Oh, good: someone let Mickey near the children.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: Grateful Dead (Page 21 of 25)
It wasn’t like roulette, you see. The casinos have made fortunes since they installed those immaculately legible tote boards listing the numbers that have landed previously in red with big ol’ tempting empty spaces in between and they’ve been raking cash in because your dumb ass has evolved to think 15 is gonna hit because it’s due. It makes sense to believe that present events are based upon past observation: that’s why people instinctively shielded their crotches whenever Billy came around, for al the good it would do them. Billy was like Gretzky: he could always find your five-hole.
But just as it is a logical fallacy to think that the rules of real life apply in the casino, it is also a mistake to think that Hoyle has any say over the world. (It’s called the Ludic fallacy, which I know because it is one of those facts that gets lodged in my brain instead of, say, how to find love.) So, why do we forget that about the Dead? Why do we lionize certain shows only to ignore the rest of the week? These men were, appearances to the contrary, human. They had good runs. But the forest is invisible but for the trees, especially when some trees are, y’know, Barton Hall or Red Rocks. They suck up all the light.
Talking about the Dead is to talk about overshadowing. Garcia overshadowed the rest of the band, Mickey’s overkill overshadowed Billy’s light touch, ’77 and ’73 overshadowed all the other years, and Vince’s playing overshadowed the charitable work he did as a participant in the saddest Make-A-Wish event ever. Even Vince knew enough to be embarrassed.
We let ourselves think the greatness appeared as weird happening, crepuscular beams from a murky sea. Not so. 5/19/74 is rightfully well-regarded, especially the raging Truckin’>Mind Left Body jam. but listen to the very next show, 5/21/74 at UCLA the University of Washington* where they proceed to pull out a GODDAM 45 MINUTE PLAYIN’. Give the kids some Robotussin, shoot the dog and LISTEN to this thing, to the peaks and valleys that spring like Zeus out of inchoate spaciness one after another. (And, since it’s a GREAT matrix mix, listen to the appreciative audience cheer every twist and turn. Listen to ’em ROAR for Donna in Playin’. hell, listen to Donna!
Yeah, 2/14/70 is historic, but 2/11 is better. Yes, 1977 was THE year, but y’know: ’78 kicks more ass than an avowed lover of kicking ass who had spent his last dime to enter an ass-kicking contest in an attempt to win enough money to open his own business, a high-end Ass-Kickery.
*Thanks to a comment by an Esteemed Enthusiast, the location of the 5/21 show has been amended to note the actual location. For his Sherlockian abilities, he will receive a lifetime supply of Bobby Weir’s Shorts Shorteners. Shorts too long? Shorten ’em with Shorts Shortener!
The Dead wrote about 135 songs, and did probably half again as many covers, except that doesn’t tell the whole story. Mainly because some songs, they wrote three or four times.
Jack-A-Roe and Peggy-O are–thematically–the same song: doomed love, hyphens, Game of Thrones vibe. Ramble On Rose and Tennessee Jed are musically the same song, while Ramble On Rose and U.S. Blues are lyrically the same song. Eyes of the World and Help on the Way could be mistaken for each other in a dark alley.
The Dead are lucky that they premiered Iko, Samson, Throwing Stones,and Women are Smarter after their mind-blowing Europe ’72 warm-up show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Dick’s Pick 30). Otherwise, jamming with Mr. Diddley might have been a little more awkward. (And if you haven’t checked out this offering, you’re just a sillypants: the first disc* alone is worth the price of admission, featuring the five song Bo Diddley jam, a version of Are You Lonely For Me, Baby that defines “ragged but right,” and the only GD performance of How Sweet It Is**–which is odd, because they really rock the hell out of it, but perhaps the three chord tune was a bit boring for a certain bass player.)
To Lay Me Down, Must Have Been the Roses, and Ship of Fools are identical cousins; Black-Throated Wind and Looks Like Rain a bit more distantly related, but still clearly available to donate organs to one another. (Don’t tell Phil.) Chinatown Shuffle and U.S. Blues aren’t fooling anyone.
