Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: garcia (Page 8 of 10)

Creamery Of The Crop

May 17, 2012 / / 4 Comments

By 1972, Bobby had learned how to play. Not just play, but lead the band in his big-boy pants. Bobby was carving out a little space for himself and turning into Sergeant Major Clap-Yo-Hands and it was a good thing. Listen to 3:20 in Greatest Story: 8/27/72 is a Bobby show. Arguably the perfect versions of all of his Cowboy tunes, especially the soft landing he gives Dark Star with a counter-intuitive saunter into El Paso, and a great Promised Land, when he’s allowed to get to it.

The announcer is so stupid that he grew up to be Bill O’Reilly. Don’t tell people they were about to be sprayed with shit, man. His stupidity does lead to one of Bobby’s brighter moments. For some reason known only to his gods, Doofus decides to announce the location of the lost children tent over a loudspeaker. Because that’s information that everyone needs to know. Nothing bad could possibly come from broadcasting the location of our most vulnerable. Cleverly, Bobby cuts him off. Bobby was always sensitive to the welfare of children: his adolesence was rife with incidents resembling the Tragedy of Koko from the 1980 musical film Fame. Bobby now paid good money to ugly strangers to recreate the squalid de-pantsenings because, if pressed, Bobby would admit to enjoying every second of it. With Bobby, it was better to focus on actions; intentions were–at best–murky to all involved.

By the end of the show, you want to hurt the announcer. Physically. Methodically. Strategically. You can keep a man alive for such a long time while you introduce him to new worlds of PAIN (Scary music: oooh-AH-ahh!)  His groovy dude patter sounds like a passage from the upcoming Ken Burns 32-hour documentary Summer of Love/Edgar Winter of Discontent: The 60’s; it will be read by Russell Brand doing a bumptiously fucked North California…accent.

(An aside, a flash-forward to the real, or at least realistic: America picks the worst Brits. We’re offered Eddie Izzard, we pick Piers Morgan. Piers Morgan is the Devil. No joke, no exaggeration. Foe the sake of the country, someone should plant heroin on him. And in his house. And car. Spider-Man had a bad guy named the Sandman who could turn himself into sand (Don’t think about it.) Like that, that much heroin. Just make him go home.)

1972 was a rock-solid year: it wasn’t flashy. If you said the word “swag” in front of ’72, it would hold you down and–using only his rough and manly stubble–flay the skin from your haunches AND your flanks. Forget about the loins, the loins are long gone, for these men were so very hairy in 1972. There was no grooming, no manscaping (well, sure, there was…just not in that part of San Francisco; couple miles away, freshly shorn was cute-and-kissable) back then, and their northern European bristles permeated everything and the music grew Teddy Roosevelt mustaches all over itself  and the mustaches were made of balls and the BALLS WERE THEMSELVES HAIRIER THAN YOU’VE EVER THOUGHT BALLS COULD BE.

PS  In keeping with my new pet theory about listening to the shows around the great shows, I present you with 8/24/72. Berkeley Community Theater. Setlist-wise, it’s comparable to the Veneta show, but with a great Morning Dew and far longer stretches of everybody being in tune.

PPS  8/24 blows the Veneta show away.

Downhill From Here (Seriously)

May 15, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Dick’s Picks was a success. It is inarguable.

There are the pristine (mostly) versions of legendary shows, the stuff you listen to over and over after making it halfway through yet another ’89 that was infuriatingly similar to the last ’89 show you didn’t really see the point to. Harpur College, Fillmore East, the He’s Gone for Bobby Sands. (When Bobby was told about Bobby Sands, he responded, “No, he doesn’t,” and then Billy was all over him.

Listen to 16, 11/8/69 the familiar minor riff in 10 emerges from nowhere and retreats to an alternate dimension where the Mind Left Body theme got turned into a song and the Playin’ riff just showed up in Dark Stars now and again. You would know it was an alternate reality because Garcia would have a goatee on top of his beard.

AND THEN they start playing Uncle John’s, but just the music because at this point it’s just a riff and then your face melts and you pick it up except it fell on the carpet and you were eating fried chicken so…ahh, shit there’s face all over the–

We interrupt the nonsense to just say: hey, the guy’s working himself through some shit right now. Things are weird at the house, okay? You’ve been there.

