Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: Grateful Dead (Page 23 of 25)
The Velvet Underground thought the Dead were sexist and homophobic and probably imperialist and definitely goofy. Most of the thing can be understood nearly instantly by realizing that the VU was made up of over-educated New Yorkers, with all the connotation that “over-educated New Yorker” entails. Yeah, I went there.
Were the Dead homophobic? I’ve never read any stories about them acting untoward. Although–and I always thought it was odd for a band from San Francisco–there were never any stories about the Dead vis-a-vis gaiety at all.
Now, sexist?
From September of ’79 to March of ’83, Billy invoked the ancient rite of Prima Nocte over the backstage area, but luckily for all involved, Billy usually just wanted a rubdown and a tugger. And he would always share his coke: Billy was good like that.
The Dead were kind of hairy and macho. Sure, they had Donna in the group, but she was really just Keith’s old lady that Bobby was banging. She was incidental. No one ever made a mix tape called Donna Jams, nor has anyone ever sold a bumper sticker with a clever Donna-inspired pun.
“Who’s your favorite member of the Dead? Garcia? Phil?”
“No, man, it’s the chick who looks like Sacheen Littlefeather who caterwauls nine or ten times a show. She’s all the Dead I need!”
They did employ more women than most rock outfits of the time, and in creative positions: Candace Brightman and Betty Canter come to mind.
Apparently, the Dead had appeared on the same bill as the Velvet Underground and, of course, both bands brought their entire scenes with them and it turned into a full-fledged hip-off. The VU sat there in their leathers and sniffed condescendingly at the hairy baboons from San Francisco. (It was probably condescending: there was an enormous amount of sniffing going on.) Instant utter hatred.
Which is not surprising: a good hate requires a bit of reflection. Who can hate something alien properly? To truly hate, we need to recognize ourself in the person, place, or thing that has so struck our ire. Both bands played songs for 45 minutes while deliberately declining to make eye contact with anyone in the room. Both had a weird rich benefactor, a pretentious bass player, and a drummer with a vagina.
(That’s right: Mickey has a vagina. In the womb, he ate his twin sister and the ‘gina just showed up on his shoulder. It is fully-functioning and Mickey introduces it into love-making by asking if his partners would like to go to “ninth base.”)
The story also might be colored by the fact that, at the time, both bands were made up of raging drug addicts. The VU, notably, preferred to intravenously self-administer amphetamines constantly. Literally constantly: if they were not actively shooting up, they were helping you look for the money that they had stolen from you. The Velvet Underground liked to stay up for six days straight turning tricks and accusing each other of things. The Velvet Underground were just the worst fucking people in the world.
So, I’m not taking their word for it.
ADDENDUM: Rereading this post, I am ashamed to see that I have not linked to the essay that inspired it. My apologies to the author and to people in general and also ducks.
Billy was the engine, even though he has never been seen in the same room as Brian Doyle-Murray. In between tours, Billy would yell and yell at those damn caddies to make something of themselves but they never listened. Billy had a Hawaiian shirt thing going on, and he spread it like a virus to successive keyboardists. Billy looks like he might have enjoyed starting fights. Billy is an Uncle: the ‘stache, the smirk.
But listen to ’73. No Mickey forcing everyone to sit there while he learns to play the kshdbviyus, the new percussion instrument he discovered in the village of extraordinarily foreign people, people so foreign that you secretly hate them because you sense they’re intentionally trying to be so foreign but whom Mickey will invariably refer to as “my brothers in drums.” Mickey was always saying shit like that when he wasn’t flying into rages and tackling business associates in restaurants. Mickey sounded like a lot of fun.
Now, when the two of them were on, they were unbelievable–this churning graceful giant. But, listen to 1973 when it’s just Billy out there. That motherfucker earns his mustache night in and night out.
Have I been negative? Probably. Almost definitely. What about the positives? What is lovable about this band?
- The black leather jacket Garcia used to wear.
- Mississippi Half-Step. When it gets real quiet and they sing about the Rio Grand-ee-o.
- The little songs they play during tuning–Funniculi, the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Stayin’ Alive.
- Billy playing the drums all by himself.
- Billy playing the drums with Mickey.
- The proto-version of Brown-Eyed Women from 8/24/71 (Dick’s Picks 35). The beat is turned around and the melody sounds like a children’s playground taunt and IT’S AWESOME.
- Bobby forgetting the words.
- Garcia forgetting the words.
- Phil never knowing the words in the first place and just making shit up as he went. (I’m looking at you, Tom Thumb’s Blues.)
- The Celtic jacket Mickey wore in the Touch of Grey video.
- Touch of Grey.
- The AUD of Touch of Grey from the comeback show.
- Garcia with his hair in pigtails.
- Pig.
- Branford.
- Bobby’s Chuck Berry tunes.
- Brent’s long, lustrous hair.
- Terrapin Station.
- Bobby’s wise-guy routines (“Turn around real slow, we gotcha covered.”)
- April Fool’s Day 1980–opening up the show with Promised Land on each others’ instruments. (Garcia on drums!)
