Set 2 – Mississippi Half-Step >Wharf Rat> Eyes Of The World >He’s Gone >Drums w/ Sikiru Adepoju>I Need A Miracle >Death Don’t Have No Mercy >Sugar Magnolia

E: Donor Rap>Brokedown Palace > Mickey’s Prayer for Peace

As always: not a review of any sort, just kinda thoughts. On the…well, you know.

• There will be a meeting about microphone privileges.
• If the trend continues, July 5th will be capped by Jeff Chimenti thanking his parents for piano lessons and his Christopher Walken impression, which is not great.
• Sometimes in life, you’ll turn away for just a second and when you look back: black guy.
• His name was Spiro Agnew or something and he whomped on some stuff.
• Mickey brought him along; he is not Mickey’s Benjy, though.
• White guys cannot have black guys as their Benjies.
• Black guys can be Benjies, of course: Puff Daddy had a Benjy.
• Morris Day and Jerome.
• White guy can’t have a black Benjy.
• The whole point of a Benjy is that he’s your property.
• Gotta have a Benjy the same as you; why have the internet write about how problematic you are?
• Billy might be about to murder someone, and it’s going to be whomever is singing at the moment, I think.
• Bobby seems to have recently shifted to a more Willie Nelson-type of phrasing.
• Don’t get me wrong on this one: TotD loves the Redheaded Stranger.
• But what Willie sings and the music being played has no bearing on one another.
• They’re two separate and unrelated things happening at the same time in the same place.
• Like getting a tugger in the stands of a minor-league hockey game: the players don’t know about your potato salad getting whipped; the jerk-job doesn’t, say, go faster if your team is up.
• And that works fine for Willie, because Willie either accompanies himself with Trigger or tells the band ahead of time, “Do not listen to me; actively ignore me or this will go poorly. Especially the drummer. Who wants to smoke weed with Willie?”
• But Bobby and Billy have no such understanding, it seems, and Bobby is torch songing the fuck out these tunes and Billy keeps getting thrown off the horse and Im afraid Billy’s going to stab Bobby. I’m sure Mickey has a knife somewhere in there.
• “It’s not a knife: it’s a drum shaped like a knife.”
• Thanks, Mick.
• Treyvon is killing it.
• Someone needs to tell him that he has tenure.
• Trophy Alfaromeo is less fire-able right now than Joe Biden.
• MAKE THEM JAM, TRELLIS.
• There’s an old saying about how you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t it drink, but that’s not true.
• You just have to torture the horse.
• Horses are just like anyone else: if you torture them, they will do things.
• TORTURE THE HORSES, TRUFFLE.
• Next time, you must not pretend to not notice Bobby trying to get you to stop jamming.
• Look him in his eyes.
• Then, redouble your efforts towards the jam.
• MAINTAIN EYE CONTACT, TROMBONE.
• The jam ends when the jam ends.
• Is it not written?
• A long time ago, a man named Bear addressed Garcia, Bobby, and Phil. “You can sing, you can sing, you can sing. You cannot all sing at the same time.”
• The players change, but the song remains the same.
• I don’t know what that last sentence means, either.
• We learned during Miracle that Jeff Chimenti has been authorized to sing; from what I could make out, he has a fine voice.
• There are five vocalists onstage and the very laws of probability and music theory say that at least one or two combinations should be pleasing to the ear.
• These combinations have not been found, but hope springs eternal.
• There was a visible on ramp to Dark Star after Half-Step, which would have been perversely awesome: Dark Stars every night.
• First set Dark Star.
• “YOU get a Dark Star, and YOU get a Dark Star!”
• Instead, they downshifted to Wharf Rat.
• I’m pretty sure if you asked Jeff Chimenti to do you up an arrangement of Wharf Rat with the only musical direction being “Break my heart, Jeff Chimenti: fuck my shit up with song,” then Jeff Chimenti could give you what you’re asking for and stuff you didn’t know you wanted.
• If he didn’t already have that shit in his pocket.
• Jeff Chimenti prepares.
• The sight of a sold-out football stadium set up for a concert–where the field is full as well as the stands–is halfway between glorious and terrifying.
• These shows are a big deal for the stadium, and not specifically these shows: summer concerts at football stadiums.
• A stadium’s a business: it needs customers and their main patrons take three-quarters of the year off for the ridiculous reason that adding even one more game to the NFL schedule would kill all the players the first year it was implemented.
• There aren’t a ton of acts that can pack the house anymore so when, say, the Kinda Dead or Taylor Swift decide to play your venue, it’s a big deal.
• You celebrate and, of course, everybody takes pictures and there are gifts and it gets in the paper and the wheels of show business go round and everyone feels like a big shot.
• One of these gifts is a personalized jersey from the home franchise.
• Most stars get a “1” on the back, because they think highly of themselves and enjoy when others follow suit.
• I would guess that when Taylor Swift did this, they gave her number 89 because of her record.
• The Dead, obviously, got 49ers jerseys with 50 on the back to celebrate their 50 years as a band..
• There was a small ceremony and there was one made for every band member.
• Unlike the old days, when Phil would scowl at the record executives and Garcia would simply refuse to come out of his room, people were polite and even if football jerseys weren’t their thing they gave thanks all around and took pictures and were just generally pleasant human beings.
• Bobby will never wear his; Bruce is wearing that fucker around the house.
• Only Mickey fell in love.
• He caressed the shiny, slightly tacky letters: H A R T. 5 0.
• Fifty years. The band didn’t exist for 20 of those years, and Mickey himself was only a member for 26 of the other 30 years, but still: 50 years.
• It was so much more than just the symbolism: it was what the symbolism represented.
• This was not just a free t-shirt.
• A free t-shirt was designed, created, etc., with the intent of being sold; it only becomes a free t-shirt upon contact with Mickey.
• Not this.
• This jersey was made for the specific purpose of being given away: it had never had value attached to.
• Other than the value generated by the fact that it’s free.
• Mindfuck, right?
• Mickey saw it instantly, though, and in his mind he ran through his underground fireproof t-shirt bunkers with hatchet and bleach, damning his formerly beloved garments.
• Calling them whores.
• “I love you for you are pure, Football Jersey With My Name On It,”
• (Mickey had begun referring to the shirt that way immediately and it was clear that the words were capitalized and maybe you don’t want any piece of this one.)
• “I shall use you to hide my nipples from society and God.”

This week in TotD: more from Santa Clara, plans for Chicago, and the dramatic origin story of Mickey’s gloves.