Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: lesh (Page 2 of 2)

Saturday Night Dead

June 6, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Found this and thought you’d like it, but before you click on it, know this: you will be going to a desert, a ghost mall of the internet, a junction far, far across the Rio Grand (EeyOoo): MySpace. There exists a MySpace. Still. I wonder if their office still has the half-pipe and yoga studio? Didn’t “Tom” die in an auto-erotic asphyxiation thing last Winter Solstice? (That’s how I mark time, because of my beliefs. TOLERATE ME.)

So, you have to go to MySpace because, well, it’s on MySpace, but mostly because I don’t know how to grab the video, so just aim your clicker over the blue letters–not the blue thing, the blue let–good aaaaaand: there’s your bank account, Grandma.  Love you, Gam. NOMNOMNOM your face Gam. Gonna kill you in your sleep, Gam. NIGHT!

EDIT: I’m not even going pretend to know what went wrong there. It’s beyond just apologizing and moving on: this is High Crime or Misdemeanor time.  Fuck…WHOO, where was he even GOING with that? These are decent folks out there getting high and listening to the Dead while reading about the Dead. Fuckin’ stoner-ass stoner asses. Who am I again? Am I the Reader or the Faithless Narrator? Sometime, he uses italics for one, and sometimes…sometimes, I think this is all just a bunch of obscure lies and silliness, man.

SUPEREDIT: Play the video or I’ll teach you what the word ‘flense’ means.

So: the Grateful Dead playing Saturday Night Live on 11/11/78. (You should open the video in a different window or, you know what?  You’re bright and capable and more than equipped to wrangle the doodads. Just be yourself all over the place.

Casey Jones on SNL

And we start off with everyone’s favorite secret genius, Buck Henry!

And Billy!

.26     It’s called conditioner, Garcia. Plus–and I’m just saying–for a guy who always bitched about being on TV, he certainly does play adorably to the cameras.

.38     Here we see Donna, who for some reason is easy skanking.

.50    Was Phil just yelling at the drummers on live TV? Seriously, can no one get Phillip Lesh to exhibit anything even resembling human behavior?

1.05   Donna was always dressed like your grade-school art teacher that time you ran into her at the supermarket.

1.15   We need to talk about Bobby’s pants. Young man, are you wearing jodhpurs? Or are they riding pantaloons? Are you playing Young George Washington? Will you golf later? If so, is your caddie Bagger Vance? Are you the renegade scion of the House of Bourbon? How are those socks staying up–is there a garter in play here? EXPLAIN YOUR PANTS.

1.45   Although if we’re going to be honest, they do hug his ‘tocks quite nicely. Bobby’s sexy and he knows it.

2.00  The slide. That’s a choice.

2.22   Hey, there are other people in this band!  (None of whom are attractive enough for a close-up, apparently.) And a great shot of both drummers, um, drumming.

3.00  Donna gives me boners.

3.12   It’s Rowlf the dog!

3.27 Hey, Mickey’s in this band!

Let Phil Cook!

June 4, 2012 / / 4 Comments

Phil’s new hash-house/gin joint, Terrapin Crossroads, looks pretty swanky. I understand that they’re going for a more upscale vibe, but I think there are a few marketing possibilities that have been overlooked:

Eat your Phil!

Phil ‘er up!

Phil my mouth with goodness!

This week’s exotic meat dish: Box of Reindeer!

Our food won’t give you Lesh-maniasis!

Lesh is more, due to rising food prices!

Phil-ling the long afternoons between tours!

Our kitchen is not Phil-thy!

No, sir: Mr. Daley no longer dines here, sir. No, sir: we serve no liver whatsoever at Terrapin Crossroads. It sets Sir off. He kind of Hulks out. Except, you know: it’s Phil, so when he gets like that, we call him the Phulk–oh, totes behind his back, we just text, he doesn’t understand–and he rampages through the place demanding people show him their organ donor cards and then he strips to the waist and challenges men and women to fight and somebody always take him up on it and then it gets sexual and–why am I telling you all this? No reservations!

Y’see this is the kind of thing that I write and then I wait and NO ONE from the Grateful Dead calls me and says that I should be in the family and put on salary with a car. I know back in the day, everyone had BMWs, but I know times are rough, so an Audi would be perfectly fine as long as it’s got leather seats and you pay for my gas.

If I Told You ‘Bout All That Went Down…

May 22, 2012 / / 3 Comments

As is my wont (and my tont and my soupt), this begins with a plea, an urgent command from the Library to listen to something, something you’ve almost definitely heard before, but listen to Keith here on 5/7/77 playing Mississippi Half-Step on THE ORGAN FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THE TOUR STARTED, THANK YOU.  Forget the sheer tonnage of beatdown Garcia is bringing: listen to the B3!

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Okay: I can tell how many people are clicking on what links and the cold, hard fact is that not nearly enough of you are going on to listen to 8/24/72 even though I keep telling you and breaking your toys in front of you and making you wear Dead Mom’s lipstick every Wednesday night. Humpday? Huh. You got no idea.

