some rich drunkards wrote it down on fancy paper–All this shit is ours now, King George, you little bitch–and that was that.
  • And the name is a lie in a second way: the Dead’s Englishtown show did not take place in Englishtown.
  • Technically, Raceway Park is in Old Bridge.
  • AHHHH-hahahaha HA! Raaaaaaceway PARK!
  • That was the sped-up and demonic voice on the radio advertisements, and it was a piece of life’s soundtrack in New Jersey as Watch the tram car, pleeeeeease or Double-yoo-SEE-bee-ESS…ehhf emm
  • They mostly had drag racing, which is the most gentile way to spend time or money, and so Young TotD has never been to the site.
  • (Brother on the Dead has been to a monster truck rally. It was right after Prince died, and so the producers played Purple Rain while one of the trucks spun around the course doing what BotD described as “interpretational dance with really big tires.” That’s about the entirety of the family’s involvement with novelty motorsport.)
  • This is down in Monmouth, which is South Jersey.
  • You may in your travels come upon a quick-tongued stranger who pours honey in your ear about a mythical land called “Central Jersey.”
  • HE IS A ROGUE!
  • Do not trust that stranger, for “Central Jersey” is as real as Yoknapatawpha or Middlemarch or Little Aleppo.
  • There’s North Jersey.
  • And there’s South Jersey.
  • That’s it.
  • The dividing line is the queue for Fat Sandwiches at the Rutgers New Brunswick campus.
  • And Monmouth County is South Jersey; this means the shore (which inhabitants of lesser states might know as “the beach”), horse girls, cursed swamps, overwhelming greenery, and a couple cities where you die if you get lost.
  • TotD grew up in the other Jersey.
  • Remember the intro to The Sopranos?
  • There.
  • I grew up in the intro to The Sopranos.
  • That’s North Jersey.
  • Anyway, Raceway Park is in South Jersey and the concert promoter who owned South Jersey was named John Scher, whose voice is second only to Bill Graham on the “recognizable announcer” list.
  • Both voices are deeply Jewish.
  • If John Scher wasn’t a Jew, his voice would be racist.
  • And now you’re hearing him in your head, aren’t you?
  • Mizzus Donna Jean Got-Chow!
  • The rock and roll promoter business was just like the wrestling racket: you had a bunch of territories and each one had a king. (They were always men.)
  • Bill Graham controlled San Francisco, and Barry Fey owned Colorado, and Harvey “Mr. Fun” Weinstein ran Buffalo for a while.
  • They had control of the venues, pull with the unions, and–most importantly–the power to fuck you bloody if you encroached on their turf.
  • A manager booked a band for someone else in my city?
  • No one that motherfucker is associated with plays for me ever again.
  • And John Scher had Jersey.
  • He opened the Capitol Theatre in Passaic in ’71 and started making friends in the music business, chief among them the Dead and Bruce Springsteen.
  • Who are wonderful friends to have if you are in the music business in New Jersey.
  • John presented the Dead at Roosevelt Stadium a bunch of time and y’know what?
  • Corry over at the indispensable Lost Live Dead tells the whole story better than I do, and his version is With Research.
  • So, John Scher calls up Garcia and goes,
  • “Jerry, bubbeleh, let’s do the show in a field and a million, billion kids will come.”
  • And Garcia is like,
  • “Yeah, all right, man.”
  • It happened just like that.
  • It was a thousand degrees and the Dead hadn’t played in almost three months because Tweedle-Drum drove his Porsche off a cliff.
  • This is what it looked like:
  • See the perimeter?
  • Those are empty railroad cars in an unbroken circle that measured a certain amount of miles.
  • Anytime you had one of these mondo-sized shows, gate-crashers would show up and bust through the fence; this was fine for Woodstock, but it was 1977 and that hippie shit didn’t play in Jersey: John Scher was getting your twelve dollars.
  • Fences don’t work, even if you top ’em with barbed wire and that is not a good look for a rock show, anyway.
  • What you need to do is–God forgive me–build a wall.
  • You may make your own joke about who will pay for it.
  • The cars worked, too: they’re too sheer and vertical to climb, plus semi-employed drunks and disgraced cops were atop them waiting to fuck some teenagers up.
  • (And do you know what it took for a cop to become disgraced in 19-fucking–77? In New Jersey? I can’t even think of anything. Maybe forcing the governor to blow you at gunpoint. And you’d have to do it in public.)
  • So no one snuck in.
  • The New Riders, whom no one cared about by 1977, and the Marshall Tucker Band, whom no one cared about ever, opened.
  • And then the Dead killed it for the whole damned show.
  • Put soup on your nuts.
  • That’s not the phrase.
  • Excuse me?
  • “From soup to nuts” is what you were going for. If something maintains consistency throughout the entirety of its existence, it does so “from soup to nuts.” I have no ifea what the fuck you’re talking about.
  • PUT SOUP ON YOUR NUTS.
  • I’m just gonna let you continue.
  • There is no film or videotape of the show, which seems ludicrous given that John Scher recorded nearly every act that played for him, but the whole of the footage is some boring “setting-up” bullshit and a few soundless minutes of the performance.
  • Which is a shame, because Englishtown was the debut of Fat Phil, who was several months into the Heineken Years.
  • The show was also the near-debut of this nightmare:
  • Oh, Bobby, what is you doing?
  • The Grateful Dead is not a double-neck guitar band, Bobby.
  • You are gonna play slide on both of those necks, aren’t you?
  • Put the stunt guitar away, young man.
  • The Boys were going to play the At A Siding section of Terrapin.
  • Or maybe it’s called Alhambra.
  • Terrapin Flyer?
  • I have no idea what it’s called: the weird part of Terrapin that’s on the record but they don’t play live.
  • Tragically, but predictably, the band voted “Let’s not try so hard” and stuck to the arrangement they knew.
  • They ended up not needing the cherry on top; the show is on everyone’s Best EVAR short-list.
  • I could review it, but fuck that noise.
  • Go listen to it; you own it; hell, you might have been there.
  • But keep in mind this: there is no “Central Jersey.”

