Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: wall of sound (Page 12 of 12)

Gamma Delta 2: The Second One

May 26, 2012 / / 3 Comments

N is for Nunkeys, which are like regular monkeys, except they’re all female and they don’t show their swollen pudenda to anyone because they are married to Monkey Christ.

O is for old loves.

P is for praising the Lord, which is what Donna does a lot of now. She is a Southern Girl, and when one of them goes astray–and allowing Keith to timorously mount her from behind (it was always from behind; Keith would get all sideways on you if you tried to go face-to-face) is the definition of going astray–she goes back home, and  back to Jesus. Exactly how mired in sin she has become is measured by whether she gives Jesus a loving hug or just tackles the fucker like Ray Lewis. Actually, think about the actual Ray Lewis. Actually. For every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction, right? So, the way that woman loves Jesus now, she must have gotten up to some Billy-level bullshit back then.

Q is for quality, as in this ten-minute plus Casey Jones from 10/2/77 at the Paramount Theater in Portland, OR, where Garcia pulls a Bobby on the lyrics and just tells the lyrics, “Fuck you, lyrics: I’m Garcia,” and then he goes and Garcia-s all over the place for five minutes or so and he realizes the sheer volume of Garcia he’s placed around the room and just goes, “Keith, take one.” Garcia was the most interesting man in the world.

R is for Robert Hunter, who put the words in the right order. Even his goofiest, most floweriest poweriest songs show a love of and fascination with myth and America and Miss America (people got paid off) that all other ninny chants of the Bay Area lacked. The Dead’s first genius move was Hunter, by the way. They realized the commonest way of assigning the songwriting-singer writes the words–had a whole bunch of fairly self-evident flaws. James Hetfield sings for Metallica, and thus writes the lyrics. He once wrote a song called Trapped Under Ice, which you might imagine is a metaphorical snapshot of a man under strain, under pressure. No, he is merely and only under ice. There has been a winter-related accident and now a man is literally trapped under actual ice. The Dead chose to hire a poet.

S is for soup, which was a sacrosanct moment in the Dead’s working day. Soup, it was believed, kept you hale and hearty; never a day would pass without the bowls being passed. Every day, the bowls were passed. Bean or pea-based, chowders of all sorts. All locally sourced, far before hipster weenies who live next to Santa Claus thought of it. Each of the band and crew had their own spoon. The spoons cost two grand apiece. Every day, the bowls were passed and life would slow down, slow down for soup.

T is for transitions, such as this China>Rider from 6/22/73 in Vancouver, which is the capital of Canada. At 7 minutes in, Keith softly pads the Uncle John’s Jam chords that were the hallmark of this greatest of all Dead transitions. Those ethereal, infinitely descending chords and if you were lucky, Garcia would top the whole thing off with a little I’ve Been Working on the Railroad. Going northbound, I suppose.  In his invaluable book, Dead to the Core, Eric Wybenga* notes that one is either a Scarlet>Fire  or a China>Rider and, as you might guess from the title of the book, he declares himself the former. Not me, but his theory reminds me of one of my own..

U is for UnSub, which is a word on those creepy murder shows that women seem to love. A theory: all people are either serial killers or spree killers. Serial killers kill people in secretly for years. Spree killers lose it in a Sports Authority. Garcia and Bobby were serial killers. Mickey was spree, but Billy was serial. Phil was the definition of a spree killer.

V is for Vince, whom no one liked. The others were unkind to him, reforming as “the surviving members of the Dead” without him. A few years later, he would prove them right, but with all due resquiet in pace, the guy wasn’t very good. Prone to high-end tinkling, not particularly adept at soloing, emasculated from the get-go by Hornsby’s presence, AND saddled for some reason by Bralove with the worst sounds. Vince’s playing always resonated at what must be the human equivalent of a dog whistle: it was piercing. His songs were worse than dreck, simply stopping shows in their tracks. They were all in bad shape after Brent died, physically, morally.  But they learned the lesson of overpaying your crew AND giving them a full vote.: they will be sending your ass back to Oklahoma in March, no matter how dead certain people claim to be.  So, they got the guy from the Tubes because he was available.

