First: Billy’s had just about enough of this happy horseshit, thank you.
Second: Bobby’s impression of Popeye is hilarious, apparently.
Third: Garcia is still trying to hide from the T-Rex by standing still.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: godchaux (Page 1 of 4)
What’s up with Donna? Why does she sing out-of-tune? – Phineas Phakenamington, Philadelphia, PA
What’s up with your mother? And her vagina, which displays a stunning lack of forethought as to its door policy? Everyone is allowed in there and fights break out; the sheriffs get called all the time. Once, there was an outbreak of Legionnaires’s Disease that was found to have your mother’s vagina as the vector; that’s right, Mr. Phakename: people were Caribbean cruising on your mother’s vagina. Plus, she looks like your balls smell, also: your father’s dreams continue to go unrealized. Unless he’s no longer with us, in which case you have my condolences: I’m truly sorry for your loss.
Maybe she sings out of tune because the human throat–unlike, say, a guitar–is an imprecise instrument. It lacks any output jack; it is an acoustic instrument that has been miked and when that is matched against, for example, a gaggle of ripped-to-the-tits nitwits who have built a wall to make their sound, it is difficult to intonate precisely,
PLUS, we must have consistency: yes, poorly-intonated playing is dreadful. I agree, and I agree across the board. So, if you’re getting mad that Mrs. Donna Jean–a Grateful Dead member–was out-of-tune and haven’t been outraged for years about Big Chief Second Helpings, then I’m looking at you with askance, you perpetuator of the patriarchy. For all of Garcia’s bad qualities, which have been catalogued in numerous well-shoplifted books, his attitude of “good enough” towards all of his strings tonally agreeing with both one another and the rest of the band was possibly the most annoying. Well, maybe the accidentally burning down structures.
How do you pronounce “Godchaux”? – Keith G., Palo Alto, CA
Her-NAN-dez
What exactly is a new potato caboose? – Abandoning Thenamebit, Duetobored, OM
Something Phil used to do to groupies. Remember Zeppelin’s Mud Shark Incident? Like that, but with a Gaelic twist.
Really?
No, of course not: that’s not something a human would to do to another! It strains the bonds of decency and taints every piece of beauty on the earth. To know that somewhere, sometime, someone did this to someone else…if you knew it to be true, you would puke your brain straight of your ass. No human being is capable of this kind of horror.
Billy did it, not Phil.
What are the Dead really like?
Well, in the statistical aggregate, they’re around 41% deceased. Individually, I have no idea.
Are any of the stories captures so piquantly on these bloggings actually true.
For certain valuations of ‘true’, yes.
Why didn’t they play Ripple more?
Because it was just too pretty. Ripple was so pretty that Bobby kept demanding anal from it.
Happy birthday to the best piano player the Dead ever had.
Which brings us, again, to 4/21/78 at the Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. This tour is something of a Rust Belt/Appalachian Trail theme and, yes, there were two shows I’ve neglected, but my versions sounds as if the recording device had been keestered in and then never un-keestered, to be found post-mortem and released in a macabre recreation of Betty Canter-Jackson’s storage locker incident.
So, I went to the Rupp show, which I’ve written about before: it with this weird, wired energy that isn’t just the coke singing. Listen to the Playin’>drums. All of them stay up there for drums and listen to it climax 12 minutes in with a Donna-led call-and-response chant that makes this one of the only drums I’ve ever listened to on its own.
And then, right after that, Mickey starts playing the Knight Rider theme.
Hey! This is not Fleetwood Mac: knock it off or I get the hose!
This photo is obviously not telling you the whole story: Mrs. Donna Jean liked to fight as much as the guys, but she was a fairly petite woman and Billy’s program of punches and kicks were meant to be performed by a guy who made his living beating on things. So, Mrs. Donna Jean clawed and scratched and bit. In this pic, she is washing about two fl. oz. of Keith’s plasma out of her teeth.
So now you know.