Now, don’t take this as any sort of chastisement, of course. Hell, a lot of really, really popular bands ripped themselves off: for example, AC/DC has only written, like, three songs in their entire career, which puts them two ahead of the Ramones.
*I hadn’t listened all the way through that first amazing disc when I wrote this, but you MUST check out the Smokestack Lightning, which is usually kind of a drag, but cooks right here PLUS the added fun of–about 8 minutes in or so–hearing Bobby try again and again to drag the rest of them into Truckin’, but the rest of them are simply not having it.
**I mistakenly thought that Bobby and Garcia played How Sweet It Is on Letterman, but it was actually Second That Emotion, because, in keeping with the theme of the post, they are also pretty much the same song. Check it out, anyway: Garcia with Tiger, Bobby with Pepto Pink, and the MONSTROUS Will Lee holding down the bass and backup vocals.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOeDEVyUBek&w=420&h=315]
That’s all there is to say about it: why not you and me? This world, it tends towards indifference and cold cruelty. When you find someone to love, hold on to them as tight as Phil held his Heineken and anyone that tells you different, Billypunch ’em in the nards.
So, good for you, Mr. President.
obama-affirms-support-for-same-sex-marriage-29242313.html
Oh, and check out this GREAT acoustic Jack-A-Roe from the ’80 Radio City run.
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.
Kesey’s son just died* and with the band raging behind him, he goes into ee cummings Buffalo Bill:
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death
Try writing another joke about Dickpunchin’ Billy after that shit, man.
* This is not true, as noted in the comments. Bill Graham had just died, not Kesey’s son; Kesey’s son had died seven years prior.
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.
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.
Do you have an Old Mall in your town? As those caverns of the 70’s stubbornly rust all over the country, they evolve into one of a number of morphologies: there’s the Ghost Mall, that has maybe one store still there and the others look haunted and Cormac McCarthy-ish. The giant letters forming the names of the stores have been removed and left their traces on the wall. Best “out of business” sign there is.
Then there is another kind of mall. Perhaps it is just as bustling as it used to be, back when it supported three separate record shops (one of which was actually–swear–cool) and an honest-to-god Tiny Comic Book Store. Not too big–just one long oval with Macy’s on one end and Sear’s on the other. A solidly striving, middle-class mall in America. Now, yes, there always was a bit of a crime problem, but you get a lot of shoplifters at any mall and quite frankly, the whole situation was needlessly exacerbated by the Police Chief getting himself run over while in pursuit three times. Twice, maybe. Three times, you start looking at the common denominator.
But where there used to be ladies apparel shops are now cash4gold places, the Body Shop replaced by the Dollar Store, and far more places selling baseball caps than you would think the market could bear. It has become the Terrifying Mall, a mall you are sure “belongs” to someone who is not the rightful owner, someone for whom “laundry day” is never a valid excuse for wearing certain colors.
Jut asking, because apparently some poor soul got here via the search term socks for fat ankles boynton beach and everyone knows that the best place is Sweaty’s at the Boynton Beach Mall, in between the two kiosks selling iPod accessories and the Mexican supermarket. Godspeed, you fankled lovely.
Do you know what analytics are? I didn’t, until I started making the bloggings. Now I know how each and every person got here–there’s a list of the exact search term. Let’s see a few, shall we? (The search terms are in bold, obviously. I have not altered them except when I did to make them funnier.)
Now, weir fucking donna is an obvious one, as is is phil lesh a jerk, but less predictable was the fact that three lost, lonely men (and you know that they are most certainly men) searched for ned lagin or ned lagin band.
I’d like to think that both dickpunching billy and grateful dead crotchpunch represent people who had been here before, but for one reason or another forgot to bookmark the bloggings.
As for the 8–FUCKIN’ 8 HUMAN BEINGS–who searched for grateful dead rule 34? You sicken me. On the other hand, it was nice to fill a niche
“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.
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