Month: January 2012 (Page 3 of 5)

No one in the Dead ever got hospitalized for exhaustion. Ditto dehydration. There were drug overdoses, liver failure (plural), car crashes and the consequences of telling Mickey, “No, you can’t have that money,” but never something so bush league as “exhaustion.” Hell, if anything, some of them were getting far too much sleep, but that’s not the point: these mandrills were Old School.

But the way we listen to them now is not. No tapes in my house, nor CDs and certainly no vinyl.(I have only purchased one LP in my life. It was by UB40, but why don’t we leave me and my actions out of the conversation, okay Blame-y) I don’t even have a stero anymore, not for years. My entire collection is stored as 1’s and 0’s in a computer I bought refurbished off of a website that “looked trustworthy.” There is no backup: this will end in tears.

The machine tells me that it has 66.34 GB of Dead tunes. Every Dick’s Pick. Each volume of Road Trips and Digital Downloads. All three of the monster 10-disc box sets. (I paid for ’em, of course. Of course. In the sense that sitting through the ’95 Giant Stadium shows was kind of like payment.) Hundreds more shows from February of 1968 to October of 1994. Each year is represented, even ’84.  American Beauty is also on there, but I haven’t listened to it in 15 years, because Til The Morning Comes is poison. If you play it backwards, you get a strong urge to listen to Slayer.

Besides Beauty and Workingman’s, there are no studio releases in there.

(By the way, if you listen to one of Bobby’s cowboy songs backwards, you gradually lose the urge to throttle him while yelling, “Stop singing about 14-year-old stereotypes!)

I have not listened to every show in there; there’s probably no way I ever will. Even if I do, I probably won’t realize it. It’s not like my computer, one day in the future, will finish playing an encore of U.S. Blues and announce, “Dude! You just listened to every Dead show you own! What have you learned?”

“Everything there is to know about 8-sided whispering hallelujah hatracks.”

“And that is?”

“They have 8 sides.”

Tapes used to mean something when they showed up. They would appear according only to their own schedules, drifting across the country via the vagaries of the post office and scatterbrained tapers. All black with a thin white strip of label headlines across the top, or with the white-and-red sticks on the side. Sometimes, from a particularly savvy trader, you might get the clear plastic 100 minute tapes. Each one was special: you remember the first time you heard it.

My friend and I broke in 4/29/71 on a run into Manhattan. To meet a guy about a thing. You’ve all been there. My friend knew the guy with the thing and I didn’t, so I waited in the car outside. You know how guys with things can be. For some unfathomable teenage reason, I had shaved my armpits the night before. It was summer and hot and as I listened to the legendary show, I learned the hard way why we were given armpit hair. Driving home, we realized that we had spent every single cent we had on the guy’s thing, so we had to navigate through quite a bit of New Jersey as to avoid any tolls. I can’t listen to that show without feeling young and delightfully stupid and like I was getting a rash. But I also had the entire afternoon to skulk around Northern Jersey listening to the Greatest Goddamn Band That Ever Lived without one single care in the world.

Perhaps it is better that the Dead remain in the past. Were they not very much a product of their times?  Simpler, slower times. Better times. Better enemies, for certain. You never saw the Soviet Union flying planes into things. Starting proxy wars that killed millions and aiming their nukes at the rest of the world with the abandon of Pacino waving his gun around outside the bank in Dog Day, yes. Setting off a bomb in a nightclub, no. These new bad guys are just the worst.

(Incidentally, we are told that in Arab culture, to remove your shoe and rub its sole on a person is a grave insult. Just in Arabic culture, of course: anywhere else, it’s considered high praise to take off your shoe and beat someone with it.)

You no longer need to spend $300,000 on a home studio that you will use once to record half-an-idea, then convert into an extra bedroom for a man you met at a drug dealer’s house and made your manager later that afternoon. All you need is a laptop, and where’s the laughably huge expense incurred by that? Sure, if you sent Mickey to Apple headquarters, he would accidentally knock down a lode-bearing wall and cause a cave-in, but that’s almost certainly not going to happen.