W is for Winterland. Do you have the run from the ’73 box set? The ’77? The Farewell Shows out-of-their-gourds electricity of closing night? The From Egypt with Love shows? It’s where Frampton Came Alive and Johnny Rotten summed it all up when he asked if we ever felt cheated. It’s condos now. Better, less crime, they say.

X is for X-Men, who got Bobby into trouble this one time. In the 70’s, the X-Men comic had become popular, with no one more so than Bobby. He gobbled down each new issue. Sometimes he would buy and read the same issue three or four times, once for each airport, but he always had the same look of glee when he read–well, it was more looking really hard at the words than reading, really–the latest exploits of Wolverine and Bug Face and Mister Mess Yo Pants.

When Bobby left the hotel that night, he had nothing on him that a normal man wouldn’t: pack of gum, couple of joints, four ounces of cocaine, and five thousand dollars in cash. But the night called to him, to protect a world that feared and hated him. Bobby strolled down the sidewalk, walking straight at some young ruff-tuffs except Garcia had sent Billy to protect Bobby, so Billy jumped out from behind a garbage can and performed what he liked to call the Kill Bill Bill Kill, wherein he jabbed your scrote so fast (but with demonic force) that you didn’t know what had happened. You would wander away, confused. “What just happened? Did I see Billy? If I saw Billy, then–hurrrrg” because at that point, you’ve realized that Billy has taught your crotch the Truth. Bobby knelt before it.

Then Billy kicked the living shit out of the kids, who weren’t really bad kids, and not especially tough, either. But Billy played drums and Billy punched dicks. That’s what Billy did.

Y is for yurt, which is what Mickey lived in for a year trying to master the nomadic beats of the Mongolian Quakers of Iceland, who were the most ethnic people Mickey could find, being that Google maps hadn’t been invented yet. One of the many (suspiciously many, some might say) oddities of the MQ of I is that in their culture, it is the beats that are nomadic, not the people. The people actually lived in tidy little Cape Cods around a lake; Mickey just wanted to live in a yurt. In a nomadic beat, the One constantly migrates, based on a system of biorhythms, astrology, astronomy, rollin’ dem bones, and a touch of making it up as you go. They said this with a straight face to Mickey and he ate that shit right up. Most reasonable observers, however, would quickly have come to the conclusion that these people were fucking with Johnny Can’t Sit Still over there. The album was not even recorded, yet still lost $350,000.

Z is for zebra, which is an animal that Brent used to dress up as so he could engage in frottage with possibly women in badger costumes.

* Seriously, go buy this man’s book. It is awesome in the biblical sense where you are actually filled with awe and drop to your knees begging for your life. It is that good.

I Will Not Condemn You

May 21, 2012 / / 2 Comments

There have been new visitors to the bloggings, mostly from the wonderful and masculine-smelling Reddit, which was exciting and sexual. Problem was, I think the last few postings on the bloggings have been kind of weird and insular and not really about the Dead as much as my wrestling with the Creeping Insanity and that fucker just having his way with me. No contest, just taking his sweet time.

Until I yearned for it.

That is the kind of shit we had the meeting about.

Right, right. Sorry. So: who is this for? If you fit any one of the following descriptions, you should dive into the archives.(Actually, physically dive into them. Running start right into the computer: I swear it will work. It is an app.)

