Back then, you could just sit on the crates and no one got hurt. (Soon after this photo was taken, the crates collapsed and everyone got hurt.)
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: 1970 (Page 9 of 9)
The lighting makes it look like Garcia is naked from the waist down, or as my grandpa used to call it, Porky Pigging it.
Black power, Mickey.
A little something for a Sunday night. You could always watch TV, or whatever substitutes for it nowadays, but it’s the Dog Days; we must pay Sirius his due for our frivolity and there is Nothing On. The NFL has begun its yearly forced march through the pre-season, where the only fun is watching other teams’ stars get irrevocably broken for no reason whatsoever. Knees and hamstrings are like non-toilet trained children: when they wanna, go, they go. I always did have an odd respect for people, place, and things that didn’t even play at being reasonable. Infants, lunatics, transmissions: your plans mean nothing to them.
Maybe that’s part of the appeal with the Dead? Not only did they not take requests, they didn’t take requests lightly. Like, even Garcia, reputedly the most gracious out of the lot, had pointed barbs out whenever the peanut gallery started acting up. The Grateful Dead heckled the audience back. This is rare in the show business industry.
Tonight’s a classic: The Fillmore East, from 2/11/70. So much Phil: there are 35 or 40 people on the stage–3 keyboardists and 5-and-a-half drummers and Allman brothers and Fleetwoods and Macs and Jay-Z comes out during the Spanish Jam to drop a verse about how well things are going for him and it’s STILL ALL ABOUT MOTHERFUCKING PHILBERT J. LESH, MY BAKED BRO-TATO.
It’s pointless and distracting and masturbatory rock nerd bullshit to go through the entire roster of who was there, of the woof and weft of what happened that night, so leave at it this:
That night lasted until well into the next morning.
For some there, that night lasted for the rest of their lives.
If you don’t like the Other One>Cosmic Charlie>Uncle John’s>High Time, then you don’t like the Grateful Dead. It’s that simple.
It’s a Bear recording, which means all the vocals are slammed hard to one side, but what vocals they are! The boys had recently been taking vocal lessons from The Crosby, Stills, and Nashes and recording Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty out at Wally Heider’s and they were having a glorious time with their new instruments, shouting and squealing and swoozling and swozzling Hunter’s California prayers at the TOP of their lungs.
And it didn’t always work, no. But when they got their harmonies juiced and oiled down, it was magic.
P.S. If I had a Time Sheath, then the first thing I would do would be to go back to this show and have sex with the Dark Star. That’s how good it is: it would supersede killing Hitler or betting on things in the past to be a billionaire. First: sex with a song played during the second Nixon administration, second and third (reaaaaaaally close) would be the money thing and then Hitler. And let’s be completely honest, I probably wouldn’t kill Hitler: it seems like a lot of work doing things that are well outside my skill set. Plus, I don’t want to kill anybody, even Hitler. Who kills people? Hitler kills people, that’s who! I’m no Hitler!
STOP SAYING HITLER!
…
How do you have sex with a song, anyway? Especially en epic, half-hour Dark Star such as this?
I don’t know, but I know this–and I’m gonna say this looking dead in your eyes, Mister, right in front of God and Jesus and my mother: I’m going to make the technology work. The Sheath will work: it’s all in my father’s journals! It’s gonna work and I’m going to access the Space Between and time–time herself–will be mine. And then?
And then, I’m gonna fuck that song until it loves me.
…
Are you crying?
Okay, E.H.?
The Dead was a good band, fine and manly. They first met as volunteer firemen in the Boer War. That was a fine war: manly as all wars were, except the French-Indian War, which was some totally homo shit.
Okay, we’re fine with stretching the truth, but that’s just wrong.
But I look like your guitar player.
Thank you. Next: E.D.?
When Etna purrs
I tremble
Have not left my room
since I discovered the Archive
So, it’s just poetry and frilly blouses and your meals being brought to you, right?
Essentially.
Thank you, sweetie. Next: R.H.
The Dead were like my testicles: hairy and they knew how to swing, man. Check out this MONSTERLICKER–
You sound familiar.
–of a show from 2/15/70 in Philly, that I haven’t actually listened to yet, just pretty much picked at random and will bother you with P.S.’s about in the coming hours.
Ah, fuck it: it’s you. I thought Billy…?
Oh, hells yeah, he worked my sack: I’ll never play the harmonica again, but as it turns out, you can’t truly fire me.