The punching would no longer be allowed, and there was an awful lot of punching. Mickey, Billy, and Brent basically walked through life wildly swinging their fists at the single most inappropriate person in the room. Sometimes, I like to think that the band’s music was just the cover story and the actual reason for the band was to allow these men to go from town to town tackling people who disagreed with them. Bobby got punched a number of time, though far less than he actually deserved. Do you know Bobby once pulled out a life-like cap gun in an airport and started shooting it off? (And you know that he made that “pew, pew” sound with every shot.)

That’s called BEING A TERRORIST. If you pull that shit now, you go to a secret prison forever. Bobby Weir is A FUCKING TERRORIST.

I love rock & roll books, no matter the subject. I don’t need to like the band’s music: I enjoy the genre,  like others enjoy westerns or romance novels; obsessive readers will know what I’m talking about. There are two tracks of books going through my life: the good stuff (well, things I think are good,) and books about rock bands and rock people. I have read books by the road managers of several bands. I have read more than one 500-page oral history of a music scene I knew NO BANDS FROM. If Izzy Stradlin ever gets over his weirdo loner routine and lets a broke blogger write his autobiography (ahem), then I will have read a tome about each original member of Guns n Roses–plus two separate histories of the band as a whole.

Rock & roll books generally all have the same structure. We flash open at the lowest point in our hero’s life: running through a plate-glass window at an upscale resort to escape the drug hallucinations chasing him; his pancreas exploding, covering the inside of his torso with third degree burns; or falling asleep on his arm at his 14th-goddam-rehab and waking up with nerve damage in his hand. (I am not making any of these up.  Match the idiot with the horror in the comments and win nothing.)

After that, there’s the childhood stuff (skipped it) and the band’s rise to fame begins. About 2/3 of the way through the books, however, hubris takes over. The band has conquered America and been permanently barred from one hotel chain or the other by behaving in ways that, in our post 9/11 world, would get them tased to death within literally seconds.

We have travelled to Tokyo with them to watch them behave shabbily towards Japanese people on the bullet train. (Not in an overtly racist way at all: they would be acting precisely as badly in any train in the world, but they’re just in Japan, y’know?) We are also informed that Japanese audiences are polite, but when you really got ’em rockin’ man?  When you’re just fuckin’ ROCKIN’ out? Then they’re still really quiet. It is a baffling, baffling culture.” There is also a man named Mr. Udo. Everyone thinks Mr. Udo is the Japanese Bill Graham, but I suspect none of these ill-bred maniacs understood one single iota of any of their conversations with Mr. Udo.

Europe? Go read some rock books: Motley Crue, Guns, whatever. When these bands went to Europe, they rocked it so hard that entirely innocent teenagers randomly died. The power of their Rock irrevocably altered the course of several families’ lives.

No band went to Africa.

And then, hubris takes over, and the bands meet their Waterloo, their Little Big Horn, their Boreal Ridge: South America. To be a true rock & roll supergroup requires South America, but the continent was like an intimidatingly beautiful woman in a bar: most men are too scared to even try to approach her, but the biggest, baddest, and best keep striding boldly up to her. At which point, she leaps on their heads and eats their eyeballs.

South America never ended well, for anyone. The money gets stolen. The equipment gets stolen. The keyboard player gets kidnapped. And it’s not as if no one warned them: almost every book mentions that every single sane person in the band’s organization said this was a horrible idea. But the band knew that THEY were going to be the ones to finally rock El America del Sur.  It called to them like Afghanistan calls to dying empires.

Not our Dead, though. Never went to South America. Nor Japan. In fact, the Dead played outside the country fairly rarely. It has been said that they did not like crossing borders. Once, someone motioned at a meeting that, perhaps, they could get just get drugs where ever they were going, but then someone brought up the salient point that this plan would entail at least four to six hours without having any drugs on them at all and the idea was quickly forgotten.

