Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: phil (Page 4 of 4)

Can You Pass The Test?

January 25, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Grateful Dead imbibing game. Pick a show at random. Not from 1995: have more respect for yourself, would you please?

The rules:

  • If Phil plays an unaccompanied bass solo, drink a Heineken. If, somewhere in the solo he hits a note that makes no sense whatsoever, drink another Heineken. If you rationalize it by telling yourself that Phil is a musical genius and means every single note, so therefore you just didn’t understand what Phil was laying down, then drink the rest of the case and imagine Phil playing in Puerto Rico and giving the donor rap in halting, old white guy Spanish.

“Me llamo Philipe. Tiene oído absoluto. Dame tus hepáticas. DAME TU HEPATICAS!”

  • If Billy’s the only drummer, bet $50 that the Smails kid will pick his nose. If Mickey’s there, give your horse one hit of acid every time you can name the thing that Mickey’s hitting during drums. If he is hitting Ramrod, two hits. If he hits an executive from the record company, take the horse outside and free that majestic steed, who won’t survive two or three hours wandering through a town, especially after you fed it all that acid, you MONSTER.
  • They play Might as Well and you think about watching Festival Express again–take a shot and demand your local diner give away their food “to the people, maaaaaaaaaan.”
  • They play New Speedway Boogie and you feel like watching Gimme Shelter again–take a fistful of LSD and seconal, put on a bear hat, and beat Marty Balin half to death with a pool cue.  (Who brings a pool-cue to a concert?  Shouldn’t that have been, you know: a clue? “Sorry, guys, you can’t come in: I think you might be looking to cause trouble.  Just a guess.”)
  • If they play Dire Wolf–drink red whiskey for dinner. Then realize there’s no such thing as red whiskey so how did my whiskey get redOMIGOD SOMEONE BLED IN MY FUCKING WHISKEY.
  • If Bobby screws up a lyric–do nothing. Mentioning that Bobby screwed up a lyric is like mentioning that Billy played drums: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.  If Bobby gets every single word to Truckin’ right, go buy yourself the tightest, Izod-iest shirt you can find and pop that collar, baby.
  • If they tune for one minute–hit of Persian. If they tune in the middle of the song–burn yourself with a cigarette while you sleep. If the play a song in the middle of tuning–burn someone else with a cigarette while they sleep.
  • If Pig’s in the band and they play Lovelight and you still can’t figure out what the hell “Box back nitties, great bigging on the vine,” means–get drunk off a pint of cheap whiskey you keep in the back pocket of greasy Levi’s, have shouty drunken sex with Janis Joplin, and then wear a series of ridiculous hats, but actually look really cool in them.

Playing To The Tide

January 24, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Seven individuals with disparate backgrounds get thrown together by chance, fate, and poor map skills to find themselves eternally stuck in a paradise that is beautiful, but also quite inescapable. Has the cast of Gilligan’s Island actually been the Grateful Dead all along? Did they merely intend to go on a 3 show tour of Guam, Diego Garcia, and Midway and get hopelessly shipwrecked, an occurrence almost definitely attributable to choosing to combine marine navigation with cocaine.

Obviously, Garcia is the Skipper. Same body shape, same propensity to pick an outfit and stick with it, same love of hammocks. Phil is the Professor. We know who Bobby is, don’t we?

This week, Phil the Professor has lashed together 20 palm fronds, 9 coconuts, some vine, and 85,000 of the largest amplifiers ever invented by man.  He will not tell anyone else where he got these things. His plan is to drop the biggest Phil Bomb ever and use the fronds as rudimentary surfboardsto ride the giant tsunami wave to civilization. Then he will eat all the coconuts. However, Skipper Garcia thinks there is more to the story. Plus, he knows this: to be in the Dead is to choose the most expensive option, always and eternally. Will I supersize that? I’m in the fucking Dead, what do you think?

Skipper Garcia tells Bobbigan that Phil has had the amps shipped in, meaning that there’s a boat somewhere on the island.

“Do you know what this means, Little Bobby?”

“Yeah, Skip! We gotta find that boat so we can…

“So we can?”

“…ask the crew for drugs! And to cook us brown rice. Skipper, no one has cooked me my brown rice in, like…forever. I miss it, Skipper. I miss my brown rice.”

Hat!

Professor Phil is trying to explain the plan to the Billy the Millionaire and his wife, Lovey Hart. Billy is wearing the blue jacket and little sailing cap that Jim Backus used to wear. You can totally see him in it, can’t you? Like now you can’t unsee it, right? It’s kind of fucked up. I hope I didn’t just ruin Billy for you forever.

Lovey Hart is recording a song cycle based on the Polynesian pookapooka drum that requires thirteen drummers playing 19 drums apiece. Prime numbers are very important to the Polynesians. Each drum is situated on its own island, so the drummers must helicopter from island to island at staggering expense, costing $800,00 and the lives of two drummers and a dog named Colin. Colin was also a drummer. The album will never be released.

And then in walk…Keith and Donna. As Ginger and Maryanne. Okay, the conceit breaks down at that point.

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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