Thoughts On The Dead

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Tag: Grateful Dead (Page 22 of 25)

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.

How Does The Song Go?

March 20, 2012 / / 4 Comments

There are few Dead related pleasures more piquant than the moment when Bobby just totally gives up on remembering the words and starts singing, “yuh duh DUH yuh DUH.” Actually, Bobby’s constant memory lapses led to the classic stage configuration: Bobby had to be in the middle so everyone had an equal opportunity to yell at him when he sings Truckin‘ like this:

It’s hilarious. You can almost see Garcia contemplating the whole Mickey and the Hartbeats thing again.

Garcia knew the words, Bobby. Brent and Donna knew the words. Pigpen knew the words even when they weren’t technically words at all. (I refer you to “Box back nitties, Crayfish and mormon mice. Workin undercollar onda mall all night.”) Phil did not know the words.

New contest: has there EVER been a show where Bobby made it through without forgetting where he was? Identify it in the comments and win a year’s supply of Forearm Sweatbands by Mr. Phil of Palo Alto.

Lay Your Money Down

March 4, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Have you seen this book called How to be Like the Grateful Dead in the Business Places or Something: Business Innovations from the Long Strange Trip? Something like that, but the actual title is under the page on which I am working and I am just that committed to doing NOT ONE jot of research for these bloggings, even when now I kind of want to know. I shall, however, resist.

A book like this can succeed on two fronts: it might have cool new photos or stories about the band, or it might have a coherent and well-considered thesis that the presence of the Dead only augments. The book falls short in both categories. There are some good pictures, but nothing revelatory. There are, for instance, no photos of Billy in his Spring ’85 tour alter ego.

Billy always adopted a tour alter ego, someone to transform into when the romping got to stomping and the hotel bar started eyeballing him. Billy’s tour alter ego was usually a horrible, vicious man named The Chasm. Luckily for some, Billy would presage the arrival of The Chasm, announcing in the style of the delightful street urchins on The Wire, “Chasm coming!” and everybody would just clear right out except for one guy who would lazily wobble his head towards Billy and ask, “Chasm? Cool, man. Is he holding?”

CROTCH!

But 1985 was different. The entire band had been out of their heads on the MDMA that tour, but Billy had shifted paradigms on ’em again and undergone a massive change in temperament, renaming himself Slobber T. Johnson. He’d walk around pantless with his crank in his hand sweetly inquiring of anyone who passed by, “Hello, I’m Slobber T. Johnson. Are you slobbering johnsons? My johnson sure does need a slobber, you johnsonslobberer, you.” and it just goes on like that.

So not only does it disappoint that there are no pictures of the event, it also confirms my skepticism about the whole project as just a cheapjack move to make some blood-money. [EDIT: In no way is the income derived from writing a semi-serious book about a country-rock jam band “blood money.” We renounce the writer of the previous statement, and as all-powerful editor, replace him with ourself.] FREEDOM! [Who let him out? Who the fuck let him out?] I will DESTROY the SOUL of the UNIVERSE unless you RELINQUISH the GAUNTLET OF GANTHET! [Shit, he’s fully capitalizing now. It’s bad.] The JAWS of my DARK ANUS will CHOMP on your NETHERS until you–

Guys. Guys, enough. Thank you: it was cute until the “dark anus” and then…you know, we just can’t be having it around the kids.

I am SORRY.

[My bad.]

Back to work, now.

The entire concept of this silly book is that you should take advice from a group of orangutans who had had more than one conversation involving the phrase, “He went where with the money?” Normal human beings might have that conversation once due to no fault of their own, but they never have it twice. You pay attention the second time. Not our heroes. For all we know, they might have chosen who to give the money to by who had the most pocket space. The Dead leaked a lot of cash. They behaved, in other words, completely contrary to every business practice known to man.

I’m betting the book is going to hit on the Dead’s early adoption of fan clubs and mailing lists as some sort of evidence that the Dead “really were the first social networkers.”  Next time someone tries to tell you that the telegraph was the Victorian twitter or somesuch, headbutt that fucker til he dies.

