Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
One misguided November, the city of San Francisco designated Front Street as an official polling place. Things went well except for Billy leaning over people’s shoulders. “You’re voting for that asshole? Not on my watch,” and interesting note: punching someone in the dick while that person is filling out a ballot is, like, a federal crime squared.
Also, Bobby stole all the “I voted” stickers and kept sticking them on Phil’s back when he wasn’t paying attention.
For a while in between haircuts, Garcia could Rapunzel drug dealers up to his room via the window.
Bobby enjoys advocating for a handful of causes, but none is closer to his heart than getting everyone connected and able to take advantage of the modern miracle that is the internet. Whenever Bobby appears at an event, he reminds the crowd of what the world used to be before the web.
“One time–many times, actually–I woke up with a shock in some hotel room. ‘Where the fuck is Old Zealand?’ I would ask myself, but because it was three in the morning in 1978, there was quite literally no way of answering that question. Sometimes, I would look in the history textbook of the fox spending the night, but the answer was never in there, plus half the time there were the logos of different bands drawn all over the books and that ain’t cool, man.”
And, depending on whether or not Bobby had eaten before starting in on the hooch, the story might continue for a little while.
In this photo, we see Mickey and Phil doing their version of the classic comedy routine “Dave’s not here,” except Phil always lets “Dave” in the door after the first knock and offers him some coffee and a cookie. It’s not funny, but it really speaks to Phil’s hospitality.
Also, I’ve figured out why Mickey wears those sweatbands all the time: stigmata.
If you are a grown person in a costume and it is not Halloween, no matter how much bullshit you tell him about “cosplay,” Bobby will make this face at you.
Hey, Ramrod: who’s the new guy in charge of stacking things on top of one another?
“Oh, that’s Precarious Lee. Great fellow. Not super-awesome with engineering principles or even basic spatial relationships. Also, he smells like a slaughterhouse’s asshole. But an optimist, and well-read.”
Well, can’t we give him another job, man? He’s gonna kill somebody.
“Oh, people have already died: you were in the bathroom.”
And we have no way of setting these monitors other than strapping their naked, unpainted husks to random road cases in the most unaesthetic fashion possible?
“Oh, there’s am almost infinite variety of ways, but every one of them would take more time and energy. We chose to do the bare minimum and had to be physically threatened and bribed with cocaine to do even that, if I’m honest.”
And Keith’s piano has a heat shield on it because…?
“Are you aware of what re-entry temperatures are?”
We’re done here.
When they got bored and loopy on cognac and Twinkies, the road crew would play Jenga with the equipment.
Admittedly, most of Bobby’s thoughts on time in general were of the “How are clocks even a thing? You get me?” variety, but at a young age, he got a burr up his ass about Daylight Saving Time; each year, the number of questions he asked about the weird national habit of arbitrarily re-aligning itelf temporally increased and became more pointed.
TotD has eliminated the volumes of What If’s Bobby engaged in featuring the International Date Line to bring you a sampling.
“The government can just, like, tell us what time it is? No one else notices how weird that is? Just ol’ Bobby?
“Why don’t they change the date and time each year? You know: remember, Tuesday afternoon at 2:42, fall back an hour. I think that would keep people on their toes. Probably cause an airplane accident or two, also, but what can you do?
“And, see: Arizona and Illinois or Indiana–one of those corn and white people states–don’t even do the Daylight Saving Time thing. It’s voluntary? You can opt out of it being a certain time?
“Was this concept intended to make sense?
“Seriously: what the fuck with this bullshit?
“Why must our lives be held hostage to the schedules of centuries-dead farmers?
“Why don’t we set the calendar back a week while we’re at it? Howzabout we declare it’s August 12th, 1821? It’s all about giving us an extra hour: why not give us an extra 150 years?”
The Grateful Dead dealt with Daylight Saving Time in an idiosyncratic and varied fashion. Mickey, for example, once hauled off and decked a distressingly old man, turned to the others in the outing (they were on a trip to the bowling alley) and said “Guess that grandfather got clocked,” and then he put on his sunglasses and strode off purposefully. He came back right away, though, because it was his turn and Mickey was real competitive about bowling.
Phil took it seriously. He declared himself DST Marshall and put out a series of pamphlets about the “chronometric rejiggeration.” (That was what Phil called it and everyone made the cheap and racist joke that I won’t repeat here.) He changed the clocks at Front Street assiduously, and when Phil had a family of his own, he instituted a strict policy of drills that everybody had to do–even the dog– and no one is happier than Jill that most everything just updates the time on its own now.
The pilot was a big Deadhead, so when Mickey asked if he could fly the plane for a little while, the captain thought, “What could go wrong,” and the plane crashed and everyone died and the summer tour was cancelled.
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