Seriously, fellow Enthusiasts–if you learn anything from my ramblings and make-em-ups, let it be these two things: never do your drugs all at once; and, if possible, have really, really good hair.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Month: October 2013 (Page 15 of 15)
1968 or 2013: the decision to have really, really great hair is never a bad one.
…and this bullshit’s about 45 or so of them.
Yeah, guys. we get it: you were in the Dead. Now go back upstairs and put on some age-appropriate clothing.
You all made fun of Bobby, his choices, his belief in being fashion-forward. What you didn’t know is that it broke Bobby’s heart to see his friend next to him look so bad, and Bobby felt he had to hide his sexy under a bushel.
When Bobby had your back, he had your back.
On that OkCupid site (SHUT UP! LOVE IS WITHIN MY REACH!), there is a whole questionnaire dealie; one of the questions asks about the size of the Sun and Earth. Binary question: which one’s bigger. The only way to get it wrong is to be joking, because to sincerely answer that incorrectly would mean you were incapable of using a computer. (The comment section on YouTube might undermine my argument there.) I always thought that being wrong on that question was to be the wrongest you could be.
Wrong as usual. This is from an essay about the evolution of Dark Star: I was going to post it for you, until I came on this paragraph, which will go down in history as the wrongest words any human has ever said, tied with “Keith, could you watch the pharmacy for a minute?” and “I will never regret this Yahoo Serious tatoo.”
Late ‘73 versions all too often featured Weir throwing in chord progressions (often one that regrettably has become known as the “Mind Left Body Jam”) whenever he ran short of ideas (cf. 12/2/73 Boston). This is the only flaw of the dense, uncompromising 10/25/73 Madison (what was it about that town in ‘73?) Dark Star. Phil’s playing had evolved by now into dark abstractions and thundering chords. Jerry’s playing has moved in this direction as well, making heavier use of wah and feedback. Their styles achieved an apotheosis of sorts before the hometown crowd at Winterland on 11/11. (Compare Phil’s 2/15 solo to his playing on 11/11 for a measure of the extent to which his approach to Dark Star had changed.)
I am physically angered by this brio’s assertion. BRIO! What the fuck?
Excuse, please.
Yeah?
Why are you saying ‘brio’? Are you trying to do a ‘bro’ thing?
Bro? Is THAT what people are saying? I thought it was ‘brio’, like “Hey, I like your brio, your panache, your elan.”
…
Is that what you really thought?
If I get back on topic, can we forget this ever happened?
Probably not, but let’s try.
First of all, the author is unclear on if it is the specific name of this jam or the larger fact that jams have names at all that is so regrettable. They played this theme a lot and people needed to put it in setlists; it might have been called Fred, and clearly the band didn’t give a shit. This was the stone ages, before you could just say, “Oh? The jam at six minutes in? I’ll link to it on my sound-tushee and jack off your metaverse all over my blueteeth and my parallax.” So some random guy in a shitty apartment with an awesome audio set-up named the thing because to him (and it was certainly a him), that jam he kept hearing in Dark Star and Truckin’ reminded him of a track from an Airplane record Garcia played on.
(It may well be a direct rip off of that song, and it is readily available on the YouTube, but I will be skewered with Satan’s dong before I listen to an album called Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome-Plated Nun.)
Like the name or not, by this point: that’s what the fucker’s called.
But his other point.
The war in Viet Nam had a new terror for soldiers, a job referred to as a Tunnel Rat. The Viet Cong had built elaborate burrows under the rolling jungle hills of their home, living in there for months: bedrooms, kitchens, you could watch movies, even.
And mantraps. So many mantraps.
The tunnel rat was something like the ball gunner in WWII bomber planes. He was a little guy. This wasn’t like back at home where the coach didn’t want you because of your size: you were needed. You won. Yay.
So the tunnel rat would crawl into the wet abscess in the mud with a flashlight in one hand and a .45 in the other and the number of days he had left on the tip of his tongue.
And sometimes, he would come upon a nest of Cong. Everyone would grab his weapon and the screaming, spit flying from mouths and meals flying across the room with the table, leaping up, “DIDI MAO! DIDI MAO!” Charlie screamed, because my entirety of knowledge of the Vietnamese language comes rom Deer Hunter.
Imagine the hate in that damp, cramped room that no one wanted to be in. The confusion, stench, and anger.
And you won’t be anywhere near how I feel about that statement about the Mind Left Body Jam. The MLB was, on so many occasions, the entire goddam point of why they had been playing music that evening. It was Dark Star’s Dark Star, but better: it was modular and could be packed up and placed wherever they wanted it, heroically after Truckin’ in ’74 or (in a slimmed-down version) appended to Music Never Stopped. It’s the highlight of a damn sight more than a few shows that are inarguable Hall of Famers.
Whew.
You okay?
Yeah, just need some pudding and a nap and a ’71 and I’ll be right as rain. Is anyone else wrong on the internet?