Ramble On Rosalita

March 3, 2012 / / 6 Comments

I was raised in New Jersey, so if you say bad things about Bruce Springsteen, I have to impregnate your cousin. No, not that cousin, the other one, the one no one would expect. My family takes our New Jersey rock seriously: my cousin once punched out Jon Bon Jovi. That is an actual true fact.

For graduation, one of my friends gave, as a “graduation gift” (don’t ask, it was a suburban thing), around 10 people the exact same CD, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Not only was it the ballsiest act of record snobbery in the books, but it was the most successful: all of those recipients still listen to the record regularly. Because it’s The Wild and the Innocent, man, But it was also telling for the fact that in New Jersey in the 90’s, everyone was simply assumed to be into Bruce.

So, what do Bruce and the Dead have in common? Quite a bit, but not very much at all.

They both made their bones as live performers, got ripped off by shady idiots, and became beloved by white people everywhere. The Dead built a Wall of Sound, Bruce ripped off the wall of sound. But the analogy quickly falls apart.

Both favored the approach of putting as many people on the payroll as possible, but Bruce hired employees, and then yelled at them a lot. Which shouldn’t be held against him: it’s how most bandleaders have always treated their musicians. James Brown used to fine people for missing notes. Gene Krupa only played the drums for the permission it gave him to scream at sax players. If E Street bassist Garry W. Tallent had ever tried any of Phil’s multi-octave meanderings, Bruce would’ve just outright beat him to death in front of the rest of the band as a warning.

Bruce and the Dead never met, seemingly. They certainly never jammed together. Neither Mickey nor Phil would have taken well to being counted off in such a commanding tone; it would have ended poorly.

Yes, both favored 8-minute long songs, but in Bruce’s case, 5 of those minutes were the band vamping while he told a story about his father. Or, possibly, about the Highway of Hope or the River of Faith or the Off-Ramp of False Equivalence or whatever the fuck he’s been yammering about for the past 15 years ago or so.

(Plus, Bruce’s accent has now lapsed into either speech impediment or elaborate put-on. Growing up, I had a friend whose mom had gone to high school with Bruce, because everyone in New Jersey is required to have some connection, however tenuous, to Bruce under penalty of someone going, “What the fuck, you don’t have a tenuous connection to Bruce? What the fuck over here?” Do I need to mention that this woman who grew up not two miles from Springsteen’s house at the exact same time had not one hint of grizzled twang to her voice? At the beginning of his career, Bruce sounded like a sweathog, but now he’s Johnny 99% and he wants to Occupy It (All Night Long.))

Although, I certainly would have enjoyed hearing Garcia try to do one of Bruce’s raps:

“So, see, my dad, who was very much kind of his own avatar? If you can grok me on that, y’know? So, he was very much a man of his times–ooh, wait, I heard this cool thing about watches…

“GIVE ME YOUR LIVERS!”

“Someone take away Phil’s mic, please.”

My Best Friend, My Drummer

March 2, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Listen to this, starting at around a minute in. It’s the Stir it Up jam, you know it. But listen again to how the very instant that Garcia picks up the thread that he’s been doodling at, Billy’s right there with him.

Billy gets short shrift. The other chimps built a Wall of Sound around him, (literally*), but Billy was still sitting there like the lost Murray brother with his pervy mustache and dinky little jazz kit. Whenever Mickey wasn’t around to rope Billy into his percussion related…ideas…Billy’s entire kit would fit in the trunk and backseat of an El Dorado. He gets overshadowed, though, partially stemming from the fact that Billy is deliberately kept away from people, especially people who have crotches they don’t want punched.

