Tag: dave’s pick

The thing about the Bush League is that it’s fun and homey: you can chat with the players, and there’s always great seats. Local high school kids sell undercooked hot dogs and generic cola drinks from the stands out in right field, and there is both popcorn and cop porn. A home run counts for 2.7 runs, or perhaps none at all: the scoreboard belongs to the possums now. In the Bush league, you can steal second or you can embezzle third; there is a Designated Catcher.

And in the Bush League, the Grateful Dead sings the National Anthem every night.

FoTotD Jay Gerland over at The Dead Blog alerts us to the new Dave’s Pick 19, which has been produced using Time Sheath technology, apparently.

Things TotD Can Tell You About Montana Without Looking At Wikipedia (Or Any Other Site):

• Its capital is Helena.
• The left part of the state nestles into Idaho in a sexual way.
• Named “Montana” because of all the mountains.
• Joe Montana is not from there.
• Neither is Joe Mantegna.
• There are Black Hills.
• Custer? Was that Montana?
• Sam Neill’s character from The Hunt for Red October never got his dream, which was to move to Montana.
• He was never going to get there, honestly. The second he started telling Sean Connery his dreams and hopes, everyone in the theater knew he was a goner.
• If you’re in the kind of movie where people die, don’t tell people your plans.
• Or cough. If you cough in a movie, you die.
• Cold as shit and a million miles away from anything.
• And because of that, for a while there was no speed limit on their highways: it just said “Reasonable and Prudent.”
• The federal government, however, was having none of Montana’s foolishness and threatened to take away all their road money, so they put up a couple “80 mph” signs, but there’s really no speed limit between Helena and Livingston.
• Montana grows more dental floss than any other state.
• Not as scenic as Idaho, but not as infested with White Supremacists, so that’s a draw.
• Has never hosted a World Cup.
• Nor a Papal visit.
• The Dead played there once on May 15 14, 1974 with the mighty Wall of Sound. The fine show, with its huge Dark Star>Morning Dew China Doll can be heard in all its glory on Dave’s Picks 9.
• While it was in-state, the Wall was the fourth largest city in Montana.
• There will be no riots in Montana, mostly because there aren’t enough people to classify as a riot. The largest outbreak of violence possible is a bar fight.
• It and California somehow have the same amount of power in the Senate. Thanks, Founding Fathers, you short-sighted, slave-owning fuckwits.

Dave’s Picks 7 and 8 are the exact same release in every way except set list, location, year, and lineup. It’s mostly the HoF Scarlet>Fires from each show that relate them. Plus, Bobby was wearing the same underwear, but that was a coincidence. Garcia had on the same pair of pants, but that wasn’t a coincidence: he had worn the same pair of pants everyday from January of ’78 to sometime in ’81.

The S>F from the Fox is legendarily sinuous; it has its shit together; the Fox S>F has an agenda for this meeting. You could almost swear that they practiced.

On the other hand, the seamless sequence of Scarlet Begonias and Fire on the Mountain from 1978 is rough and clumberous: if it were anyone other than Garcia and Bobby, one might say “hey, those two dipshits are guitar duelling up there,” and you would be right, but as the Dead would never be involved in something so plebian, you would be wrong to say it here.

The Fox is a scalpel; the Horton a chainsaw. Fox is Gallant, and Horton is Goofus.

Fox gets up and lets old ladies have his seat on the bus. Horton gets up on old ladies’ seats, sometimes on the bus.

Fox tweeted out a message of encouragement to Bruce Jenner. Horton tweeted out a message encouraging Khloe to follow in her stepfather’s footsteps by coming out of the closet and admitting that she is a Wookiee.

Fox cleans up after his dog because pet ownership is a responsibility. Horton’s giant mastiff is noticeably racist.

Fox is a volunteer fireman. Horton is a volunteer firebug.

Fox says “please,” and “thank you.” Horton tells bomb jokes at the airport.

Fox goes out of his way to make people feel safe and secure. Horton steals children and sells them to gypsies.

Fox looks both ways before crossing the street. Horton considers all angles before double-crossing the street, leaving himself in possession of both the drugs and the cash, and the street lying dead in the gutter.

Fox tips well. Horton sexually assaults barbacks; he barebacks barbacks. While screaming, “Here’s your fifteen percent!” But, you know: still.

Fox treats his sexual partners with respect and dignity. Horton has orgies with Dan Healy.

Fox makes sure not to call or text too late. Horton sets off firecrackers in your AC unit at three in the morning and then calls the SWAT team saying there’s gunfire, so the SWAT team raids your house and sets your uncle on fire with one of their flashbang grenades.