–okay, okay, one more CrunchBerry–

Yeah, he disgusts us, too. You’re here of your own free will. No one’s forcing you to be here EXCEPT FOR ME WHO IS HOLDING GUN UP TO INTERNET!

You done?

Yes.

Perhaps the ultimate compliment one can give of this show is that it, briefly and entirely against my own preference, made me dance just a little bit. Sadly, sadly, but with hope? Maybe. They made me do something I didn’t want to do. The Grateful Dead are time-travelling CIA operatives.

 

It Was 35 Years Ago Today

May 8, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Your opinion of 5/8/77 (and I know that, if you’re reading this, you probably own the show, but check out the Matrix tape on Archive.org I linked to–it might even be better than the famed BettyBoard) has absolutely nothing to do with 5/8/77’s congenital greatness. It’s like the Sun: you cannot ignore it. (Also, it will give you skin cancer, but since everything gives everyone cancer nowadays, why hold that against the show?)

(What if, instead of culture doing what we wanted it to do, we did what culture wanted us to do? A truly memetic view of the world? And what culture wanted us to do was get cancer. That’s something DeadBase won’t tell you, primarily because it makes no sense.)

Now, the first set is spectacular, especially the Lazy Lightning/Supplication and Deal. But, the second set is obviously where the money is hidden. I always loved the very beginning of it:

All right, now we’re gonna play everybody’s favorite fun game: Move Back. Now, when I tell ya, “Take a step back,” everybody take a step back. Right? Right. Okay, take a step back. And take another step back. And take yet another step back. And another. Take a step back. Doesn’t everybody feel better? Whaddya mean, “No?”

And Keith plays his little snake charmer thing, and Garcia says,

Now, see, uh, all these people in front are getting horribly smashed here. So, uh, that means all you people in the back have to move back…

—or feel real guilty–

…just move back some.

Then all your friends won’t be so bug-eyed.

Garcia tocks away the Scarlet chords, soft and gentle, and then Mickey counts it off with this little triplet: dot dot dot…

AND THEN PHIL COMES IN: BOMP-buhWOOOO bum Bum BUM.  That immensely confident bounce that the song enters with!

You know the rest of it. Just listen to the music play.

Thanks, MCA

May 4, 2012 / / 1 Comment

MCA died today. Well, not MCA: I doubt MCA had been around for a year or so. Cancer strops that whimsical shit out of you, toot sweet. The horror, on its face, of cancer is the multiplying, the duplication, the encroachment. But it is a zero-sum game, there is only so much space in a person and every day there’s not even that space anymore. As the cancer takes over, you dissipate: ain’t you no more, that’s cancer where you used to be. The King is dead, long live the King.

So, Adam Yauch died today, and I realize all of our “how did you find out” stories are going to suck from now on: “Well, I opened my browser and there it was.” 

When Garcia died, people told each other, or it was on the radio. We still played those out in the street, especially in August. My RA from my freshman year called me. It was noon, so I was still in bed and I remember listening to the message he was leaving on my machine with a strange equivocation. I had seen them 5 times in the last year and hung a big Stealie flag by my bed, listened to the few tapes I had constantly (although I was developing an obsession with P-Funk, mostly the Eddie Hazel band version), and dated more than one full-on Hippie Chick. I was, you might say, a duck.

But no tears, nothing like that. Nor for when Freddie Mercury died, and there was no bigger fan in the greater suburban Essex County area then me. (A friend of mine has long been spreading a myth of some sort of “armband” in some sort of color, possibly “black” being worn by a certain bloggist  after the death of Mr. Mercury, but that so-called friend is a filthy-minded prevaricator and scofflaw. A penniless, poisonous, cretinous cur of a fool of an abolitionist of a suffragette of a communist of a fool. Double fool and a pox upon his tiny, tiny dishwasher-less apartment in Little Mozambique.  I say this about him: His drawers are wet and his blade is dry.)