I’ve Seen A Million Faces, And I’ve Choogled Them All

May 26, 2016 / / 3 Comments

englishton crowd

Way more, right? This was Englishtown, and there were reportedly 100,000 shirtless fans there. In 1992 alone, they played 13 stadium-sized shows; add those two together and you’re pretty close to a million.

You can do the math. Getting the numbers would require tedious research, and more than some guesswork, but this isn’t the Drake equation: there are actual figures available. The back of the envelope looks like (Number of shows) X (Average attendance) but that’s leaving quite a bit out; you need some sort of coefficient in there to account for repeat customers. The math is doable, though.

How many was it?

I Stick My Double-Neck Out For No Man

February 23, 2016 / / 7 Comments

bob weir double-neck englishtown

There is very little scholarship needed on the subject of Weirdo Guitars the Dead Were Photographed With: there’s just a few pictures, and it’s an exceedingly trivial subject. A scholar should be embarrassed to study it.

Luckily, I am not a scholar, so I can link to some Guitar Nerd bullshit, and then make stuff up.

It would be a shame to leave Bobby out: you’ve probably seen this photo before; I’m sure I’ve posted it. It turns out to be a bit of a mystery.

An interview with the head of Ibanez (actually a more interesting read than it sounds) says this:

When I first went to see the Dead in ’74 or so, I didn’t really know what guitar or guitars to take to show them. The copy we did of the Rex Bogue doubleneck was about the snazziest thing we had, so I brought it. I can’t recall what else we took down there. I brought my partner in crime, Roy Miyahara, with me to the show, which was at the old Philadelphia Civic Center – one of those massive airplane-hangar-style joints.

You might already see the problem: not only is the picture clearly not of a joint, massive or otherwise. In fact, I thought it was Englishtown. It can’t be ’74 for many reasons, not the least of which is the missing 75-ton sound system.

BUT

By the date of Englishtown, Ibanez already had a double-neck in (limited) production and it wasn’t the one Bobby’s playing. Look:

ibanez artwood twin

That’s not the guitar Bobby’s playing. Compare the headstocks. The one Bobby’s playing is a copy of John McLoughlin’s custom-made guitar.

Here’s the point where I become lost: that picture of Bobby up above is definitely from Englishtown. Here’s a picture I got directly from Garcia’s website that labels it as 9/3/77:

jerry bobby englishtown

Nothing makes sense.

Jerry Just Left Chicago

March 10, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The Crowd. Grateful Dead Concert Raceway Park Englishtown NJ 3 September 1977 | James R Anderson Photographer

Chicago will not look like this. Not thrown together and temporary: you will not see any seams or inner workings, unless you pony up for the VIP Road Crew Experience. For only five grand, you get to show up at dawn, carry speakers around, and punch people at the band’s behest.

There will be more shirts; there’s so much more of all of us these days.

Outside balloons will not be permitted into Soldier Field. For the courtesy and safety of all, there will be officially sanctioned balloons on sale in the facility for $12 each. (Each balloon comes with a limited-edition string as a free gift.)

There will be far, far less smoking. However, there will be infinitely more vaping, as there was no vaping in 1977. So, mathematically, any vaping at all would be infinitely more, but you get my point.

She’ll be there. She’ll be there, and when the band kicks into one of their good-time songs, she’ll think about an afternoon in New Jersey a lifetime ago, when she was beautiful and he was born to take his shirt off and the music played so damn loud you couldn’t hear anything at all.

The Stacks

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