  • You love the Weather Report Suite, yet realize the lyrics are so dumb they ought to be quarantined. Black dirt live again, my ass. (But here’s an awesome WRS from the Curtis Hixon Convention Center in Tampa on 12/18/73. This is one of my favorite names for a 70’s arena. I just wish it had merged with the nearby building in Pembroke Pines to become the Curtis Hixon Sportatorium, which is the most 70’s you can get in three words. You can almost picture the enormous tie knots and boxing still being relevant.
  • You’ve ever idly wondered whether, after building the Wall of Sound, they considered building a Wall of Sight. Or maybe a Wall of Taste. (Warning: do not taste the Wall of Taste.)
  • You like the parts that are in between the songs better than the songs.
  • Occasionally–not always, but certainly not never–Jack Straw gets on your last nerve.
  • You have forgiven Vince, but still choose not to listen to his dinky tinklings.
  • Your ongoing argument with yourself regarding The Greatest ___ Ever! has resorted to factionalism, dirty-fighting, and–since Billy is involved–crotchpunching.In my head, it feels as though each year has achieved sentience and is now throwing evidence around when I’m trying to do other things like eat or cry or eat while I’m crying. It’s like the Italian parliament up there, but with nary a spicy meatball.
  • You want Sugaree to be longer. No matter how long it is, you believe it could stand to gain another 8 minutes or so.
  • You’ll put up with Bobby’s cowboy bullshit, but not his first set turn as Silly Dixon.
  • You got here by googling “rule 34 grateful dead.” You are sick, though constantly recurring, blips on my analytics and I welcome you to a place where you’ll be accepted. (Warning: there will be NONE of that “slash” fan fiction stuff where you take other people’s characters and hump them together like they were your childhood toys. However, we may dip our toes into that shiver-inducing pond by figuring out the most horrifying match-up: my money’s on Phil/Billy, because in the whisper of time before Billy started punching dicks, it would be awkward.)
  • Now you’re thinking about it, aren’t you? Even if you don’t want to, your brain’s just going “Brent/Mickey? Hornsby/Phil?” Tell me what the worst of the terrible, terrible images your brain is rifling through right now against your will in the comments. Best one wins a lifetime supply of Beard! for men with beards. Have a beard? Use Beard!

Ramble On Rosalita

March 3, 2012 / / 6 Comments

I was raised in New Jersey, so if you say bad things about Bruce Springsteen, I have to impregnate your cousin. No, not that cousin, the other one, the one no one would expect. My family takes our New Jersey rock seriously: my cousin once punched out Jon Bon Jovi. That is an actual true fact.

For graduation, one of my friends gave, as a “graduation gift” (don’t ask, it was a suburban thing), around 10 people the exact same CD, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Not only was it the ballsiest act of record snobbery in the books, but it was the most successful: all of those recipients still listen to the record regularly. Because it’s The Wild and the Innocent, man, But it was also telling for the fact that in New Jersey in the 90’s, everyone was simply assumed to be into Bruce.

So, what do Bruce and the Dead have in common? Quite a bit, but not very much at all.

They both made their bones as live performers, got ripped off by shady idiots, and became beloved by white people everywhere. The Dead built a Wall of Sound, Bruce ripped off the wall of sound. But the analogy quickly falls apart.

Both favored the approach of putting as many people on the payroll as possible, but Bruce hired employees, and then yelled at them a lot. Which shouldn’t be held against him: it’s how most bandleaders have always treated their musicians. James Brown used to fine people for missing notes. Gene Krupa only played the drums for the permission it gave him to scream at sax players. If E Street bassist Garry W. Tallent had ever tried any of Phil’s multi-octave meanderings, Bruce would’ve just outright beat him to death in front of the rest of the band as a warning.

Bruce and the Dead never met, seemingly. They certainly never jammed together. Neither Mickey nor Phil would have taken well to being counted off in such a commanding tone; it would have ended poorly.

Yes, both favored 8-minute long songs, but in Bruce’s case, 5 of those minutes were the band vamping while he told a story about his father. Or, possibly, about the Highway of Hope or the River of Faith or the Off-Ramp of False Equivalence or whatever the fuck he’s been yammering about for the past 15 years ago or so.