47 is young, let’s not lie. Too young, although a 97-year-old would cane-whack you for suggesting that any age is the right age to go. Now, for certain occupations: not young at all. I am looking at a certain piano bench that has claimed far more lives than the Hope Diamond.

Thanks, Adam.

On The Road Again

May 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The first time Robert Hunter dropped, “But what would be the answer to the answer man?” on everyone, I am willing to bet everything I have there were at least three “whoas.” I am also laying 7-2 on a “far out, man.”

But anyway…

7/19/74. Selland Arena in Fresno, California. Start with He’s Gone.

None of them are in tune, with themselves or each other, and Garcia is the worst: he is a noticeable quarter-step away from where he wants to be for most of the song. Plus, he playing the wrong chords. Combining those two choices makes it difficult to succeed. He’s not the worst, though: Billy keeps wanting to get to the next bit a beat early and Keith is being overbearing like he could be, stomping and comping in the middle register with block chords like he did near the end…

But then, as they’re finished with the song part of the song, they turn around and snatch it from themselves and wrestle it with brawny arms and steaming loins and thrusty parts and soiled trousers and punchy crotch and shivering fists and they make Selland Arena in Fresno their lady-friend. (Which would be kinda nice, actually. Old ladies got put on the payroll. Plus, there was most certainly not going to be any of that Led Zeppelin shit going on. Yes, hotel rooms were being consumed by flames at precisely the same rate as Keith Moon went through them, but Garcia was always really sorry about it, man. You know he didn’t mean that shit.)

Here’s the only problem: Selland Arena only held 6,500 people.  How do you get 6,500 people to produce enough revenue to justify moving the Wall of Sound? During the GODDAM GAS CRISIS. And it wasn’t like nowadays, they didn’t charge rich people prices at concerts yet; hell, there were no rich people in Fresno fucking California in 1974 going to the Dead show. There might have been some cats with a roll, but nobody with any money. Even if they had money, rock bands didn’t learn how to really sell shit until the Stones’ Steel Wheels tour.

But not of that matters, because GO BACK AND LISTEN TO EYES, PEOPLE. The end of it, the Stronger Than Dirt part, where you suddenly realize again that the Dead, if they hadn’t had such strong strictures in place regarding practicing, could have been Yes. You listen good and hard to what Billy is doing: he has, as I’ve mentioned before, become Jazzbo Billy by 1974, but he was GOOD AT IT. Billy played his drums like he fucked his women: anally. (You are right, that is going too far and it doesn’t make sense, but wow did it make me giggle like a ninny when I thought of it)

Just, Y’Know: Thoughts On The Dead

May 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We forget how long ago it was, what a different world it was. To  understand my point, you must listen to Pig absolutely fucking KILLING IT on It’s A Man’s World. That was April 15th, 1970. Listen to how crisp and present the recording is, how clean and separate the instruments sound: I would wager most lay-listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this recording and an official release from the era. Marvel at how such a recording got made in the same world where there is absolutely no record of a show from that same month: no tape, no poster, certainly no film but there is a contract and cancelled check, so it must have happened. There are shows as late as 1973 just…gone. Compare that to today’s DeLillo Barn of a culture, all of us pointing our iThings at each other the second anything notable happens. Holding our phones vertically, all of us.

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Everybody’s new favorite fun game: Play in One Key, Sing in Another!

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Is the most terrifying moment of your day the Silence that comes before the Fretting that comes before the Waffling that comes before the Choosing? An ’89? Surely, a Summer ’71! The wrong choice–it’s like throwing the i Ching, only to lodge the coins in your cousin Kevin’s throat and Kevin dies right in front of you and you just LOSE IT and decide that you can’t get in trouble if EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD, TOO, so you kill your way halfway down the street before they take you down. No matter which Ching translation you use, that’s an unhealthy omen.

I almost had one of those rolls today. I chose an ’85 (4/27/85 Frost Amphitheater, Palo Alto, CA) to start off the morning. The 80’s are a giant tushee: fun around the edges, but dangerous in the middle. (I apologize for that.)

