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

Month: October 2013 (Page 14 of 15)

US (PS) Blues

phil old paper

An open letter to Phil (and a very select few of the other Olds),

You’ve made it this far against serious odds: you have used roughly 108% of your natural allotment of organs. You are doing wonderful things with time that I think you know is a gift. You’ve mellowed and age suits you. You’re still cool because you always were, sometimes in spite of yourself (I’m looking at you, the ’80’s).

And while I congratulate you on (mostly) your decisions to not follow any trends and remain the cranky, weird fucker we know and love, perhaps a man of your vintage should not pose with outdated technology. I’m half-expecting that there’s a wall-mounted phone with a 30-foot, irretrievably tangled cord in your kitchen. Pad next to it with a pen on a string. “Check children,” the pad reads.

But mostly, undated-but-assuredly-recent photo of Phil that I am for some reason writing a letter to, good work on the hair. Excellent choice in genes. My grandfather, at a ridiculously old age and ravaged by around forty diseases that seemed to be letting him live just so they could battle for supremacy, still had a great head of hair and it was, like, all the man would talk about. It was like a guy with a big dick knowing where all the men’s bathrooms with troughs in town were: we get it, you rolled the hard eight, take it down a notch.

Which leads me to speculate about Grateful Dead dong size. None of the standard literature covers anyone hiding a mammoth on their person, not even Scully’s nonsense, and if there had been any guys with giant schlongs, then he would have put that in, because he would have heard, and Scully put everything he ever heard and a lot of shit he just completely made up in that book. The Dead were, above all (and beneath it, too) a bunch of guys (and Mrs. Donna Jean, who does not really figure into this conversation, except perhaps she does), and bunches of guys have roles that exist outside of the individual groups, tropes, types, whatever you want to call it.

There’s the Leader, or the Clown, or the Wild Card; these are the core members of any group, but there are also tangential members that can go and go. There’s the Maybe Rapist. The one who turns Gay When He’s Drunk. And there’s the Guy With The Big Dick. Everybody else in that group knows about the dong, the mighty meaty dong, and–

FUCK, this just got weird.

–it’s treated like a mascot. Huh?

Have a little moment there, buddy?

Might have gotten away from me.

Yeah.

Was I talking to Phil?

You were not, no. You were more directing nonsense at a picture of him taken at an unknown date, in an unknown location, and for an unknown reason. 

Should I go back to doing that or just take a breather?

Smoke ’em if you got ’em, champ.

Thought Only Obliquely Related To The Dead

One of the major themes of whatever the hell this is, is that the Dead existed not in our past, but in a completely different America than the one we’re tweeting in.

Remember Jim Jones? If you’re getting a majority of the jokes that don’t concern Billy and his relationship vis-a-vis dicks, then you’re familiar with him and his planned community in Guyana.  (People don’t know that: Jonestown was just a real estate investment gone a little wobbly.)

700 PEOPLE DIED, DUDE.

And you memorialize them by throwing ‘dude’ around? You must be REEEEEAL serious about this.

Just continue belaboring your metaphor.

Thank you. What people forget about Jones and his People’s Temple was that he (and it) were contemporaries (and neighbors, kinda) of the Dead. They’re mentioned in a bunch of the books as the people who NOBODY fucked with. Sometimes, through the prism of 710 and Olompali and Winterland, San Francisco in the ’60’s and ’70’s could seem happy and peaceful: it wasn’t. The Bay Area back then was like The Warriors, except simultaneously less gay and more–way, way more–gay. Things were tense. People who banded together with names like Black Panthers and Hell’s Angels were actual political forces. They had voices.

It was a rough town, but no one went anywhere near the People’s Temple. Bill Graham had a standing order to give any of those weird fuckers whatever they wanted: just get ’em off the property and stay off their radar.

Even in a city full of tough guys, no one wanted Jim Jones’ full attention. This went on for years, understand. Everyone knew: all the children in the neighborhood knew which building not to play ball in front of, or piss on. They didn’t hide–they couldn’t, there were hundreds of them. Eventually the heat got too bad, but they got away with being utter lunatics right out in public for a long time.

That was the past, you say. Things have evolved.

Fine.

The grateful Dead’s songs contain messages that, when listened to backwards, inside-out, upside-down, slideways, widddershins, and even sober, implore one to [redacted] a government building. Just [redacted] the living fuck out of it and it’s gonna sound like this: [RRRRRRRRRRREDACTEDDDDDD!]

I’m going to get some C4 from my [redacted] John Hackney, who lives at 121 Park, apartment [redacted}.

What the fuck are you doing?

I hid the apartment number!

So?

It’s an enormous building, man.

Isn’t this the point where Boldface Omnipotent Narrator comes in?

Is that what you think of him as? I always though ‘Ego’. You know, the–

Yeah, I went to school.

–Freudian…you don’t have to be a dick.

Enough. You, get to the point; you, everyone knows the Freud thing. explaining it reveals your dickishness. 

Before it went off the rails, my point was that even mentioning ‘C4’ and ‘government building’ in the same sentence tripped an algorithm somewhere.

This is a fact; we all acknowledge this. The fact that it seems to be okay with us is another topic.

I just put myself on a list: the algorithm doesn’t quite get satire yet, so they set the net wide, and so I just put myself on a list at–quite precisely–the speed of light.

One time, when the Dead were in an airport, they got their weed through INTERNATIONAL FUCKING CUSTOMS by standing in a line and passing the stash behind their backs, and let’s face it: this wasn’t a team of skilled pickpockets here. The only way to get away with this sort of silly bullshit is if absolutely no one gives a fuck. No one, not the cops, the guards, the people passing the stash,

That’s not true, is it? Folks back then, especially police types, were the same as they are now. Cops have always given a fuck: it’s almost their defining quality. The only way to get away with this sort of thing is to live in a world that isn’t carpeted with intelligent cameras and patrolled by militarized guards.

That’s how you get away with that sort of thing.

Also, here is what happens if you say to Garcia, “Hey, Garcia, show me what you like to do to pretty girls’ butts!”

jerry thumbs

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