Hey guys. Whatcha doing?
“Rocking out.”
On purpose?
…
“Yes?”
“Sure, why not?”
“PHIL IS ROCKING INTENTIONALLY.”
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Month: June 2014 (Page 10 of 23)
From left to right, as usual:
- Keith’s hair and head are as wide as one another.
- Billy is…Jesus, Billy. You don’t always have to make my point for me.
- Garcia is not wearing his glasses and has no idea what’s going on. Immediately before this photo was taken, he tried to cop from a fern, and then burnt down a stranger’s hotel room. (It was not a stranger: it was Phil.)
- Mickey has been drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins.
- Look at Mrs. Donna Jean: she’s clearly being held hostage here. If this were a video, you’d see her blinking out “COME GET ME” in Morse code.
- Bobby looks like when Superman first comes out of the phone booth.
- The only thing Phil was able to save from his hotel room was that tie and he is not happy about it.
Sometimes, Bobby just killed it.
“Dude, what if Jerry’s third eye–wait for it–HAD ITS OWN THIRD EYE?”
“You’re a fucking genius, bro. Gonna draw the bears evil as fuck?”
“Of course.”
I have a Squier now, a shitty sunburst Strat knock-off with crackling and mostly-fucked electronics. No matter, I don’t plug it in mostly: it’s just us and some chord charts from the internet. When I do rock the fuck out, though. it’s with a very cool and smart amp with all the sexy.
Remember those candy-colored pedals, so wondrously named: BIG MUFF, WAH-FUZZ, SLAP-BACK, all that back page of Guitar Player magazine bullshit? A real professional would have, like, 15 of them hot-glued to a big wooden board. (Alex Lifeson might have had three or four separate boards. That giuy single-handedly kept the Toronto Sam Ash in business.)
These new amps do all of that by themselves. The reverb and delay and aggressive squealy metal and rumbly surf rock: just everything you can thing of, and for one single hundred-dollar bill. Not a bad country. Fender Mustang, baby.
Which is odd, because I’ve already owned a Fender Mustang. It was my other electric guitar: my father came home from work one day with it. Some guy at the office, he said, had sold it to him. The Mustang was a mess from its conception: small-scale neck, weird-o switches for the pickups and the worst tremolo system known to man that made it physically impossible to keep in tune. My friend Jay and I had to open it up and slather the springs and doo-hickeys in Krazy Glue (you should be aware that we did not consult a luthier before beginning this project) to keep the thing solid.
Worked, though. Damned fine guitar after that, were it not for the sound.
Our earlier project did improve the sound of a shitty guitar. (Some people’s lives can be measured in dogs; mine by which shitty guitar did I not practice.) We took a $40 guitar from Sears–no, not Sears. My mother got it for me with Green Stamps–and sanded the lacquer off. We spray-painted it white Then, using electrical tape, we laid in long, straight, black stripes. Another layer of red paint, pull some of the tape off and I had myself the only Eddie Van Halen acoustic guitar on the planet.
I neer really learned to play the damn thing. But, you know: I can play. I shall use Dead songs to illustrate, from “I could jam that shit right now, bro,” to “I would have a better chance of flying than of playing this song if I practiced nothing but it for the remainder of my life.”
- Fire on the Mountain is just two chords.
- Franklin’s is three chords, but only two of them are important.
- Bertha’s pretty simple.
- St. Stephen is (mostly) just I-IV-V, too.
Now it’s getting out of my comfort zone.
- You know that chord in Ship of Fools that sounds really tricky? It is.
- Same thing with China Doll.
- Brown-Eyed Women is far tougher than it sounds.
We now come to things that I might take a run at, only to fail miserably and not touch the guitar for a week.
- Deal is the devil. Seriously: go try to play it on guitar.
- Slipknot! is way tougher than it sounds, and it already sounds like La Villa Strangiata.
- Bobby’s parts on China Cat.
This picture was taken at a different show than the header photo of these bloggings; he’s playing Alligator instead of that obscure Sunburst model.
And it’s a snappy and snazzy pic, until you realize that fucking Garcia is wearing JEANS WITH HIS NUDIE SUIT. You lazy fuck, Garcia: this is why we can’t have nice things.
“Hi. This is Parish, and he’s about to hit you.”
Just re-found the picture for this.
Everyone’s eyeballs stunk that day. “What’s that smell,” in a dozen, a hundred, a thousand different languages rang out and it was eyeball, the people discovered, after they smelled everything else. You never think of eyeballs having any smell at all, let alone a powerful ragout of an alcoholic moose’s turds wafting out of people’s’ orbital sockets.
No one’s dick worked right that day. Wana bang? Floppy. Gotta piss? Hard as Chinese algebra. Fix the dicks, the cry went out. No one could. No one could fix the dicks on that day.
Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS switched places that day and absolutely no one gave two shits one way or the other.
That day, haircuts didn’t take. Which led to a lot of really unprecedented conversations with barbers the next day, but we’re only talking about that day.
That day, the ocean grew angry and started winging porpoises at cruise ships. The wet, meaty thuds as the magnificent cetaceans hit the bulkheads were disconcerting.
That was the day that Matt Morris got blown by a radioactive gay guy and became…HOMO-MAN! with all the spending power of a gay man and the scheduling abilities of a gay woman.
What?
That was the day that Ned Lagin came, children.
With very small thanks to Mr. Completely who, upon being asked for squares in a Dead Bingo card, responded with “dickpunching and Bobby forgetting stuff.”
As if I might forget my bread and butter?
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