So, our heroes went to Egypt. The capital of fun.  The story is that Phil told the Egyptian cultural minister that they like to play in different places and spirituality and ley lines and Mahler’s 3rd symphony and–at this point Phil goes to the bathroom for five minutes and returns without having flushed the toilet–and the Valley of the Kings and the Temples of the Syrinx and…

And I believe Phil; I believe that all of them consciously wanted to expand their music through the location and whatnot and somesuch. But, secretly, they were doing it for the primary reason the Dead did everything: because it was the single most expensive thing they could dream up at the time. Now, they could have recouped at least a tiny fraction of the cost by, you know,  playing well, and releasing a live album. They derided that suggestion as bush league.

(And here’s the thing: even if they had played AWESOMELY, and made a great live record, it’s still only an audio recording. The whole point of the thing was that the GRATEFUL FUCKING DEAD WAS JAMMING IN FRONT OF THE FUCKING PYRAMIDS DURING A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE FUCKING MOON. How do you not film that? How is it possible the only visual recording of those shows was from Bill Walton’s paniflex?

Everything went wrong: upon arriving Billy broke his arm tackling a camel he accused of “sassing him.” Billy had, just prior to this incident, announced loudly that he “wouldn’t be taking any guff from no camel bastard.” These are actual quotes, taken from something Dennis McNally once wrote down in his dream journal after a night of drinking and Chinese food.

Other band members had their own reasons for going. Mickey planned to line up 800 guys in turbans and then pull the turbans from their heads in a ryhthmic fashion, spinning the men at different pitches. He was then going to edit the notes into an all-drum Noh theater version of the Life of Teddy Roosevelt. The album was never released.

When Bobby was told about the ongoing strife between Israel and the Palestinians, he recommended that the Palestinians move to Marin Country because it’s so mellow, y’know, and ya just don’t have all the haaaassles of the city. Even Keith was a little embarrassed by this, albeit not until he was revived and told of the incident.

This wasn’t the last of the trouble Bobby would cause in the Levant. The latter part of 1978 was, you’ll recall, smack-dab in the middle of Bobby’s slide guitar phase. Some (okay, I) have interpreted the Garcia/Weir as older brother/younger confused brother, but this isn’t quite it: they were deeply different people. Garcia, every book and article tells us, was practicin’ fool. He would rarely go a day without playing his guitar, spending most days working through chord books for hours while watching cartoons. You can picture the ashtray swiftly filling with forgotten Camels, can’t you?

Bobby, on the other hand, chose to practice only when a paying crowd had gathered.

For the sin of indulging these nitwits on the Egypt trip, their fans were burdened by the curse of Bill-ho Graham-tep. That curse, of course, was Althea.

I cannot unsee the image of Phil Lesh screaming “Give me your livers!” while lurching, like Hippie Frankenstein, towards terrified Boriquas. I blame the 8 of you.

Time hates us and it most certainly hated Them. One third of them, let’s not forget, kicked the living shit out the actuarial tables by dying at 27, 32, 37, and 55.  Y’know that scene from the beginning of every movie that requires the hero to go through some sort of training where the sergeant goes, “Look to your right. Look to your left. Now some pelvic thrusts that really drive you insane.” You know the scene I’m talking about, but the thing is: the Dead could have done that. There’s a lot of non-metaphorically dead people in the band.

If the Grateful Dead hit curveballs the way they killed people, they’d bat third.

But time is cruel to the GD obsessive, as well. I decided to listen to Spring ’77. Not parts or highlights or a general overview slapped together from gratefuldeadprojects and the top hundred lists on DeadBase or whatever.–

(Not that those two sites aren’t wonderful giant black holes of time and sanity that you visit and look up from a week later, having listened to, say, “Liberty,” over and over to truly give the song its chance rather than judge it prematurely. (Of course, no matter what length of time you spend with”Liberty,” it is exactly as awful as every other time. No mater how they play it, or how long it takes, or whether they blow they lyrics or not: each version is exactly as awful.  It’s constant, like the speed of light.))

–but every single note the Grateful Dead played in the Spring of 1977.

I didn’t have a ton of tapes as a younger Enthusiast of the Musical Stylings of the Rock Combo The Grateful Dead.  (I shall not call myself that word.  I own no tie-dye. My hair-cut is respectable. I get waved through at borders.) Mostly it was stuff my friend Glenn had copied for me.  Glenn might have been the perfect proselytizer for the band: he was a taper, always had really good weed, and his parents did that “better to be screwing around in the basement than out in the streets” thing.

