- I spent a million dollars on this thing.
- Hey, Healy? Could you turn me up a bit? I can’t hear myself over Lesh and Weir.
- You smell like Heineken; let me have your liver.
- Fuckin’ Weir.
- Fuckin’ drummers.
- FUCKIN’ DONNA!
- Healy, if I still can’t hear my bass 60 seconds from now, I’m going to stab you. I will physically stab you with an actual knife. You need to bring it up at 800 cycles…that’s it: Ramrod, bring me my knife.
- No, Ramrod: to ME my blade.
- Bring everyone their knives, Ramrod!
- Would someone pull Mickey off that cop? Just grab him, but be careful…OOH, I should have told you that Billy was probably gonna punch you in the dick. He does that and other human beings seem to just accept it.
- Jerry, get out of the bathroom.
- No, not “I need a million dollars.” I told you that I have already spent a million dollars and now the million dollars is gone forever and we will almost certainly never get one cent of it back. What did I do with it? Stop hassling me, man.
- Yes, of course it seems perfectly logical that we allow the crew to have a full vote on everything we do. How can that be anything but a sound business practice that will, in no way, end in numerous deaths. Why do you ask?
- Who the fuck bought a harpsichord?
- Yeah, they call me Captain Billy; I’m kinda the captain. Would you like to touch the captain in a sensual way? Come! Let Captain Billy practice his sensuality all over you, my zaftig nightchild!
- Soooo…you should just assume that every single thing you see is just absolutely drenched with acid. All of it, even on the insides of things in defiance of all laws of nature. We encourage a culture in which is acceptable to drug one another at any time with any amount of any drug. Some workplaces have fantasy football; we have chosen to amuse ourselves through poisoning one another. We have almost definitely poisoned you already. Enjoy your backstage passes, Congressmen.
- Healy, can you–
- –Healy, you turn him up and I’m gonna buy, raise, and train attack dogs–like Michael Vick-type shit–and then I will set them on you and fucking LAUGH.
- –you’re just, like, mean.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: garcia (Page 10 of 10)
Grateful Dead imbibing game. Pick a show at random. Not from 1995: have more respect for yourself, would you please?
The rules:
- If Phil plays an unaccompanied bass solo, drink a Heineken. If, somewhere in the solo he hits a note that makes no sense whatsoever, drink another Heineken. If you rationalize it by telling yourself that Phil is a musical genius and means every single note, so therefore you just didn’t understand what Phil was laying down, then drink the rest of the case and imagine Phil playing in Puerto Rico and giving the donor rap in halting, old white guy Spanish.
“Me llamo Philipe. Tiene oído absoluto. Dame tus hepáticas. DAME TU HEPATICAS!”
- If Billy’s the only drummer, bet $50 that the Smails kid will pick his nose. If Mickey’s there, give your horse one hit of acid every time you can name the thing that Mickey’s hitting during drums. If he is hitting Ramrod, two hits. If he hits an executive from the record company, take the horse outside and free that majestic steed, who won’t survive two or three hours wandering through a town, especially after you fed it all that acid, you MONSTER.
- They play Might as Well and you think about watching Festival Express again–take a shot and demand your local diner give away their food “to the people, maaaaaaaaaan.”
- They play New Speedway Boogie and you feel like watching Gimme Shelter again–take a fistful of LSD and seconal, put on a bear hat, and beat Marty Balin half to death with a pool cue. (Who brings a pool-cue to a concert? Shouldn’t that have been, you know: a clue? “Sorry, guys, you can’t come in: I think you might be looking to cause trouble. Just a guess.”)
- If they play Dire Wolf–drink red whiskey for dinner. Then realize there’s no such thing as red whiskey so how did my whiskey get redOMIGOD SOMEONE BLED IN MY FUCKING WHISKEY.
- If Bobby screws up a lyric–do nothing. Mentioning that Bobby screwed up a lyric is like mentioning that Billy played drums: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. If Bobby gets every single word to Truckin’ right, go buy yourself the tightest, Izod-iest shirt you can find and pop that collar, baby.
