Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Sometimes it got boring out on the road and Garcia would start gaslighting Phil. He would add a knob, or take one off, and Phil was wasnt quite sure how the damn thing worked in the first place, so he would get confused and angered and paranoid and run to Garcia, who could just barely keep his shit together.
Seriously, one of those dials controls the heater in a AMC Gremlin.
How’s your day going? Back hurting? Folks on the train screaming and turning into sex-pterodactyls?
We’ve all been there. make your afternoon better with this overlooked gem from the that Wall of Sound summer of ’74: 7/27 in Roanoke, VA. Easily the equal of the Dillon Stadium show featured on Dave’s Pick 4, this dank nuggety dab of doobie-love also rivals it in sheer weirdness, although in a far sneakier way: Sure, the DaP show from Yale has the do-not-listen-to-while-operating-heavy-machinery sleight of hand that is the Playing>Supplication transition, but how about a “>Promised Land”?
They NEVER went into Promised Land; the song was an opener: the only things that preceded it were propping Keith up at the piano, flushing Garcia out of his dressing room, and several nerve-induced doodies. (Followed immediately and dramatically by nearly ten minutes of smoking, tuning, and smoking again.)
Singer not the song, as always: the US Blues>Promised Land on this fucker is a Hall of Fame thirteen minutes. Also, the 25-minute Playing contains a Tiger Jam that David Gans once referred to as “a Tiger Jam.”
p.s. After the show, the Taper’s Section was never to be seen again. Carved in a VW microbus nearby were the letters “KREUTZM”.
The hair, beard, and glasses were all fake: in 1974, with money left over from building the Wall, Phil and the boys from Alembic got the Invisibility Ray to work.
This was Garcia’s practice amp.
Sometimes the Dead seemed like the final result of a game of telephone that started with “rock band” but the only people playing were lunatics, cyborg fetishists, and interstellar bounty hunters.
In 1972, the Dead toured Europe; they brought Pigpen with them. In 1974, they went back with Ned Lagin. That’s a better metaphor than I could ever dream up. “Taking Ned Lagin to Europe” should be a folksy way of saying that your own actions have ensured your doom.
As pernicious an influence Ned Lagin was on Phil and the rest of them, this bit of weirdness excised from Dick’s Pick 7, 9/11/74 from the Alexandra Palace in London, is worth the listen: Garcia and the rest of them come out and lay down a solid hour of insect/incest terror fuckbombs and also a Chuck Berry Tune.
The European tour from 1974 was almost completely a debacle, so debauched that even Long Strange Trip, which is R-rated, had to glance over the assuredly NC-17 truth.
And not hot and sexy NC-17. Like Bad Lieutenant type shit. You want to know what the Europe ’74 was? Picture Harvey Keitel masturbating onto your neck, forever.
The jaunt was a bad idea in the first place: they were exhausted from 14 months straight of touring; taking the Wall of Sound somewhere there’s a border every 85 feet is just ludicrous; and, Billy–for all of our jokes–might have gone feral by this point.
Since debuting the proto-Wall in February of ’73 until that summer of ’74, they had played 114 shows. 28 states. The longest they had gone between performances was 20 days. The Wall eventually grew to 65 tons and required a crew of 21 men to build and tear down.
Did you look up any of that?
No. But those numbers sound ballpark, right?
You’re awful.
But the boys (and Mrs. Donna Jean) were entranced by some rich lunatic with a giant sack of drugs. This is not their fault, as it was apparently in the band’s founding charter, as witnessed in Bear’s constant Professor Bunson Honeydew-like presence.
So they went to London, Paris, Munich. With the Wall. In 1974, taking a piece of equipment larger than a toaster for the stated purpose of doing business required–this is not a joke–that at no less than three points in the process, an official affix his seal to the documents via wax, a candle, and an ancient ring bequeathed to him by his ancestors.
From the accounts I can triangulate in the usual sources (McNally, Scully, Random Dudes on the Internet), the band was passed from one international drug smuggling lunatic to another across the continent: they were hairy versions of the half-naked Chinese kid with the firecrackers from Boogie Nights.
There was so much cocaine that a ritual burning of the stashes was forced, except there was a basic problem with the thinking. The thing about cocaine is this: it may be tough, occasionally, to get cocaine. It is never tough to get more cocaine. More cocaine is the easiest damn thing in the world to find.
Munich was the nadir, or more appropriately, the ScheissenKonzertenSchnitzel. Billy got lost, and scared, and he hated Europe; he didn’t like punching uncircumcised dicks. Call him a phallic jingoist, but he liked a smooth shaft. He also found the bruising was more uniform, and thus healed quicker. Billy cared about the dicks he punched. Why else would he punch them. It made Billy sad that no one understood that the first step in punching dicks…is reaching out.