No, you got everyone.
Excelsior!
Ginsberg wouldn’t stop trying to fuck Bobby and then the children began to scream, “SANTA’S TERRIFYING!” and the night was really a failure by any metric.
One of the first things you realize on psychedelics (besides how silly it is to fight the urge to vomit) is that you can do a lot of damage. To yourself, to other people: these are powerful substances. There’s a reason they call it acid.
We continue our trek through the Almost Great Shows with a fairly famous one: 10/26/89 in Miami, based on a recommendation from Intergalactic Affairs Editor, friend of the bloggings, and all-around secret weapon, Mr. Completely. He writes this:
And that was really the point: that was the first time, and almost the only time, that I heard the Grateful Dead get Seriously Fucking Weird, like not just rote, surface-level weird, the kind they could crank out by the numbers, but the kind with deep intent behind it, and the intent was to fuck with your head in a pretty serious way.At that point, you know, we were in a post-jaded phase, and felt like we had this whole Dead show thing dialed in pretty good. Betting pools on the setlists, two hits tonight, then four, then eight the last night. Band’s playing better now than they were in ’88, more interesting, tonality sometimes questionable but basically on board with the MIDI thing, new songs mostly suck (I liked Victim, though, but partly because it bothered the fluffy rainbows) but more than made up for by the series of bustouts. Most importantly, tripping at shows was still intense, and sometimes we’d still have Big Moments, but nothing like those early shows, where even a completely generic Saturday Night Special might turn you inside out. Fall tour had been up and down, I’d heard Garcia was dirty again & as tour progressed it became plainly obvious that it was true; but we’d all crossed Dark Star off our life-lists, and once you’ve seen a hundred-plus and peaked to Dark Star, well, in ’89 there weren’t really anymore badges to sew on your sash after that.
So we washed out the tour vial, the good stuff, and settled in for the last show of the run…and they skullfucked us so hard I’m still a little shocked we didn’t all get pregnant with mutant mind-babies.
The psychic wreckage was astonishing. People were destroyed by it: no one was ready, and everyone was taken. Until I started swapping stories on the internet, I assumed it was just the n00bs (there really were a lot) and my heavily overdosed little circle, but it seems like it was basically everyone, or at least everyone that was paying attention at all. The dark waves started coming off the stage during Victim and particularly during the mini-space after it. Ominous mental clouds gathered through setbreak and with the out-of-nowhere Estimated opener the tension was palpable (“did I space out the entire first song of the set?”). Long, long 70s style pause before Blow Away gave everyone plenty of time to project their own inner turmoil onto the stage. And then, well, all the memories after that are essentially reconstructed from listening to the tape in later years. The frequent comparisons to alien abduction are on point: there was Missing Time in there, and then a slow, shattered drift to the surface from the deepest of depths.
I was going to add more, but Senor Completidad just dropped the mic on all of us.
Sit back. Do what you do; be yourself all over the place. Remember: it’s only a ride.
We leave you with some selected quotes from the Archive, all of which is [sic].
This show was terrifying. I can remember all my friends asking me if I was “alight” for hours after this show. Truth was, I wasn’t….
This is off the hook. This is Dark powerful freak the dogs out slap your grandma kinda powerful music.
this is pull your hair out running screaming out the door music. every time i have to defend the dead aginst puffballness i give them this tape. they either tell me they ‘rarely’ played this good, as if to write it off, or they shake their head and say ‘i never knew’… most nights jerry was the biggest tease in the world. i wasn’t there but i know he spooged on the walls that nite. no teasing here, i’m just gonna screw you into tomorrow, and have you talk to your dead grandmother while i’m at it.
All I know is I wound up in Key West the next day still tripping my balls off and swiming with dolphins..ahhh those were the days!
This Dark Star sounds like the inside of an electronic pinball machine.
I was at this show and it was extremely edgy. We watched many a pastel colored yuppie suck down frozen mixed drinks, oblivious to the seriousness of the first set. By the time Drums was hitting us, these poor folks were literally crawling up the aisles, covered in their own sick, trying to get out of the cauldron
It was like watching aliens land in your backyard….
p.s. I have linked to a Matrix mix instead of the usual Charlie Miller SBD because, for some reason, the CM’s are all either first set or second set. It;s a decent mix, but if you choose to listen to the first set, be ready to hit fast forward, as the creator of the matrix thought we needed–for the sake of competism, I suppose–to hear literally scores of minutes of nothing, absolutely nothing, happening at all.
They had tried everything, from double-sided tape to scratching posts and squirt bottles, but Billy just liked it up in the rigging.
Okay, pranksters or not, the other guys should have noticed what Billy was staring at and warned Clive Davis about what was going to happen.
Also, for some reason, Mickey and Keith are taking this opportunity to work out their new secret handshake.
© 2025 Thoughts On The Dead
Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑
Recent Comments