Fun fact: while this show was taking place, political prisoners all over the world were being tortured.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: mickey hart (Page 26 of 71)
At a certain level of financial success, don’t you just stub out the roach and light a new one?
Also: Mickey looks like a PSA about not doing drugs.
Also also: if you tilt your head to the side, Phil’s profile looks like the Andes mountains.
“Annabelle!”
“That’s my sister.”
“Fifi!”
“Close, but no.”
“Otis?”
“That was Bobby’s dog, Mickey.”
“Are you Jeff Chimenti?”
“Stop looking at my hair and look at my face, Mickey.”
“Okay.”
…
“You’re too short to be Bill Walton.”
“Good talk, Uncle Mick.”
Many tales have been told of the Grateful Dead: they’ve been examined from angles musical, financial, sociological, historical, chemical, metaphysical, biographical, academic, and there was a coloring book once. Never, though, has the Dead’s relationship with exercise been detailed, and certainly not with the scholastic rigor I intend to apply to the following bullshit I’m about to make up.
Bobby was the most physical-minded of the group; he cared about the parts of his body that were not his dick or stomach, and engaged in strenuous and joyful fits of exercise, plus many soothing and barefoot yoga sessions. Bobby enjoyed running almost as much as he enjoyed running shorts. In the 70’s, he took up mountain biking, and in the 80’s got into hill biking; the 90’s saw Bobby become interested in riding his bike on flat terrain, and in the 00’s, Ebay was founded, which is where Bobby sold his bike.
Mickey gave Bobby a run for his money, though, and sometimes literally: Mickey liked to combine his athletics with gambling and would often make more money off his impromptu wagering than from a tour. Like Bobby, Mickey took up bicycling for a while, but always preferred his horses, as it was impossible to dose a bicycle.
And here lies a sheer and fatal drop-off in both athletic ability and exercisial enthusiasm. Except for Bobby and Mickey, every Grateful Dead would be picked last and sent to right field. (There are pictures of Bobby playing softball; there are pictures of Garcia watching softball.) You might pick Billy a little higher up if you were playing hockey and wanted to start a fight.
Billy’s exercise came primarily from running amok. Smoothie in the morning, throw a mailbox at a cop around lunch, run through a hospital with a chainsaw before the show, and then finish up the day with cardio (Billy calls anal “cardio”).
The ocean also provides Billy with a chance to stretch, strengthen, and shape up; he has invented something he calls “sharkour,” but is actually just swimming slowly and looking at fish. (You cannot do parkour underwater as there are no benches to vault over, and even if there were, you can’t vault over anything underwater.)
Phil’s idea of exercise was standing up during a blowjob.
The keyboardists were all over the place, as should be expected: Pig did Tai Chi once, by accident; TC did some fancy bullshit, I’m sure; Keith, along with Mrs. Donna Jean, trained in mixed-martial arts and practiced on each other constantly; Brent was the Marin county free-diving champ three years in a row until he was beaten; Bruce beat him; Vince owed his taut tush to ballroom dance.
Garcia always carried his own briefcase, though sometimes it was heavy.
Much like how you must assume the dealer’s down card is a face card in Blackjack, the odds say that Mickey is wearing a Dead shirt.
Just out of frame is Bobby, who is wearing a pair of XXL sweatpants with a ketchup stain on the left thigh: the wardrobe mistress was fired that night.
Check out this close-up of Garcia’s knee:
Weird, right?
A reminder: Bearded Mickey is terrifying.
Also, Mickey’s beard is crooked. Or his lips. The whole mouth area is askew.
Jesus, Mickey.
Also: if you have a moment with literally nothing else to do, then go look at this dumb list of bullshit that is completely invalid due to Ronnie Tutt’s absence. And we need to stop pretending that Ringo could play. I know he was a Beatle, but he’s in the top ten on this list, way above Tony Allen from Fela’s Africa ’70 band, or any of the P-Funk guys, or Bill Ward from Sabbath.
But the fatal flaw here is lack of Tutt.
Mickey was the biggest fan of April Fool’s Day: he didn’t alter his behavior in the slightest, it’s just that on the first of April, he had an excuse to be awful. On the 31st of March, you were allowed to be angry with him when the duffel bag full of furious raccoons was introduced into the band van, but on April Fool’s Day you look like a dick if you get angry.
“April Foolishness,” Phil would harrumph yearly: he had no patience for any of it. A roadie once gave him a can of peanut brittle that actually contained a springy snake; Phil choked him with the snake.
There was nothing the Grateful Dead couldn’t make more complicated.
Also: this picture confuses me. Those aren’t stage lights in the upper righthand corner: they’re film lights. Rock and roll lighting hangs from a truss; it certainly doesn’t go in front of the band with gels gaffer-taped over the bulbs.
And since we know that the Dead’s road crew would never do more work than required (and sometimes not even that), then we must infer that this show was captured on film.
…
It is here, Enthusiasts that I can either be honest or simply delete the whole post; for both our sakes, I choose honesty: this photo is from 7/12/76 at the Orpheum in San Francisco, which we do in fact know was filmed. You can watch the soundcheck, courtesy of the legendary and mysterious Voodoonola:
Now, here’s where I turn into a complete slapdick: I had a whole theory about how the photo was not from 7/12, but instead from a different night in the run, which means another night was recorded and that there was a pro-shot film from ’76 being kept from us. My thesis relied heavily on the fact that Mrs. Donna Jean is wearing a different blouse in the photo than in the soundcheck video.
And then I remembered that people change their clothes.
Sorry to have wasted your time.
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