Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

Tag: jerry garcia (Page 75 of 139)

Two-Faced

jerry what? donna

Try this: hold your thumb up, or your phone, or your pet’s remains up to the screen and cover up the left side of Garcia’s face. Your left (unless you are standing behind your computer or viewing it upside down or via a mirror or you are a six-dimensional being from three realities over and experience direction as color, in which case you should cover up the mauve half of Garcia’s face.)

Do you see the Old Campaigner–that man of twists and turns who knows sorrow and infinity and infinity’s horrible twin exfinity? (Infinity is everything that ever was, is, or will be. Exfinity is the stuff that wasn’t, isn’t, and won’t be. Lot of early potential in exfinity.)

Keep covering that left side, continue the face-ectomy: Garcia can see forever, but knows that forever’s a mighty long time. And he can tell you: there’s no such thing as an afterlife. Shit, most people barely have lives to begin with.

There are rocks, then water, then money, then water, then rocks; and then it starts again: we are all the Buddha because we’re all full of shit. And then we try for holiness and fuck it all up. We’ll do it together.

We’ll do it together this time or not at all.

Now cover up the other side: that Garcia has no clue what city he’s in.

Yes, We Have No Pianos

band 74 wos 7:21

Reasons for a backup piano:

  • First-string piano tears its ACL.
  • Leverage in contract negotiations.
  • Keith liked to play them both at the same time, stretching his arms out like Christ (if Christ were the keyboardist in Yes) to tinkle both sets of ivories. When Phil rightly pointed out that he wasn’t actually accomplishing anything, Keith fired back: “YOU’RE NOT–” and passed out.
  • There was a Buy One Get One sale at The Piano Barn and passing up that kind of deal is criminal.
  • Pianos should always be kept in pairs or they get lonely and often display obsessive behavior.
  • After the actual show, Keith, Bobby, and Mrs. Donna Jean would entertain a select few fans with their Fabulous Baker Boys routine. It was a failure because Mrs. Donna Jean is no one’s idea of a sultry chanteuse, Bobby does not really know how to play the piano, and Keith would burst into tears during Making Whoopie.
  • It’s where the drugs are stashed. Used to be a guitar case, then a speaker enclosure, now a piano.
  • It just followed the Grateful Dead home one day. The Grateful Dead’s mom was all, “You already have an enormous piano,” and the Grateful Dead was all, “I promise I’ll transport it around the country ar great expense,” and Mom was all, “Okay,” and the Dead was all, “YAAAY!”
  • Billy Joel might show up.
  • Due to a malfunction with the Time Sheath technology (Mickey played drums on it until it spazzed out,) the piano to the right is actually the same piano as the one on the left, except from ten minutes from now. It’s fine as long as they don’t touch because that would decreate the universe.
  • They started the tour with six; this is all that’s left.

My Brother Ug

jerry outside travis bean

This is a rare photo of the notoriously publicity-averse Precarious Lee, lounging directly under some equipment he had stacked up.

Born to a one-eyed Chinese woman and a Merchant Marine with balance issues and a penchant for giving his children silly names and then abandoning them, Precarious was abandoned soon after birth and raised in a Bangkok orphanage called Our Ladyboy of Mercy’s Home for Urchins. His obvious lack of skill manifested early when, while playing with blocks, he killed three of the other children. Soon, officials made his travel everywhere with a rubble-sniffing dog, just in case. This was too much for the orphanage to bear financially, and they sent Precarious Lee to the States.

He soon became some sort of spastic Zelig, appearing wherever engineering principles had been thrown to the wind in favor of Precarious’ method: eyeballin’ it. (Precarious once boasted that he could eyeball an appendectomy; the jury found that the patient’s death by decapitation was almost entirely the fault of the doctors and hospital administrators who let the surgery take place.)

He arranged security at Altamont, crowd logistics for The Who in Cincinnati in ’79, worked pyro for Great White. Currently, he gives TED talks on why Twitter is worth $20 billion.

« Older posts Newer posts »