- Stella Blew
- Casey Bones
- Touch of Grey Pubes
- Chokedown Alice
- Fuckin’
- Dark Starfish
- Nipple
- Shockingly Loose Lucy
- Fire on Your Mountains
- Vagina Cat Sunflower->I Know Her, Let’s Ride her
- Thighs of the World
- Sensually Playin’ in the Band (Billy stars in that one.)
- Ass-enger
- Ass-idy
- El Ass-0
- Brown- Aeroela’d Women
- Looks Like, But Is Almost Certainly Not, Rain.
- Me and My Uncle
- Black Peter
- Comes a Time
- Hard to Handle
- Let It Grow
- Dark Hollow (Wow, a lot of these work on their own, don’t they?
- Uncle John’s Gland
- Deep Throated Wind
- Sexicali Blues
- Estimated Pop-shot
- Sittin’ On Top Of Your face
- Please Ease Me In
- The Golden Road (To Unlimited Crotch)
I present you with a partial list of the reasons the Dead again and again faced financial ruin:
- Lenny Hart. This might not have been the Dead’s fault; they were the most goyish band on the planet and I am including Ladysmith Black Mambaza and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in there. These were laid-back Catholics and Protestants from Northern California and they could not possibly be expected to recognize the clear and present danger inherent in a Jewish guy screaming about Jesus. Any time a Jewish guy starts screaming about Jesus, that guy should be watched carefully, because he is up to something. There is a secret list of Jews that other Jewish people all secretly despise, and those guys are pretty close to the top. Also on the list is the family from Hardcore Pawn on TruTV.
- The Wall of Sound. The Dead answered George Carlin’s agnostic riddle, “Could God make a rock so big that he himself could not lift it?” with a resounding, “Yes, if He made it out of 20,000 fussy, cutting edge tube amplifiers, He could.” The people who built the Wall were immensely clever, but why did they not take an hour to sit down with a list of gas prices and some scratch paper and figure out how much it would cost to drag that techie-version of Hoarders around the damn Midwest? Think of it this way: the Grateful Dead built the Heaviest Thing in the World and then kept moving it. That gets pricey. Especially if you do it in 1974. You know: during the GAS CRISIS. THEY BUILT A SOUND SYSTEM THAT REQUIRED 20 TRUCKS TO MOVE DURING THE GAS CRISIS.
- Ron Rakow. Someone tell me why I know who this man is, please. You should feel as ashamed as I do for knowing that.
- The Grateful Dead Movie. Garcia labored over this thing for 4 years. The animation–the fucking cartoon–cost half a mil. When he decided to include the Nitrous scene, was he thinking, “This is my Citizen Kane?”
- Egypt. They played in Egypt to an audience of 32 Egyptian tour guides, a hundred rich white kids in tie-dye, 13 camels, and the monkey from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Bill Walton was also there; he and the monkey became besties. This is the box score for Egypt: two junkies, at least three full-blown alcoholics, one drummer with a broken arm, a fucked-up piano. Plus everyone was doing the Ol’ Cairo Hotstep, if you know what I mean. (I am talking about diarrhea: foreign places give you diarrhea because they are foreign.)
- The White Slave Trade. You probably don’t know about this, reading all those Dead sites that don’t want you to know THE TRUTH, but the Grateful Dead were heavily, heavily invested in the international sale and distribution of top-of-the-line white slaves. Men, women, children–it did not matter. If you were white, the Grateful Dead would snatch you up (Billy did the actual snatching) and sell you in shady backrooms for purposes best not delved into. Rest assured there was butt stuff involved.
We don’t talk about ’71 a lot, you and I? In the transitive nightfall of diamonds?
(I need to get this off my chest: the lyrics to Dark Star–well, all of the early, yell-y songs, but Dark Star in extremis–are nothing but a freshman year way of saying, “I took the big blue pill.” In fact, the phrase “dark star” is almost identical to the phrase “midnight sun,” which is universal shorthand for “shitty lyrics.” Seriously, go check how many songs have “midnight sun” in them: it seems like a lot, but I’m going to have to go ahead and absolutely refuse to do even the tiniest iota of research for this. Nor will I provide links to examples.)
Because for a while there, in between TC and Keith, it was just the five of them. Pig did the backing vocals on Not Fade Away. Billy wouldn’t transform into Swingin’ Billy the Jazzbo Cat for three years. Bobby was in that sweet spot between learning how to play electric guitar and learning how to play slide guitar. Garcia still had the nasty sound of the Primal stuff, but he was playing these long, lyrical lines and PHIL WAS PLAYING EVERY NOTE HE COULD THINK OF AS LOUD AND AS OFTEN AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.
And it worked, it really worked. They were loud and nasty and occasionally funky. They actually were the dance band they’d always bullshitted about being. And the shows they have left us are a little bit of magic in this used-up world.
We haven’t talked about Pigpen; we’re gonna talk about Pigpen.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrzOzgYL1-o]
Sometimes the Dead would try to sound like this record, Free Jazz. It was by Ornette Coleman and also featured Eric Dolphy and a bunch of other guys who wore clothes you could never in your wildest dreams pull off. Lots of chocolate-brown trousers with immaculate creases and cigarette ashes caught in the cuffs.