- If they tune for one minute–hit of Persian. If they tune in the middle of the song–burn yourself with a cigarette while you sleep. If the play a song in the middle of tuning–burn someone else with a cigarette while they sleep.
- If Pig’s in the band and they play Lovelight and you still can’t figure out what the hell “Box back nitties, great bigging on the vine,” means–get drunk off a pint of cheap whiskey you keep in the back pocket of greasy Levi’s, have shouty drunken sex with Janis Joplin, and then wear a series of ridiculous hats, but actually look really cool in them.
Seven individuals with disparate backgrounds get thrown together by chance, fate, and poor map skills to find themselves eternally stuck in a paradise that is beautiful, but also quite inescapable. Has the cast of Gilligan’s Island actually been the Grateful Dead all along? Did they merely intend to go on a 3 show tour of Guam, Diego Garcia, and Midway and get hopelessly shipwrecked, an occurrence almost definitely attributable to choosing to combine marine navigation with cocaine.
Obviously, Garcia is the Skipper. Same body shape, same propensity to pick an outfit and stick with it, same love of hammocks. Phil is the Professor. We know who Bobby is, don’t we?
This week, Phil the Professor has lashed together 20 palm fronds, 9 coconuts, some vine, and 85,000 of the largest amplifiers ever invented by man. He will not tell anyone else where he got these things. His plan is to drop the biggest Phil Bomb ever and use the fronds as rudimentary surfboardsto ride the giant tsunami wave to civilization. Then he will eat all the coconuts. However, Skipper Garcia thinks there is more to the story. Plus, he knows this: to be in the Dead is to choose the most expensive option, always and eternally. Will I supersize that? I’m in the fucking Dead, what do you think?
Skipper Garcia tells Bobbigan that Phil has had the amps shipped in, meaning that there’s a boat somewhere on the island.
“Do you know what this means, Little Bobby?”
“Yeah, Skip! We gotta find that boat so we can…
“So we can?”
“…ask the crew for drugs! And to cook us brown rice. Skipper, no one has cooked me my brown rice in, like…forever. I miss it, Skipper. I miss my brown rice.”
Hat!
Professor Phil is trying to explain the plan to the Billy the Millionaire and his wife, Lovey Hart. Billy is wearing the blue jacket and little sailing cap that Jim Backus used to wear. You can totally see him in it, can’t you? Like now you can’t unsee it, right? It’s kind of fucked up. I hope I didn’t just ruin Billy for you forever.
Lovey Hart is recording a song cycle based on the Polynesian pookapooka drum that requires thirteen drummers playing 19 drums apiece. Prime numbers are very important to the Polynesians. Each drum is situated on its own island, so the drummers must helicopter from island to island at staggering expense, costing $800,00 and the lives of two drummers and a dog named Colin. Colin was also a drummer. The album will never be released.
And then in walk…Keith and Donna. As Ginger and Maryanne. Okay, the conceit breaks down at that point.
“Ah, Mr. Mydland, I see you’ve completed brushing your beautiful, silky hair 100 times on each side with your silver brush. As this is your first show with the Grateful Dead, please allow me to show you around. My name is Rutherford.”
…
“Yes, is certainly was a shame when you lost count those four times.”
…
“Yes, it was rude of Mr. Weir to kep sneaking up behind you and shouting numbers.”
…
“Yes, it did also seem to me that Mr. Weir’s decision to only yell “one,” and “two,” before bellowing nonsense syllables that he thought sounded like numbers was entirely based on the fact that Mr. Weir is mentally challenged. What’s odd is that I’ve heard him count off Estimated. The only possible explanation, may Sweet Sweaty Jesus protect us, is that Bob Weir is getting stupider before our very eyes.”
…
“Mm-hmm. I’ll bet you’re worried. I, on the other hand, have watched that man woo, seduce, mount, and hump to completion an ice machine in Salt Lake City. And now he’s actually dumber than that. But I digress: let’s show you around backstage.
“These are the dressing rooms. You do not have one, as they are earned by not dying. Mr. Godchaux, for example, never got a dressing room. He would change his trousers in the middle of the room, with Mrs. Godchaux holding a towel around him as you would for a small child at the seaside. The entire crew would laugh and laugh, pointing at the poor little man.