Billy should be listed along with Charlie Watts and Animal Muppet as one of the greatest drummers of the time, but he labors under the double canopy of Garcia and Phil. Phil, as we have discussed, preferred to play all the notes. Other bassists would play some of the notes. Actually, most bassists would play merely a few notes repeatedly. Not our Phil, so it’s easy to forget The Rule:

The sound of a great band is made by two guys, usually the drummer and the rhythm guitarist, but sometimes the bassist. No exceptions.**

The Stones are Keith and Charlie. Van Halen is those two aging tweakers and whatever hepatitis-infected blond they can rope into screaming, “GLARBLE MONNA HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT!” for a three-month tour that lasts five weeks and ends in recriminations, lawsuits, and, finally, discussion of Wolfgang’s unfortunate resemblance in every single way possible  to A. J. Soprano that was totally uncalled for. Not cool, man.

The sound of the Dead is Garcia and Billy. Dead and gone.

(We do, though, have recordings of the shows, which we may listen to at our leisure. For your enjoyment, and to bolster my pro-Billy stance, listen to the Mind Left Body Jam in this China/Rider. It proves my point: Phil played the bass, but Billy played songs. Man.)

*Billy refused to sit directly under the massive center speaker conglomeration, primarily because he had been up all night doing drugs and shooting at the Invisible Ones with the people who erected the thing.

**I am including Rush in this. The sound of Rush is generated by Geddy and Neil. Lifeson, while technically known in official musician terminology as “a motherfucker,” has always been generic, generally.

ADDENDUM

Recently having written a post about Springsteen, I have come to the realization that the sound of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band is generated by Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, making it an ultra-rare piano/drum combo.

Another Dick’s Pick In The Wall

February 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The Wall of Sound. Sweet heavenly Jesus: the Wall of Sound. These befuddled men asked themselves, “How much Sound do we need?” The answer–apparently–was, “A Wall’s worth.”

The problem was not really with the Sound so much as it was with the Wall. It was also an intractable problem, due to the fact that the very definition of ‘wall’ is something you cannot move easily, if at all. Hadrian’s Wall? Great Wall of China? All still there, mostly because of bunch of longhairs and bikers didn’t drag them around the midwest for months at a time. That a wall not be portable is its sine non qua is obvious with even my cursory knowledge of siege warfare, all entirely gleaned from 8th grade World history and whichever Lord of the Rings movie had the big castle fight scene. You know the name: it was the one with the little gay hobbits and the monsters and dragons and it lasts for nineteen fucking hours.  (Although, seriously, what kind of nimrod builds a castle with a drainage canal thing in the FRONT, where is easily accesible to your enemy, provided your enemy is a monster, WHICH HE TOTALLY IS AND YOU KNEW THAT GOING INTO THIS, SO WHY DIDN’T YOU BRICK THAT THING UP, GRAND MOFF TARKIN?)

It took 12 hours to set the Wall up. The Amish can knock off 6, 7 barns in that amount of time. If something takes you twelve hours to build, it should be permanent. These facts, though, pale in comparison to the fact that they chose to do this during a gas crisis. You cannot haul 75 tons of anything around during a gas crisis and expect to turn a profit: it’s one of the first things they teach you at Wharton, right after, “mention Trump and you fail.”

The Wall didn’t stop at the speakers, all of which were custom-built at a special facility in Daly City, CA that lights its workshop with burning cash. No, the boys also had new space-age instruments made up for themselves, most famously Garcia’s Wolf. Phil also got a new bass, so heavy and laden with doom it looked like the melee weapon of Phil-Garr the Grateful.

I will break my own iron held rule about research to quote at length:

Phil is using a new quadraphonic bass, the electronics of which were designed and built by George Mundy and the body and pickups by Rick Turner. The new bass has the same versatile qualities as the old bass: three pickups (bass and treble pickups covering all the strings, and a quad pickup which has a separate signal for each string); on each of the bass and treble pickups there are controls which enable him to select 1) the band-width of the filter, 2) the center frequency of the filter, 3) the kind of filter being used and 4) mix unequalized unfiltered direct sound with the filtered sound. The variety of sounds which can be achieved on the bass is the result of the many different combinations of these variables which can be used. The new bass has a frequency response with a crisper tone, and two quad pickups instead of one, the new one being a frequency-detector pickup. The main addition to the new bass is a Digital Decoding Circuit such that ten push buttons on the bass allow Phil to select any one of sixteen quad spatial arrangements of his speakers, and eight in stereo mode

I DARE you to make sense of any of that. And then factor in the fact that this is all to play Chuck Berry tunes. You can see how the Hiatus was, maybe, a necessary and inevitable thing–what comes after the wall of Sound, after all? The band made a brief and desultory attempt to build an exact replica of Versailles out of speakers, drugs, and promissory notes, but after spending $200,000 and Mickey burning down the model, the boys lost interest.

