[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cH7I6ibA-SM&w=420&h=315]
Oh, boys.
Why did they let you act?
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Month: January 2012 (Page 1 of 5)
Have I been negative? Probably. Almost definitely. What about the positives? What is lovable about this band?
- The black leather jacket Garcia used to wear.
- Mississippi Half-Step. When it gets real quiet and they sing about the Rio Grand-ee-o.
- The little songs they play during tuning–Funniculi, the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Stayin’ Alive.
- Billy playing the drums all by himself.
- Billy playing the drums with Mickey.
- The proto-version of Brown-Eyed Women from 8/24/71 (Dick’s Picks 35). The beat is turned around and the melody sounds like a children’s playground taunt and IT’S AWESOME.
- Bobby forgetting the words.
- Garcia forgetting the words.
- Phil never knowing the words in the first place and just making shit up as he went. (I’m looking at you, Tom Thumb’s Blues.)
- The Celtic jacket Mickey wore in the Touch of Grey video.
- Touch of Grey.
- The AUD of Touch of Grey from the comeback show.
- Garcia with his hair in pigtails.
- Pig.
- Branford.
- Bobby’s Chuck Berry tunes.
- Brent’s long, lustrous hair.
- Terrapin Station.
- Bobby’s wise-guy routines (“Turn around real slow, we gotcha covered.”)
- April Fool’s Day 1980–opening up the show with Promised Land on each others’ instruments. (Garcia on drums!)
- Stella Blew
- Casey Bones
- Touch of Grey Pubes
- Chokedown Alice
- Fuckin’
- Dark Starfish
- Nipple
- Shockingly Loose Lucy
- Fire on Your Mountains
- Vagina Cat Sunflower->I Know Her, Let’s Ride her
- Thighs of the World
- Sensually Playin’ in the Band (Billy stars in that one.)
- Ass-enger
- Ass-idy
- El Ass-0
- Brown- Aeroela’d Women
- Looks Like, But Is Almost Certainly Not, Rain.
- Me and My Uncle
- Black Peter
- Comes a Time
- Hard to Handle
- Let It Grow
- Dark Hollow (Wow, a lot of these work on their own, don’t they?
- Uncle John’s Gland
- Deep Throated Wind
- Sexicali Blues
- Estimated Pop-shot
- Sittin’ On Top Of Your face
- Please Ease Me In
- The Golden Road (To Unlimited Crotch)
I present you with a partial list of the reasons the Dead again and again faced financial ruin:
- 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.
- 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.
- Ron Rakow. Someone tell me why I know who this man is, please. You should feel as ashamed as I do for knowing that.
- 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?”
- 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.)
- 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.
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.
We don’t talk about ’71 a lot, you and I? In the transitive nightfall of diamonds?
(I need to get this off my chest: the lyrics to Dark Star–well, all of the early, yell-y songs, but Dark Star in extremis–are nothing but a freshman year way of saying, “I took the big blue pill.” In fact, the phrase “dark star” is almost identical to the phrase “midnight sun,” which is universal shorthand for “shitty lyrics.” Seriously, go check how many songs have “midnight sun” in them: it seems like a lot, but I’m going to have to go ahead and absolutely refuse to do even the tiniest iota of research for this. Nor will I provide links to examples.)
Because for a while there, in between TC and Keith, it was just the five of them. Pig did the backing vocals on Not Fade Away. Billy wouldn’t transform into Swingin’ Billy the Jazzbo Cat for three years. Bobby was in that sweet spot between learning how to play electric guitar and learning how to play slide guitar. Garcia still had the nasty sound of the Primal stuff, but he was playing these long, lyrical lines and PHIL WAS PLAYING EVERY NOTE HE COULD THINK OF AS LOUD AND AS OFTEN AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.
And it worked, it really worked. They were loud and nasty and occasionally funky. They actually were the dance band they’d always bullshitted about being. And the shows they have left us are a little bit of magic in this used-up world.