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I’ve written before about Garcia’s guitar tone being friendly, but the entire band had an ethos of friendlyness-ship. (Of course that’s a word. And if not a word proper, at least wordish.) All those references to following and leading and sharing (women, wine (Not Persian, though. Persian was not a share-y kind of substance.).) There was very little aggression in the music: no one will ever enter the Octagon with Brokedown Palace blaring. This made them a different band then–say–Slayer, who once wrote a song about Josef Mengele from Mengele’s point of view.  While many Dead songs featured unreliable narrators, none of them were so unreliable as to have committed war crimes. Committing war crimes is the very definition of being unreliable: you need to be watched, apparently. The second everyone turns their back, BOOM: you’re sewing twins together.

Slayer’s always been a bit of a mystery to me. Not the “why are they popular” part: there will always be ugly 15-year-old boys and money to be made catering to them being all evil and shit. I’m referring to the actual music. A friend burned me the Compact Disc. My good friend, Inter-Natalie. You should see her record collection. I like to listen to the hard-charging angry stuff when I am up in the gym working on my fitness, Sabbath and Titus Andronicus and the Boom Boom Satellites, so I tried a little Slayer and halfway through the third verse describing what can only be classified as “atrocities,” I quietly bowed out. I prefer to keep my tunes free of graphic descriptions of torture labs. Cartman was right: hippies hate Slayer.

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Who was it, precisely, that was clamoring for the return of Dupree’s Diamond Blues?

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In May of 1969, the Dead jammed with legendary conga player Mongo Santamaria.  Also legendary was the lecture given to Bobby afterwards concerning his giggles upon hearing the name.

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Merl should have been the keyboardist after Keith. They would have looked like the Celtics in the 80’s, racially. Also, Walton.

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I don’t care if Putin has turned the place in to a Latveria-of-the-mind: THEY’RE THE BAD GUYS, FUCK THEM. They were THE BEST bad guys: evil enough (gulags, proxy wars), but not, you know, too evil (that thing that made the 40’s such an inherent downer.) They had an ideology and an aesthetic, none of this “at night, it is my bed; during the day, my clothes” bullshit these Al Qaeda fuckmuppets smell up the room with.

Check My Pulse

April 30, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Idea for sci-fi novel: An Enthusiast invents (or inherits or finds or, if this were Stephen King, extrudes) a time machine; it only has one trip in it (Get it? Trip? Because of the drug use! Because of all the drug use). He uses it to go back to 1995 and revive Garcia from his heart attack and, after proving his bona fides as a Time Traveler (with wackiness: “The president is what-now?) nurses him slowly and carefully back to health.

This act leads–both directly and provably–to a Global Holocaust. Rest assured that the words zombies, genitals, and eating will be involved and, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what order you put those words in, I want no part of it.

My Old Kentucky Home

April 23, 2012 / / 4 Comments

“Hey, Bobby? I was hoping you’d play slide tonight,” is a sentence only uttered by one man in history.  It is our bad luck that the man was Bobby. He used to talk to himself a lot, on the road somewhere between Iowa and Summer. Immediately after viewing the classic made-for-TV movie ‘Sybil,’ Bobby demanded the rest of the group recognize his other selves, except Bobby had named them all Bobby and they all had his personality and, quite honestly, Bobby hadn’t even decided real concrete-like on precisely how many of them there were, so the whole situation just played itself out, quietly and quickly

Dear whoever put together the soundboard tape for 4/21/78 at Rupp Arena: thank you for doing what you did, allowing me to–at virtually no expense–possess this show, this wonderful artifact. But there is no such thing as 4 minute and 40 seconds of stage banter in 1978. Maybe in ’70, they would have sat there bullshitting with the rowdy kids in the front row on the Fillmore East, but no longer. Not here, now.

From the end of the Hiatus (June of ’76) to Keith leaving the band (2/17/79) can be seen as a gradual speedening up. Not a typo, a choice: speedening.

But here’s the thing about 4/21/78 at Rupp arena: apparently no one showed up and the security was dicks. That’s the story. Which is the problem with knowing anything, really, about the actual gig part of it–it removes the textuality of the text (well, not just the text, but also the text) and places the praxis of the ur-Dead and the…ah, fuck it. i can’t even make fun of that kind of crap anymore.  The best thing one can say of any music is nothing, there’s music on, shit the fuck up. But the second best thing you can say is, “Listen to this. Now, Now, you must.” When he got excited about an upcoming song or passage or transition, my friend Glenn would grab your forearm and he was strong. There was no getting away from the Sugaree he was offering you.

