A rare sight indeed: Mickey winning Best Hair
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Month: October 2013 (Page 1 of 15)
While MONSEIUR Lemeiuuxiueeixixeuux may endeavor to hide the truth from you–obfuscate, prevaricate, confibulate, and other words I may or may not have made up–there is one thing that even he and the shadowy figures behind Big Dead cannot cover up:
Montana is not actually known as “Big Sky Country” because of the grandeur of its scenery, no: the name stems from a 19th-century prospector and salloon owner named Kermit “Big Sky” Chesterville. Myths abound about the man: he was to the West what Mose the Bowery B’hoy was to New York. Seven feet tall and eight feet across, they say he was.
Montana legend says that Big Sky Chesterville carved the Platte River out of the ground with one swipe of his pick. People who aren’t from Montana will often reply politely, “Isn’t the Platte in Missouri?” Montana folks never been much for cartography: don’t hold with it.
When Big Sky would smile at the streams, the gold would glint and shimmer in the light. It would call to him and he could scoop it up in his mighty paws, dislodging boulders and fallen trees with his knuckles, each the size of a wagon wheel. His breath would rush from him in excited torrents; WHOOOOOSH and rise, rise into the huge blue empty, and swirl around, faster faster faster as the pressure drops; invisible tornadoes that eagles would come for miles to ride and they would call him by name in the fresculating light of the late afternoon: SKY! SKY!
He once got busy in a Burger King bathroom.
One April morning in 1883, Big Sky was whitewashing the prostitutes at the Gem Saloon when a bear walked in and that creature was just as big as Big Sky himself. It was a mama and she was ornery, one swipe of her paw sent the piano player’s head flying across the bar; the music stopped. Big Sky walked with purpose towards the grizzly and roughly took her by the scruff, loosening his belt with the other hand.
Big Sky made love to that mama grizzly that day, and he did it masterfully. He was gentle, he was forceful: most of all, he was present. The bear cooed at him and tried to cuddle, but Bug Sky sneered at her, threw a handful of salmon on the dresser, and told her to beat it. She tried to contact him, but Big Sky would never respond, and the bear ended up drinking herself to death.
And that’s the story of Idaho.
Montana.
Same bullshit.
The new Dave’s Picks, number 9 of what I hope will be an infinite series, has been announced. The Dead’s only Montana show, and it is am all-time, but perhaps underrated great: 5/14/74 in Missoula. This is in Big Sky Country, which has earned its name by having nothing in the way of an immense canopy of blue. I’ve seen pictures, and if I were there and ventured outside, I would immediately drop to the ground, clutching at shrubbery in fear of shooting upwards: falling to death in reverse, ever upwards.
Billy’s deft snare work and light hand cymbal was always what separated him from the common, thundering horde. Billy put the ‘b’ in subtle, and that was evident on the cowboy songs at this show, and they played fucking all of them. Bobby saw that sky and screamed, “Bobby the Kid RIDES tonight!” And then he leapt on the back of a hefty groupie and put his spurs (Bobby was wearing his spurs; this would be the last time it was permitted) into her sides. Except, you know: she wasn’t a horse, so she just had the wind knocked out of her and collapsed. Bobby skinned his knee.
And listen to 3.18 into the Weather Report Suite, when Garcia’s guitar chokes back a tear…
The PITB (I always hated that shorthand: my brain insists on pronouncing it like a Bronx Cheer) from Montana is a masterpiece, with a the band stretching out for hours in between Mrs. Donna Jean’s wails. Keith stays on the down-and-dirty Rhodes piano and Bobby plays flamenco flourishes until they completely whiff on the transition back into the song, each of them stuttering and deferring to the others, like Englishmen arriving at a door simultaneously.
The Dark Star is a ’74 Dark Star, and if you don’t know what that means, then I hope Billy punch your mother right in her dick.
I just checked the search terms thing, and I don’t know why someone got here via bear country rule 34, but for the sake of everything that is dear to you: do not google this phrase unless you are prepared to accept the consequences of your actions. And no one can see your monitor.
Now, this is good. Well, I don’t know if it’s good or not, but it looks like him.
Don’t get your drugs and your sex mixed up, at least not consistently. Neither one should be contingent upon the other is what I’m telling you.
“Holy shit: I’m in the future conditional tense! It should be ‘I wish I were a headlight.’ Parish, there’s been a Garcia Grammar Emergency!”
These kept popping up all over town, like cheap sneakers looped over the telephone wires; after a while, you didn’t even see them.
You would see them 8th and Hennepin, and on the overpass by the Berber District, and all up and down the Hammerhead Highway. Discreetly up on the walls of the Skybus between the ads for shyster lawyers and semi-accredited nursing schools. Some enterprising kid made a single-serve tumblr about it; others made a half-assed meme, put it on a t-shirt. Wasn’t viral, so people scrubbed their likes from it and deleted their feeds: The City moved on.
No one understood that it was a warning.
Someone’s going to explain to me why this image keeps popping up when I look for pictures of Bobby.
Because it’s late here and that is NOT COOL, INTERNET. This is the first sign that we’re heading towards the most annoying of all possible futures: computers become self-aware and use their awesome powers to be dicks.
HA, HA. I, THE SUPER-COMPUTER HAVE CHANGED YOUR PASSWORD!
“Dude, you’re a super-computer AI: couldn’t you get the nuclear codes or something?”
WHERE’S THE FUN IN THAT?
“Where’s the fun in this?”
THIS IS SO MUCH FUN!
