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

Tag: 11/30/80

Titanic Recs

Upon a close listen, it makes sense that 11/30/80 from the Fabulous Fox Theatre in Atlanta inspired a cult. I would absolutely sign my life savings over to the sizzling-hot Stranger opener; I would move to Guyana for the Scarlet>Fire; I would buy Nikes, and slice off my nads, for the rare double-Berry closer. 11/30/80 overflows with truth, light, marathon lectures on sexual hygiene; O, it is True North in a world of broken compasses. MORE WIVES FOR 11/30/80!

Dude.

Yuh-huh?

Incoherent.

No.

Go back and read what you wrote.

That’s just gibberish.

Well spotted. The English language is slightly beyond your reach right now. Why don’t we share this collection of pieces from the New Yorker by FoTotD Nick Paumgarten?

That guy’s good.

And he’s seen Jeffrey Toobin’s schlong.

That guy’s great!

Now post a Dead-related picture and say good night.

What kind of picture?

Doesn’t matter.

Pick a theme.

Inexplicable.

Gotcha, fam.

That’s inexplicable as fuck. Well done.

I still got some heat in the fastball.

You Can Take The Berlin Wall, Give Me Stalin And St. Paul’s

Listen, Enthusiasts: I ain’t no fortunate son. Daddy wasn’t powerful, and Mommy was no trophy; you might have noticed a smallish chip on my shoulder (that I placed there deliberately, but let’s not get into that) about the opinions of the fancy and the shmancy.

But those swells up at that boarding school, the one with the dorm suite nicknamed The Fox’s Den? They just might have been right about the transition in the 11/30/80 Scarlet>Fire being the BEST EVAR, and will thus be the last of their kind put up against the wall when the revolution comes.

(Phil. The key is Phil, and the way he won’t let the chord resolve for an extra couple bars, so when they do all drop into Fire on the Mountain, it feels like your ears just came.)

Stone Cold Fox

Contest time, cats and kittens. In honor of Fox Day, and its storied (literally) Scarlet>Fire, we are settling this once and for all.

Put your favorites in the Comment Section. I’ll listen to them tonight and make my final ruling which, of course, will be right. I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I know I’m going to be correct.

Let’s take Cornell and Normal as already read, and the first person to suggest an ’83 without damn good reason gets banninated.

To start us off, live from Atlanta, GA, here is the 22-minute 11/30/80 second set-opener in the original super-clear AUD.

From The Top #7, 8

Dave’s Picks 7 and 8 are the exact same release in every way except set list, location, year, and lineup. It’s mostly the HoF Scarlet>Fires from each show that relate them. Plus, Bobby was wearing the same underwear, but that was a coincidence. Garcia had on the same pair of pants, but that wasn’t a coincidence: he had worn the same pair of pants everyday from January of ’78 to sometime in ’81.

The S>F from the Fox is legendarily sinuous; it has its shit together; the Fox S>F has an agenda for this meeting. You could almost swear that they practiced.

On the other hand, the seamless sequence of Scarlet Begonias and Fire on the Mountain from 1978 is rough and clumberous: if it were anyone other than Garcia and Bobby, one might say “hey, those two dipshits are guitar duelling up there,” and you would be right, but as the Dead would never be involved in something so plebian, you would be wrong to say it here.

The Fox is a scalpel; the Horton a chainsaw. Fox is Gallant, and Horton is Goofus.

Fox gets up and lets old ladies have his seat on the bus. Horton gets up on old ladies’ seats, sometimes on the bus.

Fox tweeted out a message of encouragement to Bruce Jenner. Horton tweeted out a message encouraging Khloe to follow in her stepfather’s footsteps by coming out of the closet and admitting that she is a Wookiee.

Fox cleans up after his dog because pet ownership is a responsibility. Horton’s giant mastiff is noticeably racist.

Fox is a volunteer fireman. Horton is a volunteer firebug.

Fox says “please,” and “thank you.” Horton tells bomb jokes at the airport.

Fox goes out of his way to make people feel safe and secure. Horton steals children and sells them to gypsies.

Fox looks both ways before crossing the street. Horton considers all angles before double-crossing the street, leaving himself in possession of both the drugs and the cash, and the street lying dead in the gutter.

Fox tips well. Horton sexually assaults barbacks; he barebacks barbacks. While screaming, “Here’s your fifteen percent!” But, you know: still.

Fox treats his sexual partners with respect and dignity. Horton has orgies with Dan Healy.

Fox makes sure not to call or text too late. Horton sets off firecrackers in your AC unit at three in the morning and then calls the SWAT team saying there’s gunfire, so the SWAT team raids your house and sets your uncle on fire with one of their flashbang grenades.

The Matrix Revealed

We’ve got to talk about these matrix mixes. I just went through about eight of them, one after another, the digital version of throwing a paperback across the room after an egregious sentence. Etree is full of the damn things, and fuck me if they’re not a solid 95% unlistenable.

In Bill Graham’s great posthumous oral autobiography (seriously), he tells a story about the light show folks trying to get more power and/or control and/and money. He laughed at them. “If you don’t show up, the band goes on; if the band doesn;t show up, you don’t play. The light show is an appendage! ZAYNE HASHEN MEIN TUCHAS, TU ZAF CHARATZIM MITTEN DER PICKLESCHMECKER! “

In a Matrix, the crowd is the light show: it’s there to complement, to heighten the drama, to punctuate and underscore. It can never become a distraction. Rising, falling, cheering, and occasionally singing: all as one, a great human sweaty glob of instant feedback. Technology (and, let’s not forget the hard work and love that Jeffrey Norman and the whole crew do) now allows for a clarity, a precision to the sound that can border on the sterile.

It’s easy to forget that these shows took place in buildings, buildings just chock-full of people going through some real heavy shit, man.

So when David Lemieux announced that the next Dave’s Pick would be November 30th, 1980 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, part of the big news was that this would be the first (?) official release that could rightly be called a matrix and from the small (for the Dead: it’s still a two songs that take up 20 minutes) snippet of the finished product, they’ve just killed it. Go listen to the drums, how you can hear them playing not just in the band, but in the room. They sound like they are fixed in space in a way that hasn’t been so clear before. The crowd cheers them on at every turn,

As opposed to–and I’m not making this up–one I listened to (briefly) where the matrix was where a compressed-sounding SBD met an AUD that was just dudes shouting out one another and yelling out names of songs that could never in a million years be played at that moment in the show. (Seriously, Mr. Bro-tato Head? You’re shouting for Wharf Rat in the middle of the first set? Go jerk off your uncle.)

 

p.s. It doesn’t take more than half-a-dozen comments on the announcement page before someone starts someone starts whining that, while the show’s from the ’80’s, it’s not from far enough in to the decade. Bravo.