We haven’t talked about Pigpen; we’re gonna talk about Pigpen.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrzOzgYL1-o]
Sometimes the Dead would try to sound like this record, Free Jazz. It was by Ornette Coleman and also featured Eric Dolphy and a bunch of other guys who wore clothes you could never in your wildest dreams pull off. Lots of chocolate-brown trousers with immaculate creases and cigarette ashes caught in the cuffs.
This music was to the Grateful Dead what the Grateful Dead was to keyboardists: a bad influence. Go back and listen to that nonsense again. It is skreeking and skronking and the odd thing is: they’re sure that they’re killing it. At least when Lou Reed made Metal Machine Music, you knew it was the simple combination of Being the World’s Biggest Junkie and Being the World’s Biggest Asshole.
When I hear this, I hear space, and when I hear space, I just want to go around slapping people. My hand would chafe until the skin just sloughed right off, like a snake’s–that’s how many slaps I want to give out when the Noodle Monster shows its mangy face.
Um, are we…like…all aware of this fuckery?
I mean…heh, heh…who are the ad wizards who came up with…holy shit, why?! WHY?
One of the selling points in the ad is “Serendipity.” The computer game where you pretend to be a tie-dye Ewok going to shows you have owned for decades but you get to pay for it is offering me “serendipity.” I might get to meet any one of the several thousand bearded weirdos that habituate every other Dead sites. Except, you know: for free, and without the implication of being a cyber-furry.
(Thoughts On The Dead says: don’t be a Cyber-Furry, kids. Furries shouldn’t have rights. Black Ford Falcons should pull up to their houses after dark and take them, away and forever. Sting could write a song about it.)
I am not MAKING THINGS UP HERE, man. He is STILL DOING THIS SHIT.
Bill Graham used to introduce the band by saying, “Not only are they THE BEST at what they do, they’re also THE ONLY ONES who do what they do: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Grateful Dead.” Which was elegant and eloquent but not quite true.
Miles Davis’ 70’s bands were doing the same thing as the Dead, except without any first set niceties. Miles and the Dead shared a San Francisco stage right after Miles’ masterpiece (that should probably read “right after one of the many, many masterpieces he produced), Bitches Brew came out. Miles had been working with an electric bass player since about the moment he decided, “I must destroy this concept of the song. There is no Song! Songs were invented by white devils! I’m just going to find a bunch of musicians and freak out for 60 minutes at a time.”
Miles, as usual, is not telling you the whole story. That “bunch of musicians” has to include Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter or the entire plan falls apart. Plus, Miles’ bands are sometimes mired in the jazz tradition of laying back while someone solos, instead of the full-band improvisational composition that the Dead do. You know what I’m talking about: the stuff that’s worth sitting through all the nonsense and noodling for. When the boys flow from one song through another and back and you never realize what they’ve done until you’re already amazed; it’s a musical magical trick when they do it right.
Miles was sometimes accused of cynicism: that his ’70’s electric period was not purely a musical journey, just an excuse to go from his usual clubs to playing the much larger (and therefore more lucrative) halls and theaters that the bands on the rock circuit did. This might have been one reason, sure, but you can never discount the possibility that Miles just didn’t want to rehearse anymore, as it took time away from driving a Lamborghini packed with white women through city streets at 100 mph, then accusing the officer that pulled him over of being–dependent on the situation–“a racist cracker-ass cracker,” or “an Uncle Tom motherfucker.” Miles was a real piece of work.
There was another band criss-crossing the country in the 1970’s trying to Reconnect with The Holy through playing really loud and long: P-Funk. Whatever the hell George Clinton was calling whichever group of guys were in the room when they made the record: Parliament, Funkadelic, the P-Funk All-Stars, Funk-isyahu and the Klezmer Kids, whatever.
P-Funk was the answer to the question, “What if we gave poor black kids in Jersey and middle-class white kids in San Francisco the exact same drugs and massive amplifiers?’
And, of course: the leaders of all three of these groups are dead. I know George Clinton thinks he is still alive, but he died three years ago–trust me on this one.
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