“This is Mr. Garcia’s dressing room. Needless to say, you are not allowed in there. Ever. Especially not if he has invited you in; all it means is that he smells narcotics on you and will not be satisfied until he looks for himself. He will check every single bit, Mr. Mydland. You have been given the talk about Mr. Garcia, correct? No eye contact–he interprets that as aggression. Also: it is his ice cream. Any and all ice cream is his. If you were to go to the shop to pick up a pint of ice cream for yourself, it would still be his ice cream. So, never ever ever–
DICKPUNCH!
“Ah, you’ve met Mr. Kreutzman. He enjoys so much to punch people in the dick. Randomly and viciously. You are aware of one of our supporters, the basketball player, Bill Walton? We have been keeping a terrible secret for years: Mr. Walton’s continuing series of injuries that have kept him off the court are, without any exception, results of being punched in the dick by Mr. Kreutzman.
Who was the most useless member? Musically speaking, obviously. In a serious crisis, like a fire or a cruise boat disaster, you would want precisely none of them around. Garcia might keep a cool head, but that’s it. Bobby’s presence would result in a vast increase in casualties due to the time expended by having to explain over and over, in increasingly simpler language, what was happening and why it was a bad thing. Brent would lose the will to live immediately and just walk into the flames.
Which brings us to Tom Constanten. TC is no one’s favorite Dead member, but he is also not anyone’s least-favorite. No one puts on a tape of 1969 and admonishes his friends, “Dudes, listen to the Bach-flavored calliope noises way in the background. LISTEN TO TC TRILL FANCIFULLY!” TC seems to have been included in the group for three reasons: to make Lesh seem like less of a pretentious dick, his clothes, and mustache. Let us examine these things:
Phil Lesh is unbearable, we all know this. If you can read an interview with the man where your hand does not involuntarily start making the jerk-off gesture, then you’re a more tolerant man than I. If Phil were a modern-day hipster, he would work the fact that he didn’t own a television into the first 30 seconds of every conversation he ever had. Phil’s one of those New Atheists that likes to start internet arguments. TC demanded that the group buy him a harpsichord. We have a winner.
As for attire, the only thing to be said is that TC thought he was dressing to play Hippie at a Dinner Party #2 in the flashback scene of a random ThirtySomething episode. TC owns a cape. It is not his first cape. In fact, TC has a “cape guy.”
But the Fu Manchu was pretty sweet.
The heroin was bad enough, but did you absolutely have to chase it with ice cream, you fat dead bastard? Why couldn’t you have been one of those skinny junkies? Anthony Kiedis was a junkie and he looks spectacular now. Of course, he’s 3’8″, but why quibble? You could have been one of those Jerry Stahl junkies, eating health food while steadily replacing his blood with smack.
But, no: you had a sweet tooth.
I’m not listening to space. Definitely not drums. Never. This part of the second set irritates me on a deeply personal level. When I download a show and throw it on the iTunes, the first thing that happens is drums/space gets jettisoned. This is how space sounds to me:
“Ooh, Garcia just went ‘blorp,’ so I’m gonna go “fleep.” For ten more minutes. Man, those people going to the bathroom are missing some good shit! Squizzle glop! Nah-nah-nah WANG! Ba-DOOM fwop fwop gTUNk”
The only reason people didn’t go to the bathroom during space is because they had just gone during drums.
We indulged these men, you and I did, by letting them fuck around for a good half-hour a night. We should have elected an audience captain to tell the band, firmly but politely, that this kind of nonsense must stop. No more MIDI-fueled Ornette Coleman-offs. Play something, anything. One of Bobby’s cowboy songs. One of Brent’s tunes. Fuck, man, play Wave to the Wind. Just stop doing whatever it is you think you’re doing.
And don’t think I’ve forgotten about you two in back. Here’s every single drum solo you two–or any other drummer ever anywhere–have ever played: whacka-whacka-whacka-whack. That’s it. It’s a drum: it only makes one goddamn sound. You do not need to make that sound over and over and over and over while Garcia is doing whatever he does in the bathroom for two hours AGAIN.
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