Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: wall of sound (Page 11 of 12)

Change One Letter

August 26, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Phil Tesh – John’s brother, stays in the guest place out back. Watches the kids, takes care of the house when we’re gone. Good guy, glad to have him around, good guy when he’s not drinking. 4 months, knock wood: we’re proud of him. Oh, damn, is it 3 o’clock already? I have to get Simon to soccer practice. Nice talking to you. Wait: who are you? How did you get in my backyard? JOHN! COME HERE! COME HERE AND PROTECT YOUR LAND, JOHN TESH!

Donna Bean – Cousin to the lima, pinto, refried, Mexican jumping, and the Funky Winker.

Drums/Spade – That time in 79 when, after the drum solo, Phil, et al, sat at a card table Parrish had set up and played Spades for a good 35 minutes, which is impressive when you realize that Bobby didn’t know the rules, Brent was losing on purpose to get people to like him, and Garcia had snuck back into his dressing room two or three hands into the session.

Winterhand – The nickname of the groupie with poor circulation who liked giving tuggers.

Sex Luthor – All of his elaborate plans involve Superman’s butt, and doing weird stuff to it. Supes has had it up to fucking here, man.

Wall of Hound – One time, Billy got high as fuck and piled three or four dogs on top of each other and made people come and look, repeating the joke all afternoon, and then he got bored and punched one of the dogs in the dick, and I’m gonna tell you something about dogs: they have no concept of the proper deference due to a rock star, so no matter what band you’re in, if you punch a dog in his dick, he’s going to completely lose his shit on you, plus the other dogs were mildly annoyed with Billy anyway, so they joined in and all of them chased Billy around for an hour or so; he was bitten repeatedly, and let’s face it: he simply could not have deserved it more.

Knob Weir – What Bobby calls his dick sometimes.

Cob Weir – What he calls it other times.

Throb Weir – Bobby also calls his penis this.

Mickey Fart

Throwing Seastones

August 14, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Listening to the another gem from the Year of the Wall: July 31st, 1974, Dave’s Pick 2. (Which, for some reason, is still available on the Archive. Here it is.)

Tremendous Eyes, tremendously funny China Doll with Garcia and Billy musically bickering about the tempo, tremendous work on the Rhodes piano from Keith throughout the show.

but, as I said, this show has been released as a Dave’s Pick, so I cruised over to Amazon to read some reviews and came upon this offering:

Like most archival releases from 1974, this release omits “Phil and Ned”, aka “Seastones,” the electronic jams involving Phil, synthesist Ned Lagin and sometimes Garcia and Kreutzmann, which regularly took place between the 1st and 2nd set during the period June 1974 to October 1974. “Phil and Ned” was an integral part of the “Wall of Sound” show.

Why is it not included? One main reason: “Deadheads” for all their self-proclaimed openness, are just not that open to experimental electronic music that doesn’t have a “spacey” vibe, and actually they would often boo Phil and Ned’s experiments in concert. For some reason they never seem to complain about “feedback” from side 4 of live dead, which really is kind of boring.

If everyone who appreciates Seastones gives this release one star, maybe the troglodytes at Rhino will get the message for future 1974 releases.

The only reason–not an excuse, a reason–for writing this sort of thing is that one has contracted rabies. Also, scabies. ONLY SOMEONE WITH RABIES/SCABIES COULD BELIEVE THIS.

This is like going to a summer action movie and getting upset because there were no chest-pooping scenes: it’s fine to have weird, creepy fetishes (and Seastones qualifies), but realize you’re in the minority.

And, yes: Seastones was an integral part of the Wall of Sound show in the same way that Zyklon B was an integral part of Dachau’s hygiene program.

DUDE!

WHAT THE FUCK, BRO?

We JUST had the meeting about this.

You KNOW how offensive that is to me!

…

Please don’t–

What? Dude, I’m proud of my heritage.

—start with this again. Four hours in the car with this.

Germans can’t be proud?

Within the timeframe of the 1940’s, no: not really.

Y’know, it’s all about tolerance with you up to a point. “When they came for the Jews, I said nothing–“

The ‘they’ that poem refers to are the Germans, you do understand that?

…

We all have equal claims to our victimhood.

Robbing Peter To Pay Wall

August 12, 2013 / / 0 Comments

It’s ’74: there’s no internet or reliable way to get any sort of news about your favorite popular group. There was the hip radio station, and Rolling Stone and Creem (who didn’t cover the Dead, anyway) and the guys who hung around the record store.  No forums, livestreaming, whatever-the-fuck-else that people are talking about that confuses and frightens me: you were walking into the show blind. Perhaps you had heard something about a new PA system, a big one.

And you walk in and see this:

wos winterland

Would your fight-or-flight response kick in? That thing clearly doesn’t belong here, in this dimension. Should you run headlong at it and make a last stand? Welcome our new amplifier overlords? If you were a cyborg, would it give you a boner? If you were a boner, would it give you a cyborg?

Stop talking.

Top Of The Pops

July 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Bands the Dead was better than:

And I’ll just tell you upfront that I’m leaving Phish out of this entirely. I have as much interest about arguing Dead v. Phish as I do with getting involved in internet arguments about atheism: none.

Pink Floyd – Quick: what was the Pink Floyd sound? (Yeah, yeah.) Imagine Floyd jamming on, say, Summertime Blues. What would it sound like? Right.

Jefferson Airplane – The whole two singers just kinda standing there annoyed me. If you’re singing on a stage, you either stand tall with thrusted chest holding a libretto or you rock the fuck out and end the show by laying your enormous wang on a PA speaker, allowing the audience to watch it vibrate to the feedback of the guitars. That’s a lead singer. Being curly-haired and singing part of shitty Airplane jams makes you just a guy standing there singing occasionally.

