Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: lenny hart

Because You're Worth It

January 21, 2015 / / 6 Comments

Since the announcement of the Farewell Shows at Soldier Field this July, TotD has been the first to bring you all the news that Big Dead doesn’t want you to hear, such as Phil’s assorted letters to his new bandmates, the seating arrangements, and the band’s rider for the shows. (Billy wants a case of Michelob; Phil wants a freshly harvested liver with no strings attached.)

The public list of VIP packages has been released, but as we all know that flashing your stash can get you pretty far into the Dead’s backstage, and there will be number of high-class, super-quality, ultra-exclusive packages available to only the most discerning Enthusiast.

The Deal Experience In addition to the standard backstage passes, great seats, and meet-and-greet, our VIPs will get to play a game of strip poker with the Core Four, and Mickey will show dong. (Mickey is contractually required to show dong. You might see Billy’s regardless, but you can only bank on Mickey’s.)

The St. Stephen Experience No one knows how she did it, but Jill pulled some strings and you can get canonized. Straight-up made into a Catholic Saint. Also, autographed posters.

The Comment Board Experience Our Comment Boarders will get a lunch with Jeff Chimenti, then get a three-minute Skype session with Bobby and Phil to tell them how they’re doing everything wrong. (Lunch with Jeff Chimenti is mandatory if you want the Skype call.)

The Ride Bruce Hornsby Like A Horse Experience You get to ride Bruce Hornsby like a horse.

The Lenny Hart Experience Our VIP Lenny Harts will have the chance to use familial trust and financial naiveté to their advantage and steal up to all of the revenues from the night’s concert, then flee to Mexico (first-class.)

The Antelope Greg Experience Any VIP participating in the Antelope Greg Experience will be kicked in the neck by otherwise placid Enthusiasts if he pulls any of his usual shenanigans.

Steal Your Face Right Off Your Head

May 28, 2013 / / 3 Comments

It seems like a happy line, and we all gladly shouted along with it every chance we could, but it’s not. He’s Gone is like Loser: the name gives away the punchline. What’s left after you snatch away the flesh is that Good Ol’ Grinning Rictus. The theme’s death; maybe that’s why the damn thing never had an ending, just an elegiac minor-blues trail-off into Drums or Truckin’ or The Other One. No closure for realists: maybe there’s heaven or reincarnation or nirvana, but these are only conjectures. The only verifiable is that he ain’t ever coming back.

He’s Gone was the first Dead song I ever loved, that ever got its talons in me and scratched itself into my soul. There’s that tempo–dreamy smooth–that no other band ever got right. (And, in fact, this band screwed up more than once. Looking at you, the ’80’s.) The chords are simplicity: I-IV-V. There’s a c-sharp minor in there somewhere, but not so you’d notice.

And the lyrics. Simple, almost stark. Barely anything to them: Take one word–one syllable!–away and they fall apart, collapse like a souffle in quake country. Were they about Lenny Hart? Pigpen? You and me, one day? They fit lockstep jigsaw perfect with the rest of the canon’s mythos: that high, cold mountain range only accessible by train ride. Northbound train, most likely. The narrators of the Dead’s songs were always trying to go south, where the wind didn’t blow so strange and the weather suited their clothes.

But all the trains that leave Terrapin Station go northbound.

Check out the great version from the Baltimore Civic Center on 3/26/73 . A gorgeous all-in vocal rave-up into an absolutely smoking Truckin’, PLUS, check out the Weather Report Suite where all of them have clearly forgotten how the rest of the song goes and are just circling around the intro in hopes of someone coming up with a new chord.

Got To Find A Number To Use

June 4, 2012 / / 0 Comments

8 – Hallelujah hatracks (Really?)

4 – Dead keyboard players. Not 4 keyboardists for the Dead, 4 dead keyboardists. How is it possible that the mortality rate for musicians in an improvisational country-rock outfit is higher than that of those guys who parachute into forest fires? The family crest of the Dead keyboardist read Pertransiit sine me (Go on without me).

3 – Fancy little shoe racks for TC’s fancy little ankle boots.

210,000 – Number of dollars Lenny Hart stole from the band while “managing” them.

40,000 – Number of dollars Lenny Hart stole during the meeting to try to explain the financial irregularities when someone left the door to the safe open. They were trusting men, at first, our Dead.

88 – Keys on a piano.

176 – How many Keith usually saw.

1 – Number of times a crew member looked Phil directly in the eyes. Just that once.

95 – Live albums released, 110 if you count the Digital Download series (One of which I’m listening to now, the Donna-tacular 4/30/77 at the Palladium in NYC. (Audience copy, if you’re into that sort of thing. Harumph. But, seriously, it’s an AUD: think about whether that’s the person you want to be. AUD guys are to Enthusiasts what fat guys fluent in Klingon are to Trekkies)

13 – Studio albums

2 – That were any good at all.

0 – Number of times the question, “How many fingers does the Grateful Dead have?” can be answered with a whole number.

12,000 – Amount extra versus a standard P.A. it cost to tote the Wall of Sound around. Luckily, it was worth the price because it was “the righteous thing to do, man.” That is an exact quote from Blair Jackson, who was actually talking about something else entirely, but FUCK CONTEXT.

6 – Months it took the righteous thing to do to break the band’s back.

2 – Drummers.

1 – Drummer.

2 – Drummers.

12 – Teenage male hustlers found horribly mutilated throughout the 80’s in a pattern correlating to the Dead’s tour schedule. The culprit was never found, but was described as having luxuriously thick blond hair and singing the high harmony part. The pattern stopped briefly in 1989, but picked up again–far more rapidly now–in 1990, except this time it was females and there’s a weird theory that there were two guys based round this mystery man they call Suburban Lanky. Doesn’t make any sense at all, if you asked me.

40 – Milliseconds after Bobby asked, “Tonight, what if we open…wait for it…with the encore?” that his dick got punched.

300,000  – Dollars spent by Mickey in the winter of 1977 to create his most ambitious percussive masterpiece to date. Mickey planned and rehearsed diligently. He spent over a year writing the score and hired musicians from all over the world, building them a brand-new studio. Then he locked them in that brand-new studio, set it ablaze, and recorded their dying screams. Lou Reed is quoted as saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” The album was never released, except in Norway where it reached #31 on the Billboard-flurgen charts.

14 – Bucks for the Oven-Roasted Shrimp and Sun-Dried Tomatoes at Phil’s new hotspot, Terrapin Crossroads. Come for the food, stay for the Phil!

Magic Beans

January 30, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I present you with a partial list of the reasons the Dead again and again faced financial ruin:

  1.  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.
  2. 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.
  3. Ron Rakow. Someone tell me why I know who this man is, please. You should feel as ashamed as I do for knowing that.
  4. 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?”
  5.  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.)
  6. 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.

Planet Dumb

January 23, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Mickey once convinced his father to retool a music store into an all-drum extravaganza named Drum City. Mickey once made an album called Planet Drum. Mickey was not well-rounded.

The unholy spawn of Oates and Baba-Booey, Mickey Hart was the Other One of the Dead’s rhythm section. Astonishingly, he also manages to be the silliest man in a group full of deeply, almost constitutionally silly people. There are no stories concerning Mickey in any of the multitude of books about the Dead that do not end one of two ways: with fortunes disappearing in exceedingly foreseeable ways, or Mickey attacking another human being in public.

Money was allergic to Mickey, in the sense that anytime he got near any appreciable amount of cash, it would flee into the night, generally after gathering up any other money that just happened to be in the area. If Mickey had gone on a tour of San Simeon, it would have burned down immediately. We can only assume that, even though he grew up in the Bay Area, Bill Gates never happened upon Mickey Hart. We know this because had it occurred, Gates would today be gulping dongs to get paint to huff. Such is Mickey’s magic, because he thought big.

Rick Wakeman once took a book of finger-limbering exercises, renamed it after King Arthur, and rented a hockey arena so otherwise unemployable 35-year-old former Olympic ice dancing hopefuls could salchow their way through three hours of arpeggios played by a man in a spangly cape. Mickey thought Rick Wakeman was a piker. In 1984, Mickey spent 2.5 million trying to get all of Hands Across America to clap along to a 15-beat bouzouki rhythm. The album was never released.

As for the random–yet entirely predictable–violence, perhaps you’re saying, “But rock music has always been fraught with explosive personalities.  What about the fights between the Davies brothers or Daltrey and Townshend or Metallica and their reputation?” Yes, yes: all true. Except you will notice that the examples, and all the other fightin’ twosomes you’re thinking of are basically long-running personality disputes. Sure, the Gallagher brothers are, statistically speaking, punching each other as I write this, but if they weren’t rock stars, they would be doing the same thing. If they were Liam and Noel’s Plumbing Service and you called them, your house would be rapidly filling with feces as they rolled around on the floor biting each others’ necks and using their adorable Brummie accents to transform the word ‘cunt’ into something that sounds like a pet name.

That wasn’t Mickey. Mickey tackled producers in studios. He choked crew members in delicatessans. Accountants in auto-supply shops. Florists in winnebagos. The only person, I believe, he didn’t attack was his good ol’ pop. You know his dad: the guy that stole so much money from the Dead that instead of precisely calculating the figure, the FBI just rounded it up to “all of it.” The rat in the proverbial drain ditch.

Every time I see a picture of Mickey at his ranch, all I can picture is the guy raising his camera and Mickey going, “Wait!  Let me get my serape!”

The Stacks

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