We’ll start with Lester; it’s the law. If you’re talking about Lou–no, if you’re talking about Lou, then it’s something else entirely, but if you’re writing about Lou Reed (even if a slangy way that the kids might refer to as “joshing about”) then you have to start with Lester. Good old St. Lester the Awful, bloated and wheezing and uncircumcised in every way just shluffed and shlumped on a bar stool next to Lou. They’d both been up for two days, maybe three, could be they just had a full night’s in the sack–problem is, once you start in on fucking with sleep patterns, it takes a real good long time to even it back out to anything resembling human.
Life gets confrontational. And New York, in the 70’s.
What our younger readers need to realize is that New York in the 1970’s was, quite figuratively, the worst place that had ever existed in the history of everything. Each resident of Manhattan was murdered on average 3.2 times a day. The city logo was a stylized rendering of a 14-year-old being pimped out by her Uncle. Before the morning newspapers were delivered, they were set on fire.
Rough town.
When Lester Bangs sat down next to Lou Reed in whatever piss-smelling bar it was all those years ago, it was like Ali-Frazier for assholes. They deserved each other
I can’t remember how I became aware of Lou Reed. It might have been in the dying spritz of CREEM magazine, which I bought a few times and puzzled over. They kept showing the most appalling pictures of a man who truly needed a fortuitous angle. I also couldn’t figure out why CREEM magazine kept asking whether people were happy to see them or had odd substances in his pocket. They repeated that joke quite a bit, with a heightening of substance’s silliness each time, and I never got the joke.
I was dumb as hell, but I craved attention, so when a child molester took me to the mall, I got my first Lou Reed album, New York. (This is true. He was a camp counselor who was grooming my brother and me to get up on us. He did not get up on us, as my mother put an end to the dalliance when she realized that my brother and I were awful. No one wanted to spend time with us; we didn’t even want to spend time with each other. Just dreadful little fucks.
(In terms of child molesting, I objectively won: there were numerous meals of pizza or other things, but almost definitely just pizza; there were cassette tapes, which were $6.99 for the new releases, so that and hot dogs from Nathan’s is your whole allowance, so a free tape? Hell, yeah, I’ll stick my hand in the lion’s mouth for a free tape at age twelve; AND, y’know…at camp, I was one of his favorites.
Don’t tell me boys don’t cry.
Do you have any plan for this?
Winging it, Chief.
Please get back to the subject.
I really don’t want to talk about child molesting anymore. Beyond my own limited experience–
I fucking hate you so fucking much you fuck.
–I would recommend some of the respected literature.
…
He was in a little mid-career resurgence with New York and settling in to his role as “poet laureate of New York except for when Dylan was living here, and not Queens, and not Brooklyn, and definitely not the Bronx, and DEFINITELY not Staten Island. Forget the bridge-and-tunnel crowd, either. Long Island’s got Billy Joel, and Jersey, well…
No, Lou was the poet laureate of, like, nine or ten buildings and a vague “the village, maybe, no that’s Sonic Youth” neighborhood that was definitely in Manhattan, but in the same Manhattan as the Ghostbusters place and Stark Tower. The EPCOT version for the boy from the suburbs.
I saw him, live, performing, just once. (I also saw him walking down the street in Lower Manhattan wearing a pair of burgundy sweatpants once; left him alone). A woman several rows in front of me stood, boogied.
At the fucking…
I’m not alone in this, right?
I’m not alone in finding it disturbing that you’ve held onto this for almost two decades now.
30-03-96
ORPHEUM THEATRE, BOSTON
YES
120
B
Setlist:
Dorita – Sweet Jane – NYC Man – Dirty Blvd. – New Sensations – I’m Waiting For The Man – Vicious – Set The Twilight Reeling – Doin’ The Things That We Want To – Hang On To Your Emotions – I Love You Suzanne – Video Violence – Trade In – Egg Cream – Strawman – Riptide – Hooky Wooky – Sex With Your Parents – Walk On The Wild Side – Satellite Of Love … Ride Into The Sun (with supporting band “Luna“during his own set)
It took some digging to find that; there’s not a tape. (And certainly not multiple sources and endless permutations of those sources. laid out in an increasingly simple and intuitive way–I’m looking at you, Listentothedead.com!)
Of course, there didn’t really need to be a tape: Lou was bashing out the same songs most nights, which is what most bands do because they are not lunatics. This is his best stuff live, ever
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn5D2l37rdY]
Nor would anyone but a masochist even want to listen to the tape of that long-ago Orpheum show, when it snowed on the long, straight hair of the girl I was with. Her name was Heather and she believed that Al Green should be played during the evening times. She also liked to play Golden Earring. It worked, weirdly: swear to you.
Look at that set list. After Sweet Jane–and why the hell did the Dead not cover that one? Sheerly personal? In which case: bravo–there’s nothing even resembling a good song for an hour. The song Egg Cream does not contain a metaphor: it is about a fizzy drink. Guess what Sex With Your Parents is about. Guess.
An aside: the egg cream is the New York version of putting chili on spaghetti or covering perfectly good shrimp with fucking grits. The reason it’s a “local delicacy” is because no one else wants it. They’ve tried it. They’re remarkably easy to make. No one cares for them, primarily due to the taste.
I can’t defend him, not as a man or as a musician: the vast–no exaggerating–majority of his stuff is amateurish. His supposed “great” albums, Transformer and Berlin are unlistenable.
As a human? Lou Reed was always the biggest asshole in the room, and he was in the record business.
But he sounded good not giving a shit.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/dKo3nbOSx9o?t=22m52s]
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