“Hi. This is Parish, and he’s about to hit you.”
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: steve parish (Page 6 of 7)
Though semi-retired now, Parish still keeps an ear to the ground in case someone needs him to hit someone or bribe a fire marshal.
Some people got more annoyed than others when Bobby broke into Mexicali again.
Halfway through the second set, the heat got to Garcia and he bellowed, “HACHA NO WONKEE-KO!” and dragged Bobby offstage where he had a metallic bikini waiting, but Parish waved a microwave burrito and some Persian in front of Garcia.
“Run!” Parish yelled at Bobby, who took off down the hall but stopped, turned around.
“What was that bikini even doing there in the first place?”
And Parish couldn’t meet Bobby’s eyes.
Bobby, being a sensitive and with-it kinda dude, had been in therapy for years and he always took at least one of the guys from the road crew with him. It had been Ramrod for years, but Parish was doing it lately.
The psychiatrist would ask a question and mostly Bobby would let Parish speak. Bobby enjoyed Parish’s stories so much: he was in a lot of them, and they sounded mostly true, even if Bobby remembered it different mostly.
Bobby always felt better after the sessions; so would Parish. Mostly because while they were bullshitting the doctor, Mickey had broken into the guy’s office and stolen a prescription pad, a whole bunch of samples and the rug.
- No, Mr. Owsley, you cannot “soup up” the audio tour. Stop calling it the Walk of Sound.
- Parish, you’ve got to help me: I’ve accidentally invited TWO DATES to the fundraising ball!
- Gentlemen, I’m not going to point fingers and play the blame game and name names, but using the museum to stage a fake blood drive is going to stop immediately, Phil.
- There won’t be any dinosaurs, Bobby. It’s an art museum.
- Everyone needs to put on their trousers right damn now.
- Billy, that’s not performance art.
- There have been some great reviews for Keith’s sculpture of himself. Oh, that’s actually him? He’s been lying there motionless for, like, nine days. Perhaps we should call a docent.
- No, I don’t know what a docent is, either, but it’s the museum and something’s gone awry, so you call the docent. There is a chain of command here, Grateful Dead!
- But it doesn’t matter because you have dosed all of them.
- Yes, yes: doses, docent. Quite clever.
- Billy, stop doing performance art.
- No, Bobby: the eyes of that painting are not following you around the–oh, Mickey’s cut eyeholes in the art and is standing behind the canvas looking at people. Good call, Bobby.
- Come out from there, Mickey. Why are you naked?
- Garcia’ll be fine: I put him in the sculpture park. It’s just steel and gravel out there.
- I’ve told you this already, Mr. Mydland: museums don’t have mascots. Take off the costume.
- Why is Bill Graham haranguing schoolchildren in Yiddish?
- We don’t allow camping because it is a museum of art; there cannot be filthy teenagers taking doodies directly outside.
- I’m sorry, I don’t see a “Ned Lagin” on the Will Call list, possibly because there is no Will Call list, probably because it’s a museum. Why are the whole hairy lot so fuzzy on the concept of “museum?”
- Phil, you’re doing a great job running the food court, but I think charging $200 to eat sandwiches while you jam with your sons is a bit excessive.
- Vince, for the third time: your new character, down-home surrealist Salvador Golly is just not a hit. Please stop doing the routine. Also, buddy: pants.
- We’re just going to require that there be no more naked Grateful Deads in the museum, please. It’s not an unreasonable request.
- Attention museum patrons: we are going to need to evacuate the building immediately, please. All attempts to prevent Billy from doing performance art have failed. I repeat: Billy is doing performance art.
I can’t tell you the particulars, but this is some sort of hostage situation.
Either Garcia’s ransoming the kid for some stash and a meatball parm, or the kid has found Garcia in an unusualy pliable mood after some alone time and is brandishing a weapon beneath the frame.
“Your move, Parish! Toss me the idol, I’ll throw you the guitarist!”
World War III could be breaking out around Bobby, but if he had his tank top and his short shorts, then everything was copacetic.
“I’M GONNA EAT THE MICROPHONE!”
“Bobby, don’t eat the–”
“NOMNOMNOM!”
“Yeah, Parish, could…oh, you already got the hose, great.
For all the mythos of change, the Sixties were identical to every other time period in that attractive young women were allowed to get away with bullshit that would get mos others a swift thrashing from Parish.
(The picture’s from ’69, in honor of all the hard work and looking stuff up I did on the last post, but not at the Fillmore. This is from one of the April shows at The Ark in Boston, and the picture reminds me of one of my greatest Dead-related fears: one day they’re gonna make a movie about our boys and, just like every other movie made about the Sixties, everyone’s going to look like they’re wearing a costume.)
ps And check out the shortest-lived of all Garcia’s guitars, the Les Paul Junior. Certain guitars only look right in one color, just like certain cars. All Subaru should be that great blue, Jaguars should only be available in Hunter Green, and anyone who buys a Ferrari painted any shade other than red should be shot in the face with a bazooka. Same thing for the great guitars: Telecasters should only come in that wood-grain like Bruce Springsteen’s guitar, Gibson SGs were never meant–by anything approaching a just god–to be any shade other than that beautiful blood-red, and a Les Paul Junior looks like shit in any color other than the warm mustard yellow you see in Garcia’s hands above.
© 2026 Thoughts On The Dead
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments