Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: weir (Page 4 of 5)

Creamery Of The Crop

May 17, 2012 / / 4 Comments

By 1972, Bobby had learned how to play. Not just play, but lead the band in his big-boy pants. Bobby was carving out a little space for himself and turning into Sergeant Major Clap-Yo-Hands and it was a good thing. Listen to 3:20 in Greatest Story: 8/27/72 is a Bobby show. Arguably the perfect versions of all of his Cowboy tunes, especially the soft landing he gives Dark Star with a counter-intuitive saunter into El Paso, and a great Promised Land, when he’s allowed to get to it.

The announcer is so stupid that he grew up to be Bill O’Reilly. Don’t tell people they were about to be sprayed with shit, man. His stupidity does lead to one of Bobby’s brighter moments. For some reason known only to his gods, Doofus decides to announce the location of the lost children tent over a loudspeaker. Because that’s information that everyone needs to know. Nothing bad could possibly come from broadcasting the location of our most vulnerable. Cleverly, Bobby cuts him off. Bobby was always sensitive to the welfare of children: his adolesence was rife with incidents resembling the Tragedy of Koko from the 1980 musical film Fame. Bobby now paid good money to ugly strangers to recreate the squalid de-pantsenings because, if pressed, Bobby would admit to enjoying every second of it. With Bobby, it was better to focus on actions; intentions were–at best–murky to all involved.

By the end of the show, you want to hurt the announcer. Physically. Methodically. Strategically. You can keep a man alive for such a long time while you introduce him to new worlds of PAIN (Scary music: oooh-AH-ahh!)  His groovy dude patter sounds like a passage from the upcoming Ken Burns 32-hour documentary Summer of Love/Edgar Winter of Discontent: The 60’s; it will be read by Russell Brand doing a bumptiously fucked North California…accent.

(An aside, a flash-forward to the real, or at least realistic: America picks the worst Brits. We’re offered Eddie Izzard, we pick Piers Morgan. Piers Morgan is the Devil. No joke, no exaggeration. Foe the sake of the country, someone should plant heroin on him. And in his house. And car. Spider-Man had a bad guy named the Sandman who could turn himself into sand (Don’t think about it.) Like that, that much heroin. Just make him go home.)

1972 was a rock-solid year: it wasn’t flashy. If you said the word “swag” in front of ’72, it would hold you down and–using only his rough and manly stubble–flay the skin from your haunches AND your flanks. Forget about the loins, the loins are long gone, for these men were so very hairy in 1972. There was no grooming, no manscaping (well, sure, there was…just not in that part of San Francisco; couple miles away, freshly shorn was cute-and-kissable) back then, and their northern European bristles permeated everything and the music grew Teddy Roosevelt mustaches all over itself  and the mustaches were made of balls and the BALLS WERE THEMSELVES HAIRIER THAN YOU’VE EVER THOUGHT BALLS COULD BE.

PS  In keeping with my new pet theory about listening to the shows around the great shows, I present you with 8/24/72. Berkeley Community Theater. Setlist-wise, it’s comparable to the Veneta show, but with a great Morning Dew and far longer stretches of everybody being in tune.

PPS  8/24 blows the Veneta show away.

Just, Y’Know: Thoughts On The Dead

May 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We forget how long ago it was, what a different world it was. To  understand my point, you must listen to Pig absolutely fucking KILLING IT on It’s A Man’s World. That was April 15th, 1970. Listen to how crisp and present the recording is, how clean and separate the instruments sound: I would wager most lay-listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this recording and an official release from the era. Marvel at how such a recording got made in the same world where there is absolutely no record of a show from that same month: no tape, no poster, certainly no film but there is a contract and cancelled check, so it must have happened. There are shows as late as 1973 just…gone. Compare that to today’s DeLillo Barn of a culture, all of us pointing our iThings at each other the second anything notable happens. Holding our phones vertically, all of us.

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Everybody’s new favorite fun game: Play in One Key, Sing in Another!

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Is the most terrifying moment of your day the Silence that comes before the Fretting that comes before the Waffling that comes before the Choosing? An ’89? Surely, a Summer ’71! The wrong choice–it’s like throwing the i Ching, only to lodge the coins in your cousin Kevin’s throat and Kevin dies right in front of you and you just LOSE IT and decide that you can’t get in trouble if EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD, TOO, so you kill your way halfway down the street before they take you down. No matter which Ching translation you use, that’s an unhealthy omen.

I almost had one of those rolls today. I chose an ’85 (4/27/85 Frost Amphitheater, Palo Alto, CA) to start off the morning. The 80’s are a giant tushee: fun around the edges, but dangerous in the middle. (I apologize for that.)

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I’ve written before about Garcia’s guitar tone being friendly, but the entire band had an ethos of friendlyness-ship. (Of course that’s a word. And if not a word proper, at least wordish.) All those references to following and leading and sharing (women, wine (Not Persian, though. Persian was not a share-y kind of substance.).) There was very little aggression in the music: no one will ever enter the Octagon with Brokedown Palace blaring. This made them a different band then–say–Slayer, who once wrote a song about Josef Mengele from Mengele’s point of view.  While many Dead songs featured unreliable narrators, none of them were so unreliable as to have committed war crimes. Committing war crimes is the very definition of being unreliable: you need to be watched, apparently. The second everyone turns their back, BOOM: you’re sewing twins together.

Slayer’s always been a bit of a mystery to me. Not the “why are they popular” part: there will always be ugly 15-year-old boys and money to be made catering to them being all evil and shit. I’m referring to the actual music. A friend burned me the Compact Disc. My good friend, Inter-Natalie. You should see her record collection. I like to listen to the hard-charging angry stuff when I am up in the gym working on my fitness, Sabbath and Titus Andronicus and the Boom Boom Satellites, so I tried a little Slayer and halfway through the third verse describing what can only be classified as “atrocities,” I quietly bowed out. I prefer to keep my tunes free of graphic descriptions of torture labs. Cartman was right: hippies hate Slayer.

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Who was it, precisely, that was clamoring for the return of Dupree’s Diamond Blues?

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In May of 1969, the Dead jammed with legendary conga player Mongo Santamaria.  Also legendary was the lecture given to Bobby afterwards concerning his giggles upon hearing the name.

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Merl should have been the keyboardist after Keith. They would have looked like the Celtics in the 80’s, racially. Also, Walton.

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I don’t care if Putin has turned the place in to a Latveria-of-the-mind: THEY’RE THE BAD GUYS, FUCK THEM. They were THE BEST bad guys: evil enough (gulags, proxy wars), but not, you know, too evil (that thing that made the 40’s such an inherent downer.) They had an ideology and an aesthetic, none of this “at night, it is my bed; during the day, my clothes” bullshit these Al Qaeda fuckmuppets smell up the room with.

Other Times, I Can Barely SEO

April 29, 2012 / / 5 Comments

Do you have an Old Mall in your town? As those caverns of the 70’s stubbornly rust all over the country, they evolve into one of a number of morphologies: there’s the Ghost Mall, that has maybe one store still there and the others look haunted and Cormac McCarthy-ish. The giant letters forming the names of the stores have been removed and left their traces on the wall. Best “out of business” sign there is.

Then there is another kind of mall. Perhaps it is just as bustling as it used to be, back when it supported three separate record shops (one of which was actually–swear–cool) and an honest-to-god Tiny Comic Book Store. Not too big–just one long oval with Macy’s on one end and Sear’s on the other. A solidly striving, middle-class mall in America. Now, yes, there always was a bit of a crime problem, but you get a lot of shoplifters at any mall and quite frankly, the whole situation was needlessly exacerbated by the Police Chief getting himself run over while in pursuit three times. Twice, maybe. Three times, you start looking at the common denominator.

But where there used to be ladies apparel shops are now cash4gold places, the Body Shop replaced by the Dollar Store, and far more places selling baseball caps than you would think the market could bear.  It has become the Terrifying Mall, a mall you are sure “belongs” to someone who is not the rightful owner, someone for whom “laundry day” is never a valid excuse for wearing certain colors.

Jut asking, because apparently some poor soul got here via the search term socks for fat ankles boynton beach and everyone knows that the best place is Sweaty’s at the Boynton Beach Mall, in between the two kiosks selling iPod accessories and the Mexican supermarket. Godspeed, you fankled lovely. 

Do you know what analytics are? I didn’t, until I started making the bloggings. Now I know how each and every person got here–there’s a list of the exact search term. Let’s see a few, shall we? (The search terms are in bold, obviously. I have not altered them except when I did to make them funnier.)

Now, weir fucking donna is an obvious one, as is is phil lesh a jerk, but less predictable was the fact that three lost, lonely men (and you know that they are most certainly men) searched for ned lagin or ned lagin band.

I’d like to think that both dickpunching billy and grateful dead crotchpunch represent people who had been here before, but for one reason or another forgot to bookmark the bloggings.

As for the 8–FUCKIN’ 8 HUMAN BEINGS–who searched for grateful dead rule 34? You sicken me. On the other hand, it was nice to fill a niche

Without Lope Day To Day, Insanity’s King

March 14, 2012 / / 1 Comment

The Jerry Ballad is one of a number of sacrosanct moment of the show, along with the Dylan Slot, the Closing Raver, and the Brent Bathroom Break. (Or the second set Estimated in ’77; on two separate occasions, they set up their gear so they could play Estimated on an off-day.) Unlike the other categories, the Jerry Ballad has been there since the very beginning, along with the part of the show where the drummers get high while the rest of them irritate the audience and then the reverse.

The songs that work in the Jerry Ballad slot are perfect examples of what I call The Lope, that uniquely Dead stop-and-start stumble. Ramble On Rose, Sugaree. Slow it down a little and you’ve got Row Jimmy (or the later versions of They Love Each Other). Speed it up and it’s Brown-Eyed Women (or the early versions of They Love Each Other). It is the sound of a small barefoot boy in overalls ambling along with his donkey in the South that only exists in the first 20 minutes of rock star bio-pics. The donkey may be wearing a hat. Bum-BA-Bum-BA-Bum: the beat toodles to and fro.

Black Peter does that. So did Standing on the Moon and Ship of Fools and Wharf Rat. Sing Me Back Home never did that: it might be the worst of all Jerry Ballads. It is a perfect exemplar of the maxim Keep it snappy, boys! They’re DYING out there! Plus, SMBH was always a victim of the Dead’s most pernicious trait: the tempo drift. Songs have a certain tempo they sound right in. A 10 bpm deviation either way leads to the rushed, coked-out clatter od ’85, or the sludgy miasma of the Fall ’76 shows. They never got the tempo for Sing Me right, which might not have been such a problem but not for the fact that they were incapable of playing the song for anything less than a dozen minutes at a time.

(Bobby also had interests in a late show weeper. In fact, that’s what he called it: the Bobby Weeper. When he told Garcia about this, Garcia said nothing, just walked away and found Billy and the crotchpunching began.)

Prime Numbers

February 17, 2012 / / 0 Comments

They played The Eleven and Loose Lucy 98 times each. One song is more important than the other, but it is not the better song in any way.

The Eleven is more representative of Primal Dead than any other song, including Dark Star, for the simple fact that they kept playing Dark Star. DS kept popping up every few years or so, always reflective of the current makeup of the band: in the 60’s, it was a dark and speedy hellride; in the early ’70’s, it was jazzy and air-filled; in the late ’70’s, it was played in a hockey arena; and in the 80’s and 90’s, people were just happy that the song was being played at all. But they left The Eleven back in the nether reaches of the misty baroque Baby Dead.

They barely qualify as songs: Dark Star is just a head theme, then some lyrics, and The Eleven is just a party trick–Hey, look what we learned to play in! It’s not very subtle, either: it’s in eleven, about a list of eleven things, and called The Eleven. Perhaps they were auditioning for Sesame Street:

“Hi, I’m Billy!”

“And I’m Bobby, and we’re gonna teach you about the number 11, and the letter 7.”

“That’s ‘L.’ Why did we let the dyslexic guy do this? Hey, puppet-guy: c’mere.”

And then Billy punched the guy holding Grover in the nuts and then he punched Mr. Hooper in the nuts four, maybe five times. Mr. Hooper wasn’t moving after Billy got done with him. That’s really how Mr. Hooper died: Bill Kreutzmann, drummer for the Grateful Dead, dickpunched him to death.  David Gans is KEEPING THIS INFORMATION FROM YOU.

The Dead is no longer Primal by 1970. Mickey and TC would leave the band, everyone would watch one too many John Ford movies, and they would be in the next great phase of their run.Looking back, the Primal period was shouty and wobbly–the sound of a baby band.

But sometimes, the baby sounded like this.

P.S. Loose Lucy isn’t all that awful; it has a nice lope. It might have been a hit for .38 Special. But I don’t particularly care to hear Garcia talking about getting on top of ladies. Or, having ladies climb on top of him, which is, let’s be honest, almost definitely the case.

I Need To Stop Buying Dead Books Off Amazon

January 30, 2012 / / 6 Comments

Did you know Bobby wrote a children’s book? He did, in 1991. It was called Panther Dreams. Because of course it was. It had an environmental theme. Again, because of course it did. (Were the Dead that fucking famous in ’91? Children’s books are some high-level Regis and Madonna famous person bullshit.)

Tarot. Do you remember Tarot? It was the play TC left the Dead to score. Did you know it was a mime musical? This is a fact: I am not making it up.  Tom Constanten was the Crispin Glover of his time.

Bobby’s looks were becoming a problem. The problem was, Bobby was a pretty young man. Which meant he could essentially wear clown clothes and make them work, but when a man gets older, dignity should take the forefront. The pretty do not learn dignity.

Robert Hunter recorded an album called Amalgamalin Street. It was described as both an “audio novel” and a “rock-opera.” It was about a guy named Chet. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

Sweet heavenly hosts, I’m sitting here listening to them, while I read and write about them. These baboons have infiltrated my very Essence. they have befouled me like worse than Billy did that Holiday Inn that time in Des Moines when he got bored. No, not that time: the other time. No, the other time.

Mickey spoke in front of the Senate? The real one, not a bunch of dogs wearing human shirts Steve Parrish wrangled in the parking lot? The actual human Senate of the United States? In this reality? Not in some Quantum Leap type deal? (Billy could totally play Dead Stockton.) The same year he also produced an album called Honor the Earth Powwow? What a world we created.

The American Book of the Dead by Oliver Trager is awesome.

By the way: Mickey spoke in front of Senate about the benefits of drum circles for the elderly. Because of course he did.

Johnny B. Mediocre A Good Deal Of The Time

January 29, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Spurs ‘n’ Chaps Bobby had his cowboy songs, which the drummers hated; New Wave Bobby had his oeuevre of angular, weirdly melodied songs, which Jerry hated; and Blind Lemon Bobby had his clusterfuckingly tortuous first set Blooz-stravaganza, which ear-possessors hated.

Speak not to me of wang, nor dang, nor doodle, Bobert Weir! I will not look what you done done. And you put DOWN that slide guitar, Mister! Next time I see you with that slide guitar, you better be trying to flush a South American strongman out of hiding.

But there was one more Bobby, and he was my favorite Bobby: Sock Hop Bobby, who loved the old jukebox singles and 50’s rock and, most of all, Chuck Berry. (At both Woodstock and the Trans-Canada Festival, Bobby paid way too much attention to Sha Na Na. He shrieked like a girl when he clapped for them and after their set, Bobby followed the lead singer into the bathroom and just openly stared at the guy’s cock. Like not in a gay way? It was more like–I’m not explaining this right. It was Bobby just being all, “That is a thing. That is an honest-to-god thing right there. It is a cock that cock right there and I am LOOKING. I am LOOKING right AT IT. Hey, stop hitting me.” Even for Bobby, that was a behavioral outlier. It led to a stern talking to from Phil that touched upon many subjects, but mostly “expectations.”)

Except, Phil kinda ruined most of the Chuck Berry songs, didn’t he? The rest of them were pretty adroit with the rockers: Jerry always bit into them with vigor, Bobby could yelp just as good as Bob Seger or any other white guy in the Seventies, and Keith played the shit out of the boogie piano. (Strangely enough, he was absolutely amateurish at woogie piano.)

But, Phil? No, he was far too good of a musician to play those songs well. They were brutal, dumb hammers of music, but as we all know: Phil was a surgeon. He delicately flitted about both the root note and the downbeat like a savage butterfly, exposing the inner horrible grace of the mixed-ionian-calipygian modes and the sweet, sw–PHIL, STOP FUCKING AROUND AND PLAY THE GODDAMN SONG. IT’S JUST A FAST TWELVE-BAR BLUES TUNE. STOP WITH THE CHORD SUBSTITUTION.

Shit Grateful Deads Say

January 28, 2012 / / 1 Comment
  • I spent a million dollars on this thing.
  • Hey, Healy? Could you turn me up a bit? I can’t hear myself over Lesh and Weir.
  • You smell like Heineken; let me have your liver.
  • Fuckin’ Weir.
  • Fuckin’ drummers.
  • FUCKIN’ DONNA!
  • Healy, if I still can’t hear my bass 60 seconds from now, I’m going to stab you. I will physically stab you with an actual knife. You need to bring it up at 800 cycles…that’s it: Ramrod, bring me my knife.
  • No, Ramrod: to ME my blade.
  • Bring everyone their knives, Ramrod!
  • Would someone pull Mickey off that cop? Just grab him, but be careful…OOH, I should have told you that Billy was probably gonna punch you in the dick. He does that and other human beings seem to just accept it.
  • Jerry, get out of the bathroom.
  • No, not “I need a million dollars.” I told you that I have already spent a million dollars and now the million dollars is gone forever and we will almost certainly never get one cent of it back. What did I do with it? Stop hassling me, man.
  • Yes, of course  it seems perfectly logical that we allow the crew to have a full vote on everything we do. How can that be anything but a sound business practice that will, in no way, end in numerous deaths. Why do you ask?
  • Who the fuck bought a harpsichord?
  • Yeah, they call me Captain Billy; I’m kinda the captain. Would you like to touch the captain in a sensual way? Come! Let Captain Billy practice his sensuality all over you, my zaftig nightchild!
  • Soooo…you should just assume that every single thing you see  is just absolutely drenched with acid. All of it, even on the insides of things in defiance of all laws of nature. We encourage a culture in which is acceptable to drug one another at any time with any amount of any drug. Some workplaces have fantasy football; we have chosen to amuse ourselves through poisoning one another. We have almost definitely poisoned you already.  Enjoy your backstage passes, Congressmen.
  • Healy, can you–
  • –Healy, you turn him up and I’m gonna buy, raise, and train attack dogs–like Michael Vick-type shit–and then I will set them on you and fucking LAUGH.
  • –you’re just, like, mean.
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