Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: mickey hart (Page 67 of 71)
Yes, clearly it’s Titanic and Mind-Blowing and Earth-Shattering and Vast and Under-Rated and Over-Rated and Just Exactly Perfect, but the one quality that no one ever mentions is accessible. And 5/8/77 is accessible in spades.
Sure, there’s jamming, but it’s not the Neptunian jazz of ’74, nor the acid-skronk of ’69. There’s no waste; Garcia’s long, liquid lines are building to something, always, and Billy and Mickey have their feet on the gas pedals with a safecracker’s whispered touch–little bit faster here, slower there, bigger now Bigger Now BIGGER NOW and shhhhhhh…
There is command.
The greatest ever? No. not even the best show that week–5/5, with its majestic Sugaree gets my vote–but Barton Hall has something that only Veneta and Egypt also have: mystique. Fame. Perhaps we can’t even make an honest reckoning of that night anymore. Read some Don DeLillo; it’s good for you:
Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides — pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.
A long silence followed.
“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”
Another silence ensued.
“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.
“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?”
If you heard it today for the first time, would you recognize it as THE GREATEST DEAD SHOW OF ALL TIME EVER? Would the shock of genius, the green flash of recognition hit you, run up your spine, Billypunch the dick of your soul?
If you really did meet the Buddha on the side of the road…would you know it was him?
PS I have deliberately not linked to the show on the archive because you have it.
They screwed Vince, let’s all agree on that. The sounds they made him use were one thing, but it was the personal stuff that really led to Vince’s failure and eventual demise. Before joining the band, Vince was named Cock Money and combs would snap in two immediately upon entering his thick lustrous mane. On Vince’s first day at Front Street, Mickey shaved him and gave him a loser’s name.
(Try saying it like Jerry Lewis: Vince WELLLLL-nick. Glaben.)
Vince didn’t want to dress like that either, but Jon McIntire would wire his Hawaiian shirts to explode if they were removed. This hurt Vince and he went to the band–except Garcia because he was in the bathroom–and told them that if wearing the shirts was so important to everybody, he would just do it. No C-4 necessary.
So Billy punched him in the dick. (In his defense, Billy hadn’t been paying attention in the slightest and just wanted to punch the new guy in the dick. Now, that was certainly not how Vince read the situation; he cried for 90 minutes. I’m just relaying facts here.)
The sounds, however, were truly the crux of the problem: wheezy, hollow tinklings made by primitive synthesizers. The aural equivalent of watching a clown car get raped to death.
A clown car get…what the fuck is wrong with you? This is the comeback special and you’re talking about Vince and a forcibly penetrated harlequinade?
Is that not the show business way?
It is not, no. Welcome people back. Maybe a list. An update on your mental health.
Doesn’t the clown rape kinda give a clue about my mental health?
Point taken.
Anyhoo, imagine if someone pulled the bullshit on you that they pulled on Vince: “Here’s your new office and your desk and you know your responsibilities, so I’ll just let you dive right in…oh, that guy? That’s the guy we hired to also do your job. But better. And everyone’s gonna love him more. Oh, and he’ll be able to get away with things you wouldn’t even dare to THINK about.”
Because there were no rules for Bruce. He was allowed to waltz into the house at all hours and turn the basement into his room and his girlfriend slept over sometimes. So unfair. Listen to the cavalcade of Dark Star teases in this show from ‘Chicago ’91 .
Seriously, if Vince had ever tried teasing Dark Star, Phil would have smacked him with a rolled-up newspaper. And a chair.
Which brings us, again, to 4/21/78 at the Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. This tour is something of a Rust Belt/Appalachian Trail theme and, yes, there were two shows I’ve neglected, but my versions sounds as if the recording device had been keestered in and then never un-keestered, to be found post-mortem and released in a macabre recreation of Betty Canter-Jackson’s storage locker incident.
So, I went to the Rupp show, which I’ve written about before: it with this weird, wired energy that isn’t just the coke singing. Listen to the Playin’>drums. All of them stay up there for drums and listen to it climax 12 minutes in with a Donna-led call-and-response chant that makes this one of the only drums I’ve ever listened to on its own.
And then, right after that, Mickey starts playing the Knight Rider theme.
Hey! This is not Fleetwood Mac: knock it off or I get the hose!
I have moved onto 4/11/78, also at the Fox Theater, which is in downtown Atlanta, on Peachtree. There are, apparently, 140 Peachtree streets, boulevards, avenues, lanes, roads, byways, thruways, terraces, ways, places in Atlanta and this joint may or not be located on one of them. It matters not.
