Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Another in the seemingly-infinite amount of ways we know that Brent was, in fact, a dwarf from Middle-Earth: much like in the interminable Hobbit movies, whenever Brent started singing, it was also a bathroom break opportunity.
Wait. Holy shit: Middle-Earth…Mydland. WAKE UP SHEEPLE!
Presented without comment.
Brent considers any elevator ride that doesn’t contain an attack by a woman claiming to be his sister-in-law an incomplete experience.
For a band so heavily associated with the left, the Dead had a complicated and at times shaky relationship with environmentalism. Right off the bat, there was Brent’s whaling. Even the Japanese distanced themselves from it after they saw Brent’s methods, which involved stripping to his waist, sacrificing a war-bride, and just hurling himself off the boat like a crazy person to slide down the whale’s gullet and kill it from the inside.
Brent would burst forth from the blubber, having cut himself free with the knife he made out of his father’s bones. “TO THE OIL OF THE BEAST!” he would wail as he took a bit from the beast’s heart. The rest of the crew pretended to be into it, but it was just objectively unsettling.
Also, Mickey used to throw his empty styrofoam containers out the car window, but I think you have to view the shit Brent did as worse.
Bobby mostly went along with the nature thing, but he never became a vegetarian and was given to asking, out loud and at dinner parties, “Why are baby animals always the tastiest?” until Phil had a talk with him about indoor thoughts and outdoor thoughts.
It was a bad idea to even involve the Dead in the Easter pageant, let alone give them full creative control.
I sense this becoming heretical quickly.
No, heresy is merely the disavowal of Scripture: this will turn downright blasphemous almost immediately.
Ah. Carry on.
Right off the bat, the band moved the proceedings from St. Stephen’s–the small neighborhood church around the corner from Front Street–to the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum and hired the Flying Karamazov Brothers to open and play some of the 12 Apostles. They would also be doing a 40-minute drum-and-knife-throwing routine with Mickey to represent the resurrection. Billy was not allowed to participate in the knife-throwing act because Billy liked to improvise.
Mickey, being raised Jewish, didn’t really know what was going on and showed up at the first rehearsal in an Abraham Lincoln costume. When told the plot of the show, he still insisted on playing Lincoln.
Bobby, being raised a rich white person, was more familiar with the Easter story and had volunteered to write a rock opera about Jesus’ resurrection, except the deadline had blown by and all he had was a couple of chord changes and some verses that were about vampires.
“Bobby, are you just recycling your aborted vampire rock opera, Count Rockula?” Garcia asked.
Bobby looked down at the floor. “Aw, shucks, Garcia: I can’t get anything past you, can I?”
To save money on hair and wigs, Brent was to play Jesus. he got into character quite deeply, even being wracked with doubt over whether always feeling like the New Testament, and that he could never live up to the Old Testament that people loved so well. Also, this was a time in Brent’s life when his motto was “It’s 11 AM somewhere,” and things had become a bit unmanageable.
Come Easter Sunday, the set was on fire and Bobby showed up having not slept and looking like this:
The Dead were not invited back the following year.
Brent’s nickname for the Summer ’83 tour was “The Anal Badger” and you don’t want to know why.
It was years before Brent understood that this was Bobby’s “pretending to listen” face; he was actually looking at boobies and would need everything repeated to him in a setting with fewer distractions.
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