Phil looks like “Hippie #2” in a terrible biopic about the Sixties; I don’t want to talk about the others.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: 1969 (Page 4 of 5)
Looking at Mickey’s hat, I was about to say that, out of the Dead, Mickey was the most likely to be a model-train enthusiast, one of those dads hiding in the basement, thinking about the Chicago Zephyr and cocktails and freedom from those hideous children upstairs.
But, it’s Phil. Let’s be honest: Phil is the quintessential model-train guy.
PLUS I had to restrain myself from naming this post “Jew Jew!”
“I said FUCKIN’ YAAAAAY, MAN!”
Boxing Day in Texas 1969 at the McFarlin Auditorium on the campus of SMU.
Billy is still on an airplane, so they give the longhairs some country music to open up: an always-fun Monkey and the Engineer, an out-of-tune All Around This World, and a one-time only rendition of The Master’s Bouquet.
Then there is a Dark Star>New Speedway Boogie. Dark Star>New Speedway Boogie is a thing that happened, it was recorded, and I am pointing it out to you to enjoy.
But yet you are still here. Go to the enjoyment: it calls you, and offers mai tais and tittyfucking.
You have to know it off with that.
What’s bad about either of those things?
Absolutely nothing. It’s just the repetition makes it weird.
…
Bloody mary and a lubed-up armpit?
Eww.
Make of this what you will: it’s floating around the intertubes without an official announcement:
Here’s the (rather-thin) sounding SBD, and feel free to do whatever gives your boner a boner, but I’m gonna wait until the Official Release. This one’s new to me and I think I’d like my first kiss with this show to be special.
In a way, the N-word is tougher on White people than it is for Blacks.
You’re kidding me.
I have a point here, hyperbolic as my opening gambit might have been.
Get to it pronto, numbnuts.
…
You never show up this early.
There’s an alarm that goes off in the office when you start discussing race relations.
…
There’s an office?
If I can proceed: that word represents hundreds of years of dehumanization, the pitiful history of savage cruelty any Black man or woman must remember whenever they remember who built the White House. The centuries of operatic violence that were African -Americans’ entrance to these civilized shores left a scar that runs like the Mississippi, and just as long and wide.
On the other hand, hearing that word makes me briefly uncomfortable. So, that’s a tie at the very least, by my way of thinking.
That’s it: I quit.
STEP. STEP. STEP. STEP. CREEEEEEEEK. SLAM!
…
You can just leave?
…
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the first 30 seconds or so of 7/11/69 in Flushing, Queens gets your attention and REQUIRES HEADPHONES. Trust me on this: I’ll let you guess who did it.
The show’s great: an uptempo dash through Dire Wolf with a ton of help from TC on the wheezy organ (it sounds like the Vatican had asthma) follows a perfect Dupree’s in which Garcia’s voice doesn’t crack even once, which might be a one-off.
But that’s nothing–nothing at all–because next up is a Hard to Handle with Garcia on pedal steel that is HoF, and by HoF, I mean Horrendously, obstinately Fartastic. Listen to it once (and trust me: once is enough) for your daily giggle; check out Pig’s defeated “Thank you,” right afterwards.
AND a ball-touchingly good early Casey Jones! What more could you ask for? Besides the whole, “Sweet Jesus, don’t say that into a microphone,” thing.
“Five minutes, guys! Everybody got their cowboy hats? Serapes? We all set on folding chairs?”
The reason the Dead didn’t use a lot of car metaphors is because every time they got anywhere near an automobile, they looked like complete muppets.
Who the fuck is that? The Frankenstein in between Bobby and Billy: WHO IS THAT DUDE?
For all the mythos of change, the Sixties were identical to every other time period in that attractive young women were allowed to get away with bullshit that would get mos others a swift thrashing from Parish.
(The picture’s from ’69, in honor of all the hard work and looking stuff up I did on the last post, but not at the Fillmore. This is from one of the April shows at The Ark in Boston, and the picture reminds me of one of my greatest Dead-related fears: one day they’re gonna make a movie about our boys and, just like every other movie made about the Sixties, everyone’s going to look like they’re wearing a costume.)
ps And check out the shortest-lived of all Garcia’s guitars, the Les Paul Junior. Certain guitars only look right in one color, just like certain cars. All Subaru should be that great blue, Jaguars should only be available in Hunter Green, and anyone who buys a Ferrari painted any shade other than red should be shot in the face with a bazooka. Same thing for the great guitars: Telecasters should only come in that wood-grain like Bruce Springsteen’s guitar, Gibson SGs were never meant–by anything approaching a just god–to be any shade other than that beautiful blood-red, and a Les Paul Junior looks like shit in any color other than the warm mustard yellow you see in Garcia’s hands above.
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