So, I only owned like a dozen.  To this day, I will defend 9/10/91 as one of the finest shows every played, mostly because I’ve heard it 8 billion times.

Now, it’s become some sort of contest between me and the shows, trying to listen to as many of them as I can, while the shows try to make me go back and listen again or, worse, multiply.

And the thing is, 9/10/91 actually was very good.

Just heard a show that had Mississippi Half Step, Loser, and Deal in the first set. I’ve been wrong, haven’t I?  It’s not just Weir: Garcia thinks he’s a cowboy, too.

EVERYONE IN THIS BAND ACTUALLY THINKS HE’S A FUCKING COWBOY.

They blew all their big gigs. Dane County Coliseum in the middle of February? They knocked that shit out of the park. They did a show in Virginia once where they deliberately did not tell anyone they were coming and killed it. Woodstock? Egypt? US Festival? They decided, for these shows, to play everybody’s favorite Dead game, “Do you think people will mind if I tune my instrument in the middle of a song?”

Yes, we minded.

They were at Altamont, but didn’t play, staying only long enough to cameo in the movie Gimme Shelter. If you haven’t seen it, you’re missing out: upon exiting the helicopter, Lesh and Garcia are apprised of the situation, to which Garcia responds, “Wow, bummer, man.” I swear that’s what he said. Then Phil, who will certainly not let himself be topped in the ongoing, intraband battle to never do, say, or wear anything that won’t be deeply, deeply shameful in hindsight, manages to stuff the words “groovy,” “man,”” dude,”” whoa,” and “maaaaaaaaan,” into one sentence. He is able to do this because he is the educated one.

Monterey was another disappointment. They weren’t bad, just unmemorable playing between The Who and Hendrix, both of whom ended their sets with the destruction of their instruments. Someone suggested to the Dead that perhaps they could smash a guitar or two, which led to an angry tirade from Garcia about the new pickups and their delicate wiring he had recently installed in his guitar, followed by an hour-long tour of root vegetables that produced a pleasing sound when beaten upon that Mickey had collected in his recent ethno-percussionist mission to the farmer’s market in San Luis Obispo. So they just kinda played Dark Star for 28 minutes.

The Dead were not at Live Aid. First off, Live Aid was in 1984, so the band responded to the invitation with an RSVP reading, “Can’t make it. We have too many awful, awful shows already scheduled. The weekend in question, we are committed to playing rather poorly in St Louis, then flying to Baton Rouge to disappoint and sadden many of our fans. You should call Queen.” Second, acts at the charity concert were confined to tight 20-minute sets, or as the Dead call it, half a song.

The Dead never had the chance to display their magic at the Gathering of the Juggaloes. It would have been lovely: Garcia in face paint, Billy getting his ass-kicked by an obese goth chick on PCP, Bobby starting El Paso despite the torrent of rocks, trash-cans, and actual human feces flying toward the stage. (Now, I know that metaphorically, that’s what happened every time Bobby started El Paso, but Juggaloes aren’t into metaphor: they sincerely throw human feces at people who are trying to entertain them. And they get the same amount of votes as you do.)

Truly tragically, there never got to be a Grateful Dead night on American Idol. Tiny, semi-talented closeted gay teens being tutored by our beloved Walking Felonies.

“Okay, kid, now when you sing the part about “Inspiration, move me brightly…” you kinda gotta hit it. It’s, like, highlight of the cosmic symphony and all that, right, Kevin?”

“My name is Lisa, Mr. Garcia.”

“Cool, so here’s the arrangement: we’re gonna play the song however the hell we want to play it, depending on our chemical intake and which member of the band we’re currently not talking to. Then, you come in.”

“How will I know when to start singing?”

“Well, that’s just it, man: you’re just gonna KNOW, y’know? Like ‘when the music plays the band,’ right?”

Over in the corner, Phil is helping another kid:

“You’re pitchy, dog. Speaking of pitch, did you know–”

“Yes, Mr. Lesh. Perfect pitch. It’s on your business cards.”