There’s a reason this show isn’t on anyone’s top ten list. Still: better than not listening to the Dead AND listen to Terrapin, ten minutes in: something blows up, cutting off Phil and Bobby, so it’s left to Garcia and Keith to slowly wind the show the show into what will be the first of a number of full-band (or at least more guys than just Billy and Mickey) Drums.
Now, as you know, Blair Jackson and the rest of Big Dead are keeping things from you, important things: the keys to the Vault, the fact that “Mickey Hart” was played by different actors before and after the hiatus, etc. Why is this? Why does Blair Jackson hate the Dead?
No. You’re not going to do this.
Is it because he’s from Kenya?
Please: not again.
Is it because a mere TEASPOON of his liver, eaten, would produce TREMULOUS LUBICOSITIES OF THE UTMOST in the recipient?
Are you going mad or insane? There is a difference, and I can live with mad for now.
Ah, right: Blair Jackson is Yog Soggoth, the Ancient Anus with many Eyes!
Good, just mad.
Anyway, Blair Jackson is doing this thing over on Dead.net about listening to ten shows in a row so I’m going to beat him by doing the entire Spring ’78 tour because god help me, I need a girlfriend. We join in progress with 4/10/78 from the Fox Theater in Atlanta, GA.
Listen to the way Garcia snaaaaarls Los Angeles? Gimme Norfolk, Virginia. Tidewater 4-10-0-9…
And then stick around for the off-kilter BEW. Both drummers have been exploding with goodness and syncopation and tomfoolery this tour. And Keith is fucking killing it, but then, on a dime, his playing turns awkward and overpowering and there is a reason they rarely played It’s All Over Now.
And then check back in for Music Never Stopped which is such a train wreck that Harrison Ford is leaping in front of it.
P.S. After full listening, I give this show 3/2 thumbs up and a pat on its ass: “Good job,” I would say to it, were it here, even though it was goofy and sloppy and all over the place–they rocked the Fox with a crackling, coked-up energy. Proud of you!
Oooooh. OOOOOooooooOOOOOOooooh. (What’s weird is that if you use two ‘h’s, it’s no longer spooky. Well, yeah, it’s spooky, but in an unclean way: Ooooooohh. Right? Just got fifty shades of creepy in here.) It’s Friday the Thirteenth. Oogie-woogie.
The origin of our dreadful fascination with the date arose when Jesus was 13 and Joseph came in from a hard day of being a fictional character offscreen and said “Thank God it’s Friday,” and Jesus leapt up and screamed “You’re not my real dad, I hate you.” and stormed–well, I was going to say into the other room, but the Christs* probably had more of a loft thing, right? The open floor plan was big in Judea in, well, I guess it would have been 13, wouldn’t it have been?
So, then Jesus opened his religion and after that there were Knights Templar, who liked to roam around Europe building hospitals and having gay orgies. That got the Pope mad so he killed them all and, even though none of this really happened, it took place on Friday the 13th which is why on this date, we kill black cats on sight with impunity.
(There is a good possibility that none of that is true.)
So, tonight is filled with horror and foreboding (totally out of context, check out Bobby’s slide solo in Werewolves of London). Jason would have cut a swath through the Dead like Mrs. Donna Jean through a Holiday Inn, as would Michael Myers, mostly because Jason is a blatant rip-off of said Mr. Myers.
Freddie Krueger would have had no luck with the boys; there was nothing he could conjure up in their dreams that was scarier than things they had seen while awake.
Draculas of all sorts were known to avoid the Dead for fear of catching something. Or, more likely, catching everything. The weird, quickly evolving bacterium and viruses that followed each tour did some wonderful things (from a science point of view). There was one pathogen that caused a nearly 80% result for an incurable disorder called Total Nipple Refraction. TNR, man! So, like pretty much anyone with three or four brain cells, the draculas stayed away from the tour blood.
Werewoofs also would have been no sweat. A guy who turns into a raging beast once every 28 days? So, like, half-a-Billy?
It doesn’t matter anyway: Bobby still demands his nightlight to sleep.
* Until the age of 25, I thought that Christ was his last name. Like, “Hi, we’re the Christs. I’m Joseph, and this is my wife Mary.”
Billy, because he was inside casually removing a 16-year-old’s bra while drinking a Coors Light. Billy didn’t want to play Cowboys & Indians: Billy wanted to play his drums, punch some dicks, and fuck every high school chick he could.
God bless Billy fucking Kreutzmann.
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