Thoughts On The Dead

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

Month: January 2012 (Page 5 of 5)

Dead In Your Lap

January 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The Dead are not sexy, neither collectively nor individually. In fact, the thought of them humping is enough to make you consider gouging your brain out of your skull with a broken wine bottle.

I can see Billy owning a lot of robes. He does not own any of the belts to these robes: he allows the breeze to do as it will. Billy owns oils,candles, uses the word ‘sensual’ a lot. His constant refrain in the bedroom is, “Just relax.”

Phil’s very picky about the young ladies he spends 3-6 minutes atop. Bobby, however, would go home with anyone who caught his attention and said, “Follow me, Bobby,” in a stern and commanding voice. Because through all these years, Bobby has secretly been a Chesapeake Bay Retriever. That’s something the liberal elites won’t print in their DeadBases, will they?

Brent could only be wooed by approaching him slowly with your eyes averted, making a double-grunt vocalization, and then sitting behind him to pick nits and lice out of his hair and beard. (Here’s another little known fact that Big Dead would rather you not hear: Brent Mydland provided a high, keening harmony line to his own orgasmic cries.)

Mickey was a spanker and enjoyed capturing hi sessions on audio tape. He spent half-a-million bucks in 1979 putting together a ballet based entirely on buttock-percussion. This project never saw the light of day after Mickey’s cousin stole the master tape’s, the band’s money and Bobby’s car keys.

Garcia liked his women to be on top. After that, he was giving and game, but let’s be honest: he did a lot of laying there.

Vince did exactly what he had paid for and nothing else because Vince Welnick Was Considerate To Hookers.

They Love Each Other

January 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I’m not listening to the Donna songs. Sunrise, somesuch. Just not going to do it. They won’t be excised like drums/space from my library, but I’m skipping them.

Now, I am a Donna Defender. Go listen to 5/19/74 in Portland–and I have no idea which Portland because I will not be doing any research, thank you–to the way she matches Bobby’s every lyrical gesture in BIODTL.  She turns a tune so pedestrian that the only interesting thing about it is counting the beats in the introduction into a laid-back trifle full of sweetness.

And other times she howls like a banshee with the key to Hell’s executive bathroom. More than one time, she just out of nowhere lets loose with these yelps as if she had just gotten a good look at Keith without steeling herself beforehand.

Because, let’s face it, Keith’s face could most generously be called unfortunate. He looked like a muppet the dog had gotten to. Keith wore tightie-whities, I’d bet my life on it.

But Keith got bored and Keith started comping endlessly behind fucking everything. I think he was just asked the pronunciation of his last name once too often and snapped. What could he possibly have to be depressed about? He got to stay in a hotel every night, tonight in Normal, IL and tomorrow in Tuscaloosa, AL! Where he would get to play Estimated Prophet. Again. While fucking Bobby sleeps with his wife. Guy’s got it made.

Mistah Garcia? He Dead, Suh

January 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

You might ascribe a karmic tint to the fact that, by naming themselves the Grateful Dead, these men had brought about an inevitable and unenviable ability to defy the odds and die really early and predictably. Like the universe just did that to them.

Others might see their rock held belief that in order to jam on an E minor 7 for, like, 20 fucking minutes again (while Keith nods off and no one–not a single one of those hirsute bastards–can remember the lyrics to the song he’s been singing for 11 years) they must stuff every single drug they see anywhere at any time directly up their own asses. This was a poor long-term strategy.

Welcome To The Old Firm

January 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

When the Grateful Dead hired Vince Welnick, do you think they just openly said, “Please don’t die. Like, um, everyone else that’s done the  exact job you’re about to do. And whom you even physically resemble, to make it creeper-still. In fact, don’t even think of this as a keyboard gig, think of it as a not-dying gig where you also play keyboards. But keyboards really, with this kind of abysmal track record, should be at most secondary to your every single thought from the time you sign this contract until your untimely, yet entirely predictable death some time in the near next decade. Please at all times try not to be dying. Thank you, and put on a hat.”

Lesh Is More

January 21, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Mr. Lesh, are you allergic to playing the song? Is there some political or maybe ideological belief that is creating this imposition against just playing the goddam song? Instead of getting bored every three beats and wandering all over your fretboard as if someone told you there were drugs hidden there? I know how smart you are, Phil: it’s a major component of everything you’ve ever said in any every interview you’ve ever done ever. Perfect pitch, yes. We know, Mr. Lesh: Weber, Berlioz, once cancelled a concert to see Wagner’s Ring Cycle. We are aware.