What I’m getting at is that I like to look up the shows that I listen to and read the reviews, but sometimes you see things like this:

This was a really good show for the Dead. I am from Lexington so I know they were probably playing to just a few thousand fans inside a huge 24,000 capacity seating arena. I guess that’s what they mean when they say their were plenty of seats down in the front. This was the first time the Dead ever played Lexington and it would also be their last time. That’s too bad, I wish I knew why.

HOW CAN YOU WISH FOR THAT INFORMATION? IT WAS CONTAINED WITHIN YOUR PREVIOUS SENTENCE. THEY DIDN’T PLAY THERE AGAIN BECAUSE NO ONE SHOWED UP

 

PS: Seriously, go listen to the Rupp show. They’re killing it.


A Grateful Dead Movie

April 20, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Best Set: First!

Second-best Set: Second!

Set List: Fairly standard for the era!

Show Highlight: SUGAR BEGONIAS! Seriously, do yourself a favor and listen to the seamless perfection of the transition. It got a round of applause in the theater. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn they practiced.

Small Favor: This film was not presented in 3D.

Shortest shorts: Wild guess!

Highest Light: Bird Song! Nice laid back jam at the end and Garcia’s voice still had its last tinges of sweetness. (You ever hear his voice crack on a high note, or slip and slide around the pitch like the rest of them? No…and no fair bringing up the laryngitis shows.)

Lowest Light: Eyes! That they at least had the courtesy to not play it for thirty-five minutes is the kindest thing that can be said about this particular rendition.

Love Light: And leave it on!

Goddamn Bullshit: $12.50 for the ticket, 11.50 for the popcorn and coke! (I am physically unable to stop myself from ordering the Jumbo Combo Snack Pack. I have watched precisely one movie in my life without popcorn and a coke: Super Cop with Jackie Chan. Atkins diet. Never again.)

Nicest Tradition: Smoke break during drums/space! You meet the nicest, most reasonable people during the drums/space bathroom-smoke-wander around break. They, too, refuse to coddle those muppets for the 85 minutes an evening they took to whack on things and play bloopy noises.

Saddest Thought: Maybe there’ll be a lady there and…I don’t want to talk about it.

Secret Hero: Brent! Brent was all over this show–musically–and he got as much camera time as anyone but Garcia. He’s fun to watch, too: throwing himself up and down his B-3 and smacking at its keys to produce that ‘ducka ducka’ sound. Plus, he’s got very large, very blue eyes that poke out from the Gimli of Gloin beard covering the rest of his face, and he zeroes in on Garcia with utter joy. I think there were pictures of his little girls taped to his piano and then he would look at Garcia and it was all very sad.

Average Age: Not all that young! Lot of sandals, too. Plus: a crazy guy! Old grizzled hippie-biker guy who apparently thought 7:00 PM at the Boynton Beach Plexiplex was going to turn into an acid test and we would all lube ourselves up with butter topping and do some sort of movie-orgy. He did have one good line, though: when Garcia lit up on-screen, Biker Guy chastised him, “Those things’ll kill ya!”

Best Factoid: Floor mats! Bobby, Phil, and Garcia had, laying on top of the rugs, what looked like floor mats right in front of their mikes. I was confused until I half-remembered that they were pressure pads that turned the mike on as they stepped up to sing. Which is clever, in an over-engineered, MythBusters sort of way.

Worst Pope: Bobby Knucklesandwiches VI! Seriously, that guy shit the bed.

Secret Secret: Phil! He didn’t get a close-up until halfway through the second set, when he terrified the entire audience by stepping up to his microphone to sing backup on Dear Mr Fantasy. A visible shudder went through the crowd, I swear to you. The only shots we got of him were immensely unflattering. Remember the sweatpants with the elastic on the ankles? Yeah, those. Plus, he was playing my least favorite of his basses, the headless Modulus. There is something unpleasantly fidgety about those headless guitars and I don’t trust them.