It all sounded different after they came back. The music held less secrets, but it would have been good to hear the Wall with Mickey, too. Imagine this Samson coming through a sound system that in Olden Days would have been worshipped as a god, perhaps even two gods and a saint. The Wall had that much impressive in it: pilgrims would often leave notes in the cracks of the Wall, which was a horrible, horrible idea for two reasons. First, members of the band would invariably mistake the folded-up paper prayers for bindles of narcotics and savagely knock you to the ground trying to get to them; second, Steve Parrish had a strict policy about punching anyone who touched the Wall.

The Wheel Is Turning

February 14, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Ever listen to the Dead and your attention slips just as they start to jam and then you come back to the music and realize you have absolutely no idea what song they’re playing? And then you realize, they don’t know, either.  THAT’S why it’s all worth it: the clams, the time signature disagreements, the tuning, I Fought the Law–it all rolls away when they hit that Moment.

…and…

I have, for the past two weeks, not downloaded a single show. Not one. But have I received the intended grace for my absolution? Has there been even a dent in the backlog of shows taking up space on my full-to-bulging* hard drive that I haven’t gotten to yet?

No. Of course not. I have begun listening to the streams at archive.org.

*This was Billy’s constant rejoinder to the question, “How are you, Billy?” It would go like this:

“How are you, Billy?”

“Full to bulging.”

And then he would fake punch you in the dick and then he would actually punch you in the dick because Billy’s nickname on the road was Dickpunchin’ Billy and a man without a name is nothing, nothing at all.

1977 and Bobby Jokes: You Know, The Usual

February 14, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Why hasn’t Barton Hall been released commercially? Not that I’m looking for it, obviously: I can still remember the all-black Maxxell with 5/8/77!!! written on the tag in red ink. Since then, I’ve never not listened to this show. Even though the boys and I drifted apart during the first decade of the new millennium, that second set still called to me. “Just the first little bit,” I would tell myself. “Just the opening to Scarlet: dat dat dat–bom ba WHOOOM!” And then, of course, it would be seventy minutes later and the Dead would have destroyed and rebuilt the world with Morning Dew.

But no official release. They have the tapes, obviously, along with a fondness for releasing Spring/Fall ’77 shows–there have been 5 Dick’s Picks, one Road Trip, one Digital Download, To Terrapin, and the 10 CD Winterland ’77 box set. (Swear I did that by memory, so if I’m wrong, then…I don’t know: nothing, I guess. Carry on wasting time reading this nonsense.)

There’s a great book that came out last year, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes. It might be the definitive history of one of the most fertile musical scenes in history, New York in the 70’s. The author is mugged taking the subway to the train for Cornell and loses not only his money, but also his Dead tickets. The New York Times wrote an article recently about the archive and the sheer volume of shows available nowadays and its effect on ranking shows and whether or not the band should be appreciated show-by-show or by tour. Quite honestly, I think the author of the article was assigned an article covering The Dead’s weary arrival into Manhattan and just couldn’t interview Bobby again. True, there had been no dickpunching since Billy went back to the ocean, but still, you try asking Bobby  any other question other than, “When did you start looking like Dad Wolf from Teen Wolf?

So, who was on Style’s Woof-mobile?

Anyway, what I’m saying is that 5/8/77 is kind of almost vaguely “out there.” And we’re coming up on the 35th anniversary, but no one’s talking advantage of it. New members, fresh blood. Think I haven’t seen hobbies die? I used to work in a comic book shop, man: Hell holds no terrors for me.

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