This music was to the Grateful Dead what the Grateful Dead was to keyboardists: a bad influence. Go back and listen to that nonsense again. It is skreeking and skronking and the odd thing is: they’re sure that they’re killing it. At least when Lou Reed made Metal Machine Music, you knew it was the simple combination of Being the World’s Biggest Junkie and Being the World’s Biggest Asshole.
When I hear this, I hear space, and when I hear space, I just want to go around slapping people. My hand would chafe until the skin just sloughed right off, like a snake’s–that’s how many slaps I want to give out when the Noodle Monster shows its mangy face.
Bill Graham used to introduce the band by saying, “Not only are they THE BEST at what they do, they’re also THE ONLY ONES who do what they do: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Grateful Dead.” Which was elegant and eloquent but not quite true.
Miles Davis’ 70’s bands were doing the same thing as the Dead, except without any first set niceties. Miles and the Dead shared a San Francisco stage right after Miles’ masterpiece (that should probably read “right after one of the many, many masterpieces he produced), Bitches Brew came out. Miles had been working with an electric bass player since about the moment he decided, “I must destroy this concept of the song. There is no Song! Songs were invented by white devils! I’m just going to find a bunch of musicians and freak out for 60 minutes at a time.”
Miles, as usual, is not telling you the whole story. That “bunch of musicians” has to include Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter or the entire plan falls apart. Plus, Miles’ bands are sometimes mired in the jazz tradition of laying back while someone solos, instead of the full-band improvisational composition that the Dead do. You know what I’m talking about: the stuff that’s worth sitting through all the nonsense and noodling for. When the boys flow from one song through another and back and you never realize what they’ve done until you’re already amazed; it’s a musical magical trick when they do it right.
Miles was sometimes accused of cynicism: that his ’70’s electric period was not purely a musical journey, just an excuse to go from his usual clubs to playing the much larger (and therefore more lucrative) halls and theaters that the bands on the rock circuit did. This might have been one reason, sure, but you can never discount the possibility that Miles just didn’t want to rehearse anymore, as it took time away from driving a Lamborghini packed with white women through city streets at 100 mph, then accusing the officer that pulled him over of being–dependent on the situation–“a racist cracker-ass cracker,” or “an Uncle Tom motherfucker.” Miles was a real piece of work.
There was another band criss-crossing the country in the 1970’s trying to Reconnect with The Holy through playing really loud and long: P-Funk. Whatever the hell George Clinton was calling whichever group of guys were in the room when they made the record: Parliament, Funkadelic, the P-Funk All-Stars, Funk-isyahu and the Klezmer Kids, whatever.
P-Funk was the answer to the question, “What if we gave poor black kids in Jersey and middle-class white kids in San Francisco the exact same drugs and massive amplifiers?’
And, of course: the leaders of all three of these groups are dead. I know George Clinton thinks he is still alive, but he died three years ago–trust me on this one.
Spurs ‘n’ Chaps Bobby had his cowboy songs, which the drummers hated; New Wave Bobby had his oeuevre of angular, weirdly melodied songs, which Jerry hated; and Blind Lemon Bobby had his clusterfuckingly tortuous first set Blooz-stravaganza, which ear-possessors hated.
Speak not to me of wang, nor dang, nor doodle, Bobert Weir! I will not look what you done done. And you put DOWN that slide guitar, Mister! Next time I see you with that slide guitar, you better be trying to flush a South American strongman out of hiding.
But there was one more Bobby, and he was my favorite Bobby: Sock Hop Bobby, who loved the old jukebox singles and 50’s rock and, most of all, Chuck Berry. (At both Woodstock and the Trans-Canada Festival, Bobby paid way too much attention to Sha Na Na. He shrieked like a girl when he clapped for them and after their set, Bobby followed the lead singer into the bathroom and just openly stared at the guy’s cock. Like not in a gay way? It was more like–I’m not explaining this right. It was Bobby just being all, “That is a thing. That is an honest-to-god thing right there. It is a cock that cock right there and I am LOOKING. I am LOOKING right AT IT. Hey, stop hitting me.” Even for Bobby, that was a behavioral outlier. It led to a stern talking to from Phil that touched upon many subjects, but mostly “expectations.”)
Except, Phil kinda ruined most of the Chuck Berry songs, didn’t he? The rest of them were pretty adroit with the rockers: Jerry always bit into them with vigor, Bobby could yelp just as good as Bob Seger or any other white guy in the Seventies, and Keith played the shit out of the boogie piano. (Strangely enough, he was absolutely amateurish at woogie piano.)
But, Phil? No, he was far too good of a musician to play those songs well. They were brutal, dumb hammers of music, but as we all know: Phil was a surgeon. He delicately flitted about both the root note and the downbeat like a savage butterfly, exposing the inner horrible grace of the mixed-ionian-calipygian modes and the sweet, sw–PHIL, STOP FUCKING AROUND AND PLAY THE GODDAMN SONG. IT’S JUST A FAST TWELVE-BAR BLUES TUNE. STOP WITH THE CHORD SUBSTITUTION.
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