(Plus, Bruce’s accent has now lapsed into either speech impediment or elaborate put-on. Growing up, I had a friend whose mom had gone to high school with Bruce, because everyone in New Jersey is required to have some connection, however tenuous, to Bruce under penalty of someone going, “What the fuck, you don’t have a tenuous connection to Bruce? What the fuck over here?” Do I need to mention that this woman who grew up not two miles from Springsteen’s house at the exact same time had not one hint of grizzled twang to her voice? At the beginning of his career, Bruce sounded like a sweathog, but now he’s Johnny 99% and he wants to Occupy It (All Night Long.))

Although, I certainly would have enjoyed hearing Garcia try to do one of Bruce’s raps:

“So, see, my dad, who was very much kind of his own avatar? If you can grok me on that, y’know? So, he was very much a man of his times–ooh, wait, I heard this cool thing about watches…

“GIVE ME YOUR LIVERS!”

“Someone take away Phil’s mic, please.”

My Best Friend, My Drummer

March 2, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Listen to this, starting at around a minute in. It’s the Stir it Up jam, you know it. But listen again to how the very instant that Garcia picks up the thread that he’s been doodling at, Billy’s right there with him.

Billy gets short shrift. The other chimps built a Wall of Sound around him, (literally*), but Billy was still sitting there like the lost Murray brother with his pervy mustache and dinky little jazz kit. Whenever Mickey wasn’t around to rope Billy into his percussion related…ideas…Billy’s entire kit would fit in the trunk and backseat of an El Dorado. He gets overshadowed, though, partially stemming from the fact that Billy is deliberately kept away from people, especially people who have crotches they don’t want punched.

Billy should be listed along with Charlie Watts and Animal Muppet as one of the greatest drummers of the time, but he labors under the double canopy of Garcia and Phil. Phil, as we have discussed, preferred to play all the notes. Other bassists would play some of the notes. Actually, most bassists would play merely a few notes repeatedly. Not our Phil, so it’s easy to forget The Rule:

The sound of a great band is made by two guys, usually the drummer and the rhythm guitarist, but sometimes the bassist. No exceptions.**

The Stones are Keith and Charlie. Van Halen is those two aging tweakers and whatever hepatitis-infected blond they can rope into screaming, “GLARBLE MONNA HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT!” for a three-month tour that lasts five weeks and ends in recriminations, lawsuits, and, finally, discussion of Wolfgang’s unfortunate resemblance in every single way possible  to A. J. Soprano that was totally uncalled for. Not cool, man.

The sound of the Dead is Garcia and Billy. Dead and gone.

(We do, though, have recordings of the shows, which we may listen to at our leisure. For your enjoyment, and to bolster my pro-Billy stance, listen to the Mind Left Body Jam in this China/Rider. It proves my point: Phil played the bass, but Billy played songs. Man.)

*Billy refused to sit directly under the massive center speaker conglomeration, primarily because he had been up all night doing drugs and shooting at the Invisible Ones with the people who erected the thing.

**I am including Rush in this. The sound of Rush is generated by Geddy and Neil. Lifeson, while technically known in official musician terminology as “a motherfucker,” has always been generic, generally.

ADDENDUM

Recently having written a post about Springsteen, I have come to the realization that the sound of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band is generated by Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, making it an ultra-rare piano/drum combo.

Another Dick’s Pick In The Wall

February 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The Wall of Sound. Sweet heavenly Jesus: the Wall of Sound. These befuddled men asked themselves, “How much Sound do we need?” The answer–apparently–was, “A Wall’s worth.”

The problem was not really with the Sound so much as it was with the Wall. It was also an intractable problem, due to the fact that the very definition of ‘wall’ is something you cannot move easily, if at all. Hadrian’s Wall? Great Wall of China? All still there, mostly because of bunch of longhairs and bikers didn’t drag them around the midwest for months at a time. That a wall not be portable is its sine non qua is obvious with even my cursory knowledge of siege warfare, all entirely gleaned from 8th grade World history and whichever Lord of the Rings movie had the big castle fight scene. You know the name: it was the one with the little gay hobbits and the monsters and dragons and it lasts for nineteen fucking hours.  (Although, seriously, what kind of nimrod builds a castle with a drainage canal thing in the FRONT, where is easily accesible to your enemy, provided your enemy is a monster, WHICH HE TOTALLY IS AND YOU KNEW THAT GOING INTO THIS, SO WHY DIDN’T YOU BRICK THAT THING UP, GRAND MOFF TARKIN?)

It took 12 hours to set the Wall up. The Amish can knock off 6, 7 barns in that amount of time. If something takes you twelve hours to build, it should be permanent. These facts, though, pale in comparison to the fact that they chose to do this during a gas crisis. You cannot haul 75 tons of anything around during a gas crisis and expect to turn a profit: it’s one of the first things they teach you at Wharton, right after, “mention Trump and you fail.”

The Wall didn’t stop at the speakers, all of which were custom-built at a special facility in Daly City, CA that lights its workshop with burning cash. No, the boys also had new space-age instruments made up for themselves, most famously Garcia’s Wolf. Phil also got a new bass, so heavy and laden with doom it looked like the melee weapon of Phil-Garr the Grateful.

I will break my own iron held rule about research to quote at length:

Phil is using a new quadraphonic bass, the electronics of which were designed and built by George Mundy and the body and pickups by Rick Turner. The new bass has the same versatile qualities as the old bass: three pickups (bass and treble pickups covering all the strings, and a quad pickup which has a separate signal for each string); on each of the bass and treble pickups there are controls which enable him to select 1) the band-width of the filter, 2) the center frequency of the filter, 3) the kind of filter being used and 4) mix unequalized unfiltered direct sound with the filtered sound. The variety of sounds which can be achieved on the bass is the result of the many different combinations of these variables which can be used. The new bass has a frequency response with a crisper tone, and two quad pickups instead of one, the new one being a frequency-detector pickup. The main addition to the new bass is a Digital Decoding Circuit such that ten push buttons on the bass allow Phil to select any one of sixteen quad spatial arrangements of his speakers, and eight in stereo mode

I DARE you to make sense of any of that. And then factor in the fact that this is all to play Chuck Berry tunes. You can see how the Hiatus was, maybe, a necessary and inevitable thing–what comes after the wall of Sound, after all? The band made a brief and desultory attempt to build an exact replica of Versailles out of speakers, drugs, and promissory notes, but after spending $200,000 and Mickey burning down the model, the boys lost interest.

It all sounded different after they came back. The music held less secrets, but it would have been good to hear the Wall with Mickey, too. Imagine this Samson coming through a sound system that in Olden Days would have been worshipped as a god, perhaps even two gods and a saint. The Wall had that much impressive in it: pilgrims would often leave notes in the cracks of the Wall, which was a horrible, horrible idea for two reasons. First, members of the band would invariably mistake the folded-up paper prayers for bindles of narcotics and savagely knock you to the ground trying to get to them; second, Steve Parrish had a strict policy about punching anyone who touched the Wall.

Magic Beans

January 30, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I present you with a partial list of the reasons the Dead again and again faced financial ruin:

