“We all float down here. Everything floats down here.”
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: jerry garcia (Page 114 of 139)
“Over here!”
Terrible Dead Art returns! The featured piece today comes from an artist who, judging from the headstock of Garcia’s guitar, shared my views of research.
In the impressive column, though, is how the artist has captured the way a XXXL t-shirt drapes over a fat guy.
Not so impressive: Garcia, needing a haircut and seeing his barber closed, simply walked into the nearest dog groomer’s and asked for the Irish Setter.
They didn’t travel light.
In other Zevon/Dead related team-up news, there’s this:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD0_sX1qiqY]
That’s the title track from Warren’s under-loved and under-bought 1989 record, Transverse City. Garcia’s on the robot-hummingbird guitar.
They were dissimilar: one East Coast (from Eastern Europe), overcoats and storms, heavy classical training with masters, grey and black, vain; the other West Coast (from Western Europe, T-shirt Tuesday and learning your instrument through hanging out, tie-dye, and…what is the opposite of vain?
What Garcia looked like towards the end.
Right: that. The song’s great, and so is the album, with one small (almost insignificant) hiccup: it’s one of those albums that starts to sound really good after about ten years of listening to it. Interpret that however you’d like.
Garcia also plays on They Moved the Moon, which West Coast Promotional Man, Mr. Completely, thinks would have been bitchin’ coming out of Space; I agree with him.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcxxCFqihkk]
It’s weird little number: the whole album’s ten degrees off-kilter, and if you know anything about Warren, that makes sense. The man was wracked with mental disorders. No joke, but also no free pass: under his sincere problems, the man could also be a bit of a selfish dick.
Unlike you and me, of course. It’s just that someone wrote all of his sins down.
May our sins vanish! Like embers into the aether: yes, my friend? Now! You buy! Three camel, two daughter, 14 pounds dates. SEVENTEEN HUNDRED AMERICAN: DON’T CHEAT ME, JOHNNY FLAGFUCKER!
I’m sorry, excuse me, stop this, what now?
Yes?
You have become some sort of racist extra from the bazaar scenes in Raiders. Why is this, please?
Pass.
You cannot…can you get back on topic?
Ass.
I am going to take that as a big ol’ ‘no’.
Trey was, and is, a rather polite guy: parents did a good job with him, so he felt it was’t his place to musically cut in when Bobby was soloing.
Unfortunately, for 30 years, the way Bobby knew it was time to stop soloing and go back to playing chords with that pinky-trill thing was when Garcia ran out of patience and started playing over him real loud.
When this didn’t happen, Bobby doubled down and just kept playing and it got weird. 35 minutes in, the bass player snuck off, ostensibly to pee but he didn’t come back. The audience was confused and a mood overtook the room that can obly be described properly in the German language. Bobby was crying at the end: he just wanted his Garcia.
“I didn’t want one of those stupid devil guitars, anyway. Aww, everybody’s always picking on ol’ Bobby Weir…”
Only 30 years before this picture was taken, Hitler had the same view.
Who’ll be there 30 years from now?
My favorite thing about the past is how thrown-together it all was: nothing had been professionalized, unionized, securitized. Everything looked like a summer camp production. The guy doing the lights is doing the lights because he wanted to, and if he didn’t electrocute himself or the bass player, he did it again for the next show.
You could choose your own adventure.
Sure, maybe the past week or so has been Thoughts on the (1978) Dead, but last I checked, I wasn’t being paid, so I can do whatever. 6/4/78 at UC Santa Barbara
The show of the day is NOT one of the latest batch: nothing almost-great about this one; just top to bottom greatness, from the stampede out the gate of Bertha to insanely happy bounce of Tennessee Jed to the highlight of the first set (and there is serious mad magic in this first set), Jack Straw featuring Bobby trying to top Garcia’s enthusiastic line-readings only to crack himself up and lead the whole band to red-line Betty Cantor’s recording equipment.
Is there a second set? They do!
That makes no sense on any level.
I’ve talked about the problems Samson had before: it could get boring, repetitious, and most of all, wobbly. But once in a while, they played that motherfucker like Wolverine berserking out, slicing the rhythms in pieces and making it feel un-manly for being hairless. Garcia can’t even wait ’til the song starts to start knocking phrase and lines and IDEAS out the ballpark and Bobby is in your right ear playing what can only be described as Sci-Fi guitar and the drummers have Voltron’d themselves into one great, hairy, dickpunching beast and everything is perfect, everything is just exactly perfect.
Why are you still here? Go there; listen to that.
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