Foods the Help>Slip>Franklin’s in Dave’s Picks 4 is better than:

• Soggy fries.
• Black coffee.
• Gummy bears.
• Gummy hornets.
• Gummy Filipinos.
• Gummy anything, when it comes down to it. Fuck gummy.
• The bitter ashes one must eat when burying the childhood friend that honor demanded one strike down. Dammit, Yamiko-san. You knew my shuriken and nunchaku skills were far greater than yours!
• Bugs. No matter how many times I get told to check my privilege or shown infographics detailing how terrible cattle are for the world, I am not eating bugs. Bugs should not be eaten in a non-prank context. The last sound you hear before we switch to an all bug-eating society will be a cow plummeting from a plane with TotD riding it like Slim Pickens in Strangelove. (I would assume there would be a whistling sound; I would also assume the cow would be screaming the whole way down.)
• Bush meat.
• Game.
• Fowl.
• A vegetarian patty. There’s not enough information in that description for me to eat it. It’s wonderful that the patty doesn’t include meat: what does it contain? “Not meat” is an enormous category.
• 90% of flavors introduced after the initial flavor. Pringles, for example. They were fine. Then along came barbecue and sour cream, which were also fine. After that, Pringles decided on a bold strategy of abandoning potatoes and making the chips out of hobo vomit because all their bullshit flavors are bullshit.
• Get your act together, Pringles.
• Sweetbreads.
• Marrow.
• Offal.
• Scrapple.
• Spam.
• Oysters (that aren’t actually oysters, but testicles.)
• Oysters (that are actual oysters, because they are disgusting.)
• Lobsters. These are coprophagic sea cockroaches, first off; and they are expensive tofu, second, in that they taste like whatever you cook them in. Or you can just boil the, in which case they need to be dipped in melted butter to be palatable. Anything dipped in melted butter would be delicious: shellfish, steaks, Billy’s itchy asshole, whatever.
• And if we’re being real, and having real talk among bros and lady-bros: shrimp, too, is not as good as the set-opening, eye-opening H>S>F from 9/24/76.
• Like lobster, shrimp don’t really have their own taste. Vaguely clean and refreshing, kinda airy? The shrimp cocktail is not an even partnership: horseradish is doing all of the heavy lifting; the shrimp is just the delivery system for cocktail sauce.
• And then there’s the tail and what to do with it. That little transparent carapace looks so sad and creepy and bug-like. This is assuming you’re in a swanky joint. There might be some nonsense about peel-and-eat shrimp.
• If you come at me with peel-and-eat shrimp, I’m coming back at you with karate, and I will fuck you up with it.
• A plate of peel-and-eat shrimp is a plateful of work, that’s all. Don’t give me work when I asked for food.
• There are, of course, other ways of preparing shrimp,* but the best shrimp is fried shrimp because the best everything is fried everything.
• At the Iowa State Fair this year, vendors will be offering fried fries, which are deep-fried french fries.
• That kind of thing is the reason America is number one.
• Also premiering in Iowa this summer will be the really deep-fryer, which requires a caisson to be built so the teenager running the thing doesn’t get the bends.
• There’s also the tremendously deep fryer, which discusses philosophy at you until you don’t want lunch anymore.

* Mentioning different methods of cooking shrimp will of course bring to mind the bit from Forrest Gump and the actor who delivered the lines, Mykelti Williamson. Quick update: Mykelti is now semi-retired from acting and does a lot of charity work, mostly for And Then Flipper Was On Top Of Me, which is a non-profit that helps people recover from incidents involving dolphins and the tourists who pay to swim with them.

Funny fact: Mykelti Williamson has been sexually assaulted while swimming with the dolphins over a dozen times. The last six attacks have been by the same dolphin and then he’ll pop his head into the office and be all, “Oh my God, guess what happened when I was in St. Bart’s?”

And you wanna say, “You fucked that dolphin again, didn’t you?” but he raises a lot of money for the organization, so you have to play along and not get caught filming him fake-crying on your phone while he’s all, “That fish took my dignity.”

One time, he came straight here afterwards and he hadn’t even showered; he smelled like porpoise jizz.

Against my advice, TotD is taking his own advice and listening to the Dave’s Pick series all the way through in order and shall (sporadically or relentlessly: who knows at this point?) share opinions about the entries.

As usual, I’ve already fucked this up, as I listened to the first volume yesterday and have mostly forgotten it, but The Other One is a jammy highlight from a competitive field of jams. May ’77 was, as we all know, not a local or regional or even state-wide contest to find the Best Jam: this was Westminster. The Big Show. And this second set from DaP 1 sticks the landing.

How many metaphors you gonna mix and mangle?

Eleven.