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In the early days, they all had different relationships with the concept of being in tune. Phil agreed whole-heartedly when it came to his bass and his voice in the early days, but after his vocal sabbatical, he was just all over the place. Bobby played in tune and sang out of it, Garcia sang in tune, and played out of it. Keith was just plain out of it.

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Tupac keeps making popping up, Morrison went to Africa like Rimbaud, and people will be seeing Elvis along the highway for as long as the Republic stands. Garcia? He’s gone.

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39:07 for The Other One on 9/17/72? Why? Why, Grateful Dead: why would you let this happen? Forget the sheer tonnage of notes; instead, note the date: September 17, 1972. It’s been released, officially, as Dick’s Picks 23. This is not just a show they played, this is something they offered for sale in the market with their imprimatur. In other words. the Dead are telling us that this is behavior that they are proud of. “Most bands could play a song for maybe 20 minutes and then it would get weird and sad. It took us 40 minutes. GRATEFUL DEAD RULES, EVERYBODY ELSE DROOLS”

Just, Y’Know: Thoughts On The Dead

May 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We forget how long ago it was, what a different world it was. To  understand my point, you must listen to Pig absolutely fucking KILLING IT on It’s A Man’s World. That was April 15th, 1970. Listen to how crisp and present the recording is, how clean and separate the instruments sound: I would wager most lay-listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this recording and an official release from the era. Marvel at how such a recording got made in the same world where there is absolutely no record of a show from that same month: no tape, no poster, certainly no film but there is a contract and cancelled check, so it must have happened. There are shows as late as 1973 just…gone. Compare that to today’s DeLillo Barn of a culture, all of us pointing our iThings at each other the second anything notable happens. Holding our phones vertically, all of us.

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Everybody’s new favorite fun game: Play in One Key, Sing in Another!

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Is the most terrifying moment of your day the Silence that comes before the Fretting that comes before the Waffling that comes before the Choosing? An ’89? Surely, a Summer ’71! The wrong choice–it’s like throwing the i Ching, only to lodge the coins in your cousin Kevin’s throat and Kevin dies right in front of you and you just LOSE IT and decide that you can’t get in trouble if EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD, TOO, so you kill your way halfway down the street before they take you down. No matter which Ching translation you use, that’s an unhealthy omen.

I almost had one of those rolls today. I chose an ’85 (4/27/85 Frost Amphitheater, Palo Alto, CA) to start off the morning. The 80’s are a giant tushee: fun around the edges, but dangerous in the middle. (I apologize for that.)

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I’ve written before about Garcia’s guitar tone being friendly, but the entire band had an ethos of friendlyness-ship. (Of course that’s a word. And if not a word proper, at least wordish.) All those references to following and leading and sharing (women, wine (Not Persian, though. Persian was not a share-y kind of substance.).) There was very little aggression in the music: no one will ever enter the Octagon with Brokedown Palace blaring. This made them a different band then–say–Slayer, who once wrote a song about Josef Mengele from Mengele’s point of view.  While many Dead songs featured unreliable narrators, none of them were so unreliable as to have committed war crimes. Committing war crimes is the very definition of being unreliable: you need to be watched, apparently. The second everyone turns their back, BOOM: you’re sewing twins together.

Slayer’s always been a bit of a mystery to me. Not the “why are they popular” part: there will always be ugly 15-year-old boys and money to be made catering to them being all evil and shit. I’m referring to the actual music. A friend burned me the Compact Disc. My good friend, Inter-Natalie. You should see her record collection. I like to listen to the hard-charging angry stuff when I am up in the gym working on my fitness, Sabbath and Titus Andronicus and the Boom Boom Satellites, so I tried a little Slayer and halfway through the third verse describing what can only be classified as “atrocities,” I quietly bowed out. I prefer to keep my tunes free of graphic descriptions of torture labs. Cartman was right: hippies hate Slayer.

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Who was it, precisely, that was clamoring for the return of Dupree’s Diamond Blues?

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In May of 1969, the Dead jammed with legendary conga player Mongo Santamaria.  Also legendary was the lecture given to Bobby afterwards concerning his giggles upon hearing the name.

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Merl should have been the keyboardist after Keith. They would have looked like the Celtics in the 80’s, racially. Also, Walton.

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I don’t care if Putin has turned the place in to a Latveria-of-the-mind: THEY’RE THE BAD GUYS, FUCK THEM. They were THE BEST bad guys: evil enough (gulags, proxy wars), but not, you know, too evil (that thing that made the 40’s such an inherent downer.) They had an ideology and an aesthetic, none of this “at night, it is my bed; during the day, my clothes” bullshit these Al Qaeda fuckmuppets smell up the room with.

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.

Without Lope Day To Day, Insanity’s King

March 14, 2012 / / 2 Comments

The Jerry Ballad is one of a number of sacrosanct moment of the show, along with the Dylan Slot, the Closing Raver, and the Brent Bathroom Break. (Or the second set Estimated in ’77; on two separate occasions, they set up their gear so they could play Estimated on an off-day.) Unlike the other categories, the Jerry Ballad has been there since the very beginning, along with the part of the show where the drummers get high while the rest of them irritate the audience and then the reverse.