Biggest Surprise: Tyler Perry’s cameo as Madea!

Nicest Try: The Covers Project! Before the show, they showed three videos: classical guitar guy playing Bird Song endlessly, hipsters with too many Gram Parsons records wearing artisanal suspenders playing Brown-Eyed Women, also endlessly. Finally, a fat guy showed up and just awesomed all over his bass to accompany himself on I Will Take You Home. Pretty decent, that one.

Secreter Hero: The Director! (And the editor! and producer! as well, I guess.) Completely avoiding almost every annoying rock concert cliché. No swooshing Video Toaster effects, no split-screen, and quite clearly no over-dubs: coming out of space, the MIDI controller on Wolf crapped out, leaving Garcia standing there doodling noiselessly.

Shitting Me: 22 minutes and 28 seconds! That is the combined length of drums/space.

Best Face: Billy’s! Halfway through drums, Mickey called his usual audible and turned the promised Beating of the Drums into the predictable Berating of the Roadies. Billy just smirked at him and continued whacking his bongos.

Worst Hair: Mickey! He looked like the  hostage with whom you didn’t empathize.

Bobbiest Bobby: Bobby! Good sweet mammy, was Bobby as Bobby as he could be tonight! Doing his little duck-neck shrug and the lunge and those thighs! (In the spirit of truth-telling, Bobby does have a kick-ass set of gams. Bobby is up in the gym, working on his fitness.) His hair was nothing short of spectacular and he remembered the words to everything, even an awesome Stuck Inside of Mobile, and that song has a ridiculous amount of words. They should have told Bobby they were making a movie every night. (Not only did Bobby remember all the words this show, but check out the next night, when he crushes Desolation Row. BOBBY, WHY YOU REMEMBER ALL 20 BILLION VERSE  DESOLATION ROW, BUT FUCK UP PROMISED LAND? Yeah, Bobby: what the Vietnamese immigrant screamed at you.

My God: Phil’s outfit! I don’t mean to harp, but that inch of white tube sock in between the ankle elastic of sweatpant and the top of his New Balance sneakers is simply not doing it for me. The only thing Phil was missing was a mustard stain and a pocketful of food court napkins.

I’m Uncle Sam, That’s Who I Am

March 19, 2012 / / 6 Comments

I wrote about Bruce and the Dead and how different they are, even though if you think about it, they’re both overstaffed rock bands playing Chuck Berry songs in hockey arenas for white people. When you look at it that way and think about how exclusive a club that is, then yes there might be a resemblance.

But the moment of greatest divergence comes when Bruce Introduces The Band. Bruce once introduced the band for 35 minutes. If you were an acquaintance of Bruce’s and ran into him while he was with someone to whom you had not been introduced, just keep walking, man; Bruce will take a quarter-hour to say the person’s name, but it’ll be the greatest 15 minutes you ever spent. It is show-biz at its cheesiest, and therefore most authentic, best. He makes up little stories and cute pet names and shares wacky Jersey anecdotes and then you realize it’s been 12 minutes since he started this and he’s only at Roy Bittan. For a while, after Bruce rebuilt the Twin Towers and he became soulful and about family and settled into his latter-years role as “That guy from the AA meeting who calls everyone ‘brother’,” he turned the Band Intro into a song, an honest to god song about how much they all love each other even though they’re getting older and Bruce intros people, and EVERYBODY SINGS A WHOLE VERSE. It takes hooooooooooours.

The Dead did not do the show-biz introduction thing; it would not have gone well. Bobby would have to do it, of course. He had been pretending not to want to do it, but he REALLY, REALLY wanted to, so he kept dropping hints with everybody and no one knew what the fuck Bobby was talking about, so one night while Garcia was tuning and Phil was slapping a roadie, hard and in the face, Bobby just launches into–

“All right, people, lemme hear you! On the drums, stage left, Mr. Mickey–”

THWOCK a drumstick hits him in the back of the head, followed by a drum.

“That’s not cool! Over here on bass, from Palo Alto–”

“YOU KNOW YOUR PLACE, BOY!”

“Sorry, Phil. Ah, fuck, Garcia snuck into the bathroom. End of first set.”

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