  1.  Lenny Hart. This might not have been the Dead’s fault; they were the most goyish band on the planet and I am including Ladysmith Black Mambaza and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in there. These were laid-back Catholics and Protestants from Northern California and they could not possibly be expected to recognize the clear and present danger inherent in a Jewish guy screaming about Jesus. Any time a Jewish guy starts screaming about Jesus, that guy should be watched carefully, because he is up to something. There is a secret list of Jews that other Jewish people all secretly despise, and those guys are pretty close to the top. Also on the list is the family from Hardcore Pawn on TruTV.
  2. The Wall of Sound. The Dead answered George Carlin’s agnostic riddle, “Could God make a rock so big that he himself could not lift it?” with a resounding, “Yes, if He made it out of 20,000 fussy, cutting edge tube amplifiers, He could.” The people who built the Wall were immensely clever, but why did they not take an hour to sit down with a list of gas prices and some scratch paper and figure out how much it would cost to drag that techie-version of Hoarders around the damn Midwest? Think of it this way: the Grateful Dead built the Heaviest Thing in the World and then kept moving it. That gets pricey. Especially if you do it in 1974. You know: during the GAS CRISIS.  THEY BUILT A SOUND SYSTEM THAT REQUIRED 20 TRUCKS TO MOVE DURING THE GAS CRISIS.
  3. Ron Rakow. Someone tell me why I know who this man is, please. You should feel as ashamed as I do for knowing that.
  4. The Grateful Dead Movie. Garcia labored over this thing for 4 years. The animation–the fucking cartoon–cost half a mil. When he decided to include the Nitrous scene, was he thinking, “This is my Citizen Kane?”
  5.  Egypt. They played in Egypt to an audience of 32 Egyptian tour guides, a hundred rich white kids in tie-dye, 13 camels, and the monkey from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Bill Walton was also there; he and the monkey became besties. This is the box score for Egypt: two junkies, at least three full-blown alcoholics, one drummer with a broken arm, a fucked-up piano. Plus everyone was doing the Ol’ Cairo Hotstep, if you know what I mean. (I am talking about diarrhea: foreign places give you diarrhea because they are foreign.)
  6. The White Slave Trade. You probably don’t know about this, reading all those Dead sites that don’t want you to know THE TRUTH, but the Grateful Dead were heavily, heavily invested in the international sale and distribution of top-of-the-line white slaves. Men, women, children–it did not matter. If you were white, the Grateful Dead would snatch you up (Billy did the actual snatching) and sell you in shady backrooms for purposes best not delved into. Rest assured there was butt stuff involved.

Spinal Dead #2

January 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Tap built a set for their song, Stonehenge, but of course things went wackily awry: the crew built Stonehenge too small and it was famously in danger of being trod upon by a dwarf.

The Grateful Dead also built a Stonehenge, the difference being that they made it out of the largest speakers on Earth and it weighed 85 trillion tons. (I am estimating that precise tonnage.) In ’74, something called the Wall of Sound came into existence. This happened because the Dead’s policy of nearly spending themselves bankrupt on obviously retarded shit was a sacred one. This band policy was taken even more seriously than other Dead policies such as, “Please wear the most comfortable clothes you own at all times no matter how absurd you look,” and, “Only hire criminals to look after the payroll.”

In high school bio class, my friends and I would play a game to see who could break the most glassware during the period without it becoming obvious that this was the intention. It required timing–you couldn’t just break a smash a beaker every two minutes, it would be obvious. You couldn’t smash too many things or it would become apparent that you were destroying things that other people were trying to use to better themselves on purpose. Too few…well, what’s the point? The men who put together the Wall of Sound were clearly playing this game.

“So, how many speakers do we need?

“400,000. Plus, they must be the most expensive, heaviest speakers ever built. If they are not heavy enough, we will fill them with concrete. It must be such that it requires more man-hours to prepare to rock Cleveland than it did to conquer Poland.”

“So, 400,000 speakers, then?

“Well, if we’re being precise: 800,000. Because it’s so ass-kickingly heavy and complicated, we’re going to build two so we can play on one while the other’s being set up. In fact, we might very well build three and just set the third on fire for no reason whatsoever.”

“This sounds like a plan! What do you call this thing?”

“The Wall of Sound.”

“Brilliant! It’s not as if one of the defining characteristics of a wall is that it stays in one place no matter what. One question, though: will it be so electronically complex that keeping it running for more than an hour straight will defy the very laws of physics?”

“What do you think?”

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