Now, as you know, Blair Jackson and the rest of Big Dead are keeping things from you, important things: the keys to the Vault, the fact that “Mickey Hart” was played by different actors before and after the hiatus, etc. Why is this? Why does Blair Jackson hate the Dead?
No. You’re not going to do this.
Is it because he’s from Kenya?
Please: not again.
Is it because a mere TEASPOON of his liver, eaten, would produce TREMULOUS LUBICOSITIES OF THE UTMOST in the recipient?
Are you going mad or insane? There is a difference, and I can live with mad for now.
Ah, right: Blair Jackson is Yog Soggoth, the Ancient Anus with many Eyes!
Good, just mad.
Anyway, Blair Jackson is doing this thing over on Dead.net about listening to ten shows in a row so I’m going to beat him by doing the entire Spring ’78 tour because god help me, I need a girlfriend. We join in progress with 4/10/78 from the Fox Theater in Atlanta, GA.
Listen to the way Garcia snaaaaarls Los Angeles? Gimme Norfolk, Virginia. Tidewater 4-10-0-9…
And then stick around for the off-kilter BEW. Both drummers have been exploding with goodness and syncopation and tomfoolery this tour. And Keith is fucking killing it, but then, on a dime, his playing turns awkward and overpowering and there is a reason they rarely played It’s All Over Now.
And then check back in for Music Never Stopped which is such a train wreck that Harrison Ford is leaping in front of it.
P.S. After full listening, I give this show 3/2 thumbs up and a pat on its ass: “Good job,” I would say to it, were it here, even though it was goofy and sloppy and all over the place–they rocked the Fox with a crackling, coked-up energy. Proud of you!
Oooooh. OOOOOooooooOOOOOOooooh. (What’s weird is that if you use two ‘h’s, it’s no longer spooky. Well, yeah, it’s spooky, but in an unclean way: Ooooooohh. Right? Just got fifty shades of creepy in here.) It’s Friday the Thirteenth. Oogie-woogie.
The origin of our dreadful fascination with the date arose when Jesus was 13 and Joseph came in from a hard day of being a fictional character offscreen and said “Thank God it’s Friday,” and Jesus leapt up and screamed “You’re not my real dad, I hate you.” and stormed–well, I was going to say into the other room, but the Christs* probably had more of a loft thing, right? The open floor plan was big in Judea in, well, I guess it would have been 13, wouldn’t it have been?
So, then Jesus opened his religion and after that there were Knights Templar, who liked to roam around Europe building hospitals and having gay orgies. That got the Pope mad so he killed them all and, even though none of this really happened, it took place on Friday the 13th which is why on this date, we kill black cats on sight with impunity.
(There is a good possibility that none of that is true.)
So, tonight is filled with horror and foreboding (totally out of context, check out Bobby’s slide solo in Werewolves of London). Jason would have cut a swath through the Dead like Mrs. Donna Jean through a Holiday Inn, as would Michael Myers, mostly because Jason is a blatant rip-off of said Mr. Myers.
Freddie Krueger would have had no luck with the boys; there was nothing he could conjure up in their dreams that was scarier than things they had seen while awake.
Draculas of all sorts were known to avoid the Dead for fear of catching something. Or, more likely, catching everything. The weird, quickly evolving bacterium and viruses that followed each tour did some wonderful things (from a science point of view). There was one pathogen that caused a nearly 80% result for an incurable disorder called Total Nipple Refraction. TNR, man! So, like pretty much anyone with three or four brain cells, the draculas stayed away from the tour blood.
Werewoofs also would have been no sweat. A guy who turns into a raging beast once every 28 days? So, like, half-a-Billy?
It doesn’t matter anyway: Bobby still demands his nightlight to sleep.
* Until the age of 25, I thought that Christ was his last name. Like, “Hi, we’re the Christs. I’m Joseph, and this is my wife Mary.”
I’ll give 5-2 odds that this confab ended with a certain someone asking for everything to be repeated because he wasn’t listening.
Why would you ask me which room Mrs. Donna Jean is in? How should I know?
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