The songs that work in the Jerry Ballad slot are perfect examples of what I call The Lope, that uniquely Dead stop-and-start stumble. Ramble On Rose, Sugaree. Slow it down a little and you’ve got Row Jimmy (or the later versions of They Love Each Other). Speed it up and it’s Brown-Eyed Women (or the early versions of They Love Each Other). It is the sound of a small barefoot boy in overalls ambling along with his donkey in the South that only exists in the first 20 minutes of rock star bio-pics. The donkey may be wearing a hat. Bum-BA-Bum-BA-Bum: the beat toodles to and fro.

Black Peter does that. So did Standing on the Moon and Ship of Fools and Wharf Rat. Sing Me Back Home never did that: it might be the worst of all Jerry Ballads. It is a perfect exemplar of the maxim Keep it snappy, boys! They’re DYING out there! Plus, SMBH was always a victim of the Dead’s most pernicious trait: the tempo drift. Songs have a certain tempo they sound right in. A 10 bpm deviation either way leads to the rushed, coked-out clatter od ’85, or the sludgy miasma of the Fall ’76 shows. They never got the tempo for Sing Me right, which might not have been such a problem but not for the fact that they were incapable of playing the song for anything less than a dozen minutes at a time.

(Bobby also had interests in a late show weeper. In fact, that’s what he called it: the Bobby Weeper. When he told Garcia about this, Garcia said nothing, just walked away and found Billy and the crotchpunching began.)

Johnny B. Mediocre A Good Deal Of The Time

January 29, 2012 / / 2 Comments

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.

MexiBobby Blues

January 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

“How long are you going to play Eyes tonight, guys?”

“From immediately after drums until the heat death of the Universe.”

“So, the same as last night, then?”

“Yes.”

I once heard a ’74 Playin’ that is still being played at this moment.  It has been going on for nigh-on-40 years now because Phil is, and I am quoting a man who belongs to several tough-guy unions and yet still allows other people to call him Ramrod, “really feeling it.”

The only reason to play a song for as long as the Grateful Dead played several of their’s is if the lack of music will trigger a bomb. Like the Grateful Dead were in Speed, and Bobby is Keanu so he is pretending to be a Cop On The Edge instead a Cowboy With A Broken Heart this time.

As we’ve discussed, Bobby actually thought he was a fucking cowboy. Now, each of the Dead’s singers had a certain persona they delivered their songs through: Jerry was the Gambler, Bobby was the Cowboy, and Phil was The Guy Who Couldn’t Sing. Now, when Jerry did Deal or Loser or whatever, he was delivering these songs from a uniquely American perspective, one that he and Hunter had crafted to serve as an avatar for the Dead’s sheer Americanness.

For the Dead were the most American band there ever was: far too loud, prone to ridiculous, money-losing foreign entanglements, drugged out of its mind, and dying of diabetes. But also capable of the most astonishing grace–American. And what’s more that than the Gambler, armed with his six-shooter and his wits? Garcia and Hunter recognized this metaphor and wrung all they could out of it.

Except Bobby actually thought he was a fucking cowboy. He apparently spent part of one teenaged summer a’ropin’ and a’rasslin and a’rompin’ and a’ridin’ and whatever the fuck else gentiles do in the summer. You can imagine Bobby traipsing through the fields, shirtless, asking the farmhands if they thought he was pretty.

Thereafter, Bobby was a fucking cowboy and we had to sit through Mexicali Blues every other night

Lesh Is More

January 21, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Mr. Lesh, are you allergic to playing the song? Is there some political or maybe ideological belief that is creating this imposition against just playing the goddam song? Instead of getting bored every three beats and wandering all over your fretboard as if someone told you there were drugs hidden there? I know how smart you are, Phil: it’s a major component of everything you’ve ever said in any every interview you’ve ever done ever. Perfect pitch, yes. We know, Mr. Lesh: Weber, Berlioz, once cancelled a concert to see Wagner’s Ring Cycle. We are aware.

Which would lead one to believe that you must be smart enough to understand that the option of joining the rhythm section and holding the song down exists. You choose not to go that route, instead following a strict policy of “playing far many more notes than you would have imagined.” Halfway through your career in the Grateful Dead, you went from playing a four-string bass to a six-string. Phil: you demanded–and received–50% more guitar because you believed that the guitar you were playing didn’t have enough notes in it. There were more notes, dammit, and you were going to play every single one of them, or so help you God, you were going to call Ned Lagin and start that Seastones shit again, and NOBODY wants any part of that, do they?

An aside about the six-string electric bass guitar. You shouldn’t have. That massive ebony fretboard the size of the runway at Laguardia?  It’s just so Dream Theater. A lot of Jazz Odyssey in that bass.

And why, Mr. Lesh, are you wearing those glasses? The enormous Aunt Sheila glasses that you wear at the end of your nose so you have to look down at people through which really emphasizes the part where you have absolutely no chin. The wattling helps now, but overall, it was just a mess.

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