Van Halen – Eddie and Garcia were both virtuosos, I suppose. Eddie could play a lot more notes. Both were known for their custom guitars, although Eddie made his in his garage for $40, and the creation of Garcia’s guitars always included, somewhere along the way, the phrase,”Well, it costs what it costs, man.” These are some of the most dangerous words in the English language, and when you hear them, you should stop letting the person who spoke them have anything to do with your money ever again.

The Sleigh Bells

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roTsrA-0Rxs&w=560&h=315]

Where is your drummer? You fuck right off back to Brooklyn and get yourself a drummer. We understand that the Marshalls are ironic, but Leggy Von Bangsinhair, an Ibanez guitar, and an IMac do not a band make.

Queen – And that pains me to say, because I love Queen. When the Wembley ’86 double-CD live album from the legendary–yes, legendary: like Dunkirk–Wembley Stadium Show came out, I ditched school for an hour to go to the mall and pick it up immediately: I wanted to show enthusiasm in my purchasing so perhaps Queen would do another tour in America. Freddie was dead within weeks.

But still, it was a good album.

Freddie did this a lot. No one in the Dead ever did this, except maybe after chimichanga night at Club Front. So, points: Dead.

U2 – Because every band is better than U2. It’s music for people who don’t particularly like music.

The Beatles – You couldn’t dance to the Beatles. Could you make sweet, sweet love to them? You could certainly make drugged-out love to Revolver, but the rest of it? Piffle and bosh. Plus, Revolution #9 was, pound-for-pound, every bit as annoying as Seastones, but y’know what: Seastones wasn’t on the album in the middle of the all the other stuff, the stuff you actually wanted to hear but now you had to sit through these dicks futzing around with their recording desk or, since it was 1970, get up and walk across the room the move the record needle, which is barbaric.

The Who – The Dead and the Who had a friendship/friendly rivalry thing starting at the Day on the Green in ’76. It was only an equipment loan from The Who that turned the Egypt excursion from “economically infeasible” to simply “ruinously expensive.”  Also, Daltry, Townshend, and the dead one behaved badly after Keith Moon’s death: they should have retired the name, at least. Instead, they carried on with a drummer so boring he was called Kenny Jones.

Tear Down The Wall

June 5, 2012 / / 3 Comments

The Dead made everything more difficult than it had to be. Other bands brought a quarter of the equipment, played for half as long, and made twice as much.

Perhaps the Wall of Sound is a testament to the resilience of the band, to their bond. Pink Floyd built a wall once, and now every time David Gilmour and Roger Waters are in the same room, they start making these ungodly hissing noises, like feral cats with unwanted fingers in their asses. Well, like pretty much anything with an unwanted finger in its ass, honestly.  I digress…

 

Got To Find A Number To Use

June 4, 2012 / / 0 Comments

8 – Hallelujah hatracks (Really?)

4 – Dead keyboard players. Not 4 keyboardists for the Dead, 4 dead keyboardists. How is it possible that the mortality rate for musicians in an improvisational country-rock outfit is higher than that of those guys who parachute into forest fires? The family crest of the Dead keyboardist read Pertransiit sine me (Go on without me).

3 – Fancy little shoe racks for TC’s fancy little ankle boots.

210,000 – Number of dollars Lenny Hart stole from the band while “managing” them.

40,000 – Number of dollars Lenny Hart stole during the meeting to try to explain the financial irregularities when someone left the door to the safe open. They were trusting men, at first, our Dead.

88 – Keys on a piano.

176 – How many Keith usually saw.

1 – Number of times a crew member looked Phil directly in the eyes. Just that once.

95 – Live albums released, 110 if you count the Digital Download series (One of which I’m listening to now, the Donna-tacular 4/30/77 at the Palladium in NYC. (Audience copy, if you’re into that sort of thing. Harumph. But, seriously, it’s an AUD: think about whether that’s the person you want to be. AUD guys are to Enthusiasts what fat guys fluent in Klingon are to Trekkies)

13 – Studio albums

2 – That were any good at all.

0 – Number of times the question, “How many fingers does the Grateful Dead have?” can be answered with a whole number.

12,000 – Amount extra versus a standard P.A. it cost to tote the Wall of Sound around. Luckily, it was worth the price because it was “the righteous thing to do, man.” That is an exact quote from Blair Jackson, who was actually talking about something else entirely, but FUCK CONTEXT.

6 – Months it took the righteous thing to do to break the band’s back.

2 – Drummers.

1 – Drummer.

2 – Drummers.

12 – Teenage male hustlers found horribly mutilated throughout the 80’s in a pattern correlating to the Dead’s tour schedule. The culprit was never found, but was described as having luxuriously thick blond hair and singing the high harmony part. The pattern stopped briefly in 1989, but picked up again–far more rapidly now–in 1990, except this time it was females and there’s a weird theory that there were two guys based round this mystery man they call Suburban Lanky. Doesn’t make any sense at all, if you asked me.

40 – Milliseconds after Bobby asked, “Tonight, what if we open…wait for it…with the encore?” that his dick got punched.

300,000  – Dollars spent by Mickey in the winter of 1977 to create his most ambitious percussive masterpiece to date. Mickey planned and rehearsed diligently. He spent over a year writing the score and hired musicians from all over the world, building them a brand-new studio. Then he locked them in that brand-new studio, set it ablaze, and recorded their dying screams. Lou Reed is quoted as saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” The album was never released, except in Norway where it reached #31 on the Billboard-flurgen charts.

14 – Bucks for the Oven-Roasted Shrimp and Sun-Dried Tomatoes at Phil’s new hotspot, Terrapin Crossroads. Come for the food, stay for the Phil!

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