Which would lead one to believe that you must be smart enough to understand that the option of joining the rhythm section and holding the song down exists. You choose not to go that route, instead following a strict policy of “playing far many more notes than you would have imagined.” Halfway through your career in the Grateful Dead, you went from playing a four-string bass to a six-string. Phil: you demanded–and received–50% more guitar because you believed that the guitar you were playing didn’t have enough notes in it. There were more notes, dammit, and you were going to play every single one of them, or so help you God, you were going to call Ned Lagin and start that Seastones shit again, and NOBODY wants any part of that, do they?

An aside about the six-string electric bass guitar. You shouldn’t have. That massive ebony fretboard the size of the runway at Laguardia?  It’s just so Dream Theater. A lot of Jazz Odyssey in that bass.

And why, Mr. Lesh, are you wearing those glasses? The enormous Aunt Sheila glasses that you wear at the end of your nose so you have to look down at people through which really emphasizes the part where you have absolutely no chin. The wattling helps now, but overall, it was just a mess.

You like Jerry Band?

January 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I feel about the Dead the same way I feel about Star Wars: nothing outside the original is valid in any way, at all, ever. Leave me out of Further, the Jerry Garcia Band, and hundreds upon hundreds of clones of Emporer Palpatines lurking throughout the galaxy with an increasingly Wile E. Coyote-esque boomsticks. He replaced the Death Star with the Sun Crusher, and then went on to the Mom Licker, I believe. That book didn’t sell that well.  I just baaaarely accept anything Vince Welnick was involved with. Vince Welnick reminds me of a guy you wouldn’t rent a houseboat to.

Work the Jab, Weir

January 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Gentlemen, I realize the songs all want to be twenty minutes long. But you don’t have to let them. Do you fuckers know you once played El Paso for over 8 minutes?  And those minutes were in a row, mind you. It wasn’t like they hid El Paso in a sandwich of other stuff and kinda broke up the El Paso: it was 8 straight minutes of Bobby pretending to be a cowboy. Again. As always.

The only person I can think of that pretends to be a cowboy as much as Bobby is George W. Bush. The whole band went through a cowboy phase, but Bobby just Philip K. Dick’ed his cowboy persona and by this point, if you woke Bobby up in the middle of the night by screaming, “Stampede on the brazoes!” he would grab his hat and jump on his lovely steed and ride off into the purple skies of justice. Bobby stopped pretending he was a cowboy at some point and, in his mind, became a Rider of the Prairies.

What I am trying to get to is that Bobby Weir was a raving goddam lunatic. This is the only possible explanation for some of his choices.

There is only one documented instance of someone treating Bobby in the manner you would treat anyone who behaved in this manner, but–and here’s the important part–was not a rock star. In Sam Cutler’s entirely fallacious and therefore delightful book about road managing the band in the 70’s, Bobby liked to sneak up on people sleeping on planes and fuck with them. This was, obviously, back in the days when wild-eyed lunatics were allowed to wander around planes giggling to themselves. So Cutler pops him in the nose. Like you would if you were dead-asleep because this plane ride was the only 90 minutes in the day you weren’t dealing with the promoter, the union, the crew (we’ll get to them), or the 7 sweaty gibbering drugsuckers whose every whim needs to be catered to, because if they’re not happy, then how do you expect them to play Sugaree for 22 minutes?

So this is pre-cell phone or obviously, wi-fi, on planes. There are no phones. There is no problem that can be settled now; we are en route and incommunicado until Des Moines. You have just gone through the maddening ritual of getting these hairy morons through an airport and now all you want to do is catch a quick nap before you have to check them into the hotel. Which, if anything can be learned from every single other time you have attempted to check these baboons into a hotel, will go poorly at best.

And now Bobby wants to lurk up from behind you and grab your face.

P.S.  And you know he wouldn’t pull that shit on Jerry.

Rhythm Levels (Couldn’t think up a pun, sorry)

January 21, 2012 / / 8 Comments

Billy was the engine, even though he has never been seen in the same room as Brian Doyle-Murray. In between tours, Billy would yell and yell at those damn caddies to make something of themselves but they never listened. Billy had a Hawaiian shirt thing going on, and he spread it like a virus to successive keyboardists. Billy enjoyed starting fights. Billy is an Uncle: the ‘stache, the smirk.

But listen to ’73. No Mickey forcing everyone to sit there while he learns to play the kshdbviyus, the new percussion instrument he discovered in the village of extraordinarily foreign people, people so foreign that you secretly hate them because you sense they’re intentionally trying to be so foreign but whom Mickey will invariably refer to as “my brothers in drums.” Mickey was always saying shit like that when he wasn’t flying into rages and tackling business associates in restaurants. Mickey sounded like a lot of fun.

Now, when the two of them were on, they were unbelievable–this churning graceful giant. But, listen to 1973 when it’s just Billy out there. That motherfucker earns his mustache night in and night out.

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