Josh Meyers has donned what is certainly a vintage tee-shirt–not a newly-printed replica like some disgusting poor person might buy–from Madonna’s 1987 Who’s That Girl tour.
(FUN FACT: In support of her third album, True Blue (which had Papa Don’t Preach, Open Your Heart, Live To Tell, the title track, AND La Isla fucking Bonita on it), Madonna’s tour lasted 38 shows and made her $25 million; the Dead played 86 shows in 1987, and made about the same. Plus, Madonna didn’t have to split the dough with five other guys. On the other hand, Madonna didn’t go on tour and earn $25 million in 1988, whereas the Dead did. On another hand, Madonna continues to perform as she didn’t die too young, and in a strange bed. On word to your mother hand, Madonna has gotten sad. On Dr. Joyce Brothers’ hand, all the great ones get sad. Remember Dick Cavett prompting Groucho through his old bits, and Groucho was just tired and sparse and gray? Madonna’s like that now, but with more environmentalism. Hands, man. Got a lotta hands involved here.)
That paragraph became incoherent.
Dude, you can’t hear me when I’m in parentheses. It’s an aside to the audience.
It’s not.
I’m going back to my point, which is non-essential. At best, this piece of information is classified as “non-essential.” If you had to evacuate, you would leave this knowledge behind. Yet, here we are:
Josh is, of course, paying tribute to one of the most storied of all the Bobby Shirts, Madonna Tee-Shirt. Bobby wore this on 7/26/87 at Anaheim Stadium, along with his most famous shorts:
It was an iconic night for all of us.
Occupying the Pantheon along with Snake Tee-Shirt, Pink Polo, and others, Madonna Tee-Shirt instantly became a fan favorite, and by that I mean everyone made fun of Bobby and some people were angered. The word “faggy” was thrown about quite a bit, I’d imagine. Younger Enthusiast, remember that this was 1987, and irony hadn’t been invented yet. At least not wide-scale dissemination of it, and definitely not in shirt form. (That was my generation. We did that in the 90’s. We came up with the concept of wearing shirts with lame shit on them. That was Generation X. We did literally nothing else, but the shirt thing was ours.) Tee-shirt fronts were for sincerity. To wear the shirt of an unloved band was simply unthinkable. It was 1987, and there was no difference between one and one’s shirt.
How could Bobby wear that shirt, man? Moochie had a bad trip from that shit. Her forthright sexuality freaked Moochie out! Tell him, Moochie!
“…”
See!?
Deadheads were aghast at that bullshit, Younger Enthusiasts! Madonna? Madonna? Deadheads prided themselves on their catholic tastes in music, as long as they got to define “music” as “a noise made by a handful of shaggy white guys.” Madonna made music–if one could call it that–for other people. Girls, mostly. Sensitive boys. And morons, let’s face it. If the general public were intelligent, then the ’83 Lake Placid Sugaree would be #1 on the Pop charts this week, but the public are drunken fools, and so the newest slurry from Post Malone is #1.
A Deadhead could not consort with the Whore of Detroit, it simply wasn’t done. A Deadhead could be into metal, sure. Or complicated jazz. Or the right kind of country, maybe. A Deadhead might listen to all sorts of unpleasant foreign bullshit, especially if Mickey mentioned it once in an interview.
But Madonna?
It simply wasn’t done.
Oh, yeah: Bobby got the shirt directly from Madonna when he met her two years after he wore the shirt onstage. No one knows why Bobby used Time Sheath technology to perform at a rainforest benefit with Debi Mazar, but he did.
*Good decision, by the way. The common euphemism for Twitter is a “cesspool,” but I do not believe Twitter lives up the those lofty standards. A cesspool, you will note, keeps the shit in.; it doesn’t let the poison seep out and contaminate the surrounding world. Twitter fails at this task. Another difference is that a cesspool is a necessary item we all like to ignore, whereas Twitter is unnecessary and we can’t stop staring at it. I can do this all fucking day, Enthusiasts. Twitter is killing us all.
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