Why not.
We are the same person. It’s just…it’s just that the fonts change, buddy.
…
Buddy?
Why won’t you play along?
Oh, I’m sorry, man.
You always–
–You’re right–
—you do this–
I know.
And it’s why we can’t have fun, y’know?
So, let’s have fun!
I want to go skiing.
We’re gonna go skiing.
YOU KNOW I HATE SKIING!
OKAY, EVERYONE OUT OF THE POOL.
We forget how long ago it was, what a different world it was. To understand my point, you must listen to Pig absolutely fucking KILLING IT on It’s A Man’s World. That was April 15th, 1970. Listen to how crisp and present the recording is, how clean and separate the instruments sound: I would wager most lay-listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this recording and an official release from the era. Marvel at how such a recording got made in the same world where there is absolutely no record of a show from that same month: no tape, no poster, certainly no film but there is a contract and cancelled check, so it must have happened. There are shows as late as 1973 just…gone. Compare that to today’s DeLillo Barn of a culture, all of us pointing our iThings at each other the second anything notable happens. Holding our phones vertically, all of us.
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Everybody’s new favorite fun game: Play in One Key, Sing in Another!
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Is the most terrifying moment of your day the Silence that comes before the Fretting that comes before the Waffling that comes before the Choosing? An ’89? Surely, a Summer ’71! The wrong choice–it’s like throwing the i Ching, only to lodge the coins in your cousin Kevin’s throat and Kevin dies right in front of you and you just LOSE IT and decide that you can’t get in trouble if EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD, TOO, so you kill your way halfway down the street before they take you down. No matter which Ching translation you use, that’s an unhealthy omen.
I almost had one of those rolls today. I chose an ’85 (4/27/85 Frost Amphitheater, Palo Alto, CA) to start off the morning. The 80’s are a giant tushee: fun around the edges, but dangerous in the middle. (I apologize for that.)
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I’ve written before about Garcia’s guitar tone being friendly, but the entire band had an ethos of friendlyness-ship. (Of course that’s a word. And if not a word proper, at least wordish.) All those references to following and leading and sharing (women, wine (Not Persian, though. Persian was not a share-y kind of substance.).) There was very little aggression in the music: no one will ever enter the Octagon with Brokedown Palace blaring. This made them a different band then–say–Slayer, who once wrote a song about Josef Mengele from Mengele’s point of view. While many Dead songs featured unreliable narrators, none of them were so unreliable as to have committed war crimes. Committing war crimes is the very definition of being unreliable: you need to be watched, apparently. The second everyone turns their back, BOOM: you’re sewing twins together.
Slayer’s always been a bit of a mystery to me. Not the “why are they popular” part: there will always be ugly 15-year-old boys and money to be made catering to them being all evil and shit. I’m referring to the actual music. A friend burned me the Compact Disc. My good friend, Inter-Natalie. You should see her record collection. I like to listen to the hard-charging angry stuff when I am up in the gym working on my fitness, Sabbath and Titus Andronicus and the Boom Boom Satellites, so I tried a little Slayer and halfway through the third verse describing what can only be classified as “atrocities,” I quietly bowed out. I prefer to keep my tunes free of graphic descriptions of torture labs. Cartman was right: hippies hate Slayer.
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Who was it, precisely, that was clamoring for the return of Dupree’s Diamond Blues?
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In May of 1969, the Dead jammed with legendary conga player Mongo Santamaria. Also legendary was the lecture given to Bobby afterwards concerning his giggles upon hearing the name.
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Merl should have been the keyboardist after Keith. They would have looked like the Celtics in the 80’s, racially. Also, Walton.
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I don’t care if Putin has turned the place in to a Latveria-of-the-mind: THEY’RE THE BAD GUYS, FUCK THEM. They were THE BEST bad guys: evil enough (gulags, proxy wars), but not, you know, too evil (that thing that made the 40’s such an inherent downer.) They had an ideology and an aesthetic, none of this “at night, it is my bed; during the day, my clothes” bullshit these Al Qaeda fuckmuppets smell up the room with.
The essence of Grateful Deadness: 1/18/70, Springer’s Inn. Nearing the end of the set, Bobby mentions something about how this had to be their last number, as they were running up against time constraints.
So they played the song with the six-minute drum solo.
Ladies and gentlemen, your heroes.
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