So, long story short, yadda yadda, blah blah: Billy nearly starts a riot and throws a moped through a department store’s window. This incident even makes it to Long Strange Trip.
Billy throwing a moped through a window in a foreign capital is the thing that they ADMIT. Think of the shit they’re keeping from you that is–as a loyal Enthusiast–your BIRTHRIGHT. We must storm the castles of UC Santa Cruz! That’s in Los Angeles, right?
…
Yes.
LEEEEEEEEEEORY JENNNNKINS!
The new Dave’s Picks, number 9 of what I hope will be an infinite series, has been announced. The Dead’s only Montana show, and it is am all-time, but perhaps underrated great: 5/14/74 in Missoula. This is in Big Sky Country, which has earned its name by having nothing in the way of an immense canopy of blue. I’ve seen pictures, and if I were there and ventured outside, I would immediately drop to the ground, clutching at shrubbery in fear of shooting upwards: falling to death in reverse, ever upwards.
Billy’s deft snare work and light hand cymbal was always what separated him from the common, thundering horde. Billy put the ‘b’ in subtle, and that was evident on the cowboy songs at this show, and they played fucking all of them. Bobby saw that sky and screamed, “Bobby the Kid RIDES tonight!” And then he leapt on the back of a hefty groupie and put his spurs (Bobby was wearing his spurs; this would be the last time it was permitted) into her sides. Except, you know: she wasn’t a horse, so she just had the wind knocked out of her and collapsed. Bobby skinned his knee.
And listen to 3.18 into the Weather Report Suite, when Garcia’s guitar chokes back a tear…
The PITB (I always hated that shorthand: my brain insists on pronouncing it like a Bronx Cheer) from Montana is a masterpiece, with a the band stretching out for hours in between Mrs. Donna Jean’s wails. Keith stays on the down-and-dirty Rhodes piano and Bobby plays flamenco flourishes until they completely whiff on the transition back into the song, each of them stuttering and deferring to the others, like Englishmen arriving at a door simultaneously.
The Dark Star is a ’74 Dark Star, and if you don’t know what that means, then I hope Billy punch your mother right in her dick.
Listening to the another gem from the Year of the Wall: July 31st, 1974, Dave’s Pick 2. (Which, for some reason, is still available on the Archive. Here it is.)
Tremendous Eyes, tremendously funny China Doll with Garcia and Billy musically bickering about the tempo, tremendous work on the Rhodes piano from Keith throughout the show.
but, as I said, this show has been released as a Dave’s Pick, so I cruised over to Amazon to read some reviews and came upon this offering:
Like most archival releases from 1974, this release omits “Phil and Ned”, aka “Seastones,” the electronic jams involving Phil, synthesist Ned Lagin and sometimes Garcia and Kreutzmann, which regularly took place between the 1st and 2nd set during the period June 1974 to October 1974. “Phil and Ned” was an integral part of the “Wall of Sound” show.
Why is it not included? One main reason: “Deadheads” for all their self-proclaimed openness, are just not that open to experimental electronic music that doesn’t have a “spacey” vibe, and actually they would often boo Phil and Ned’s experiments in concert. For some reason they never seem to complain about “feedback” from side 4 of live dead, which really is kind of boring.
If everyone who appreciates Seastones gives this release one star, maybe the troglodytes at Rhino will get the message for future 1974 releases.
The only reason–not an excuse, a reason–for writing this sort of thing is that one has contracted rabies. Also, scabies. ONLY SOMEONE WITH RABIES/SCABIES COULD BELIEVE THIS.
This is like going to a summer action movie and getting upset because there were no chest-pooping scenes: it’s fine to have weird, creepy fetishes (and Seastones qualifies), but realize you’re in the minority.
And, yes: Seastones was an integral part of the Wall of Sound show in the same way that Zyklon B was an integral part of Dachau’s hygiene program.
DUDE!
WHAT THE FUCK, BRO?
We JUST had the meeting about this.
You KNOW how offensive that is to me!
…
Please don’t–
What? Dude, I’m proud of my heritage.
—start with this again. Four hours in the car with this.
Germans can’t be proud?
Within the timeframe of the 1940’s, no: not really.
Y’know, it’s all about tolerance with you up to a point. “When they came for the Jews, I said nothing–“
The ‘they’ that poem refers to are the Germans, you do understand that?
…
We all have equal claims to our victimhood.
It’s ’74: there’s no internet or reliable way to get any sort of news about your favorite popular group. There was the hip radio station, and Rolling Stone and Creem (who didn’t cover the Dead, anyway) and the guys who hung around the record store. No forums, livestreaming, whatever-the-fuck-else that people are talking about that confuses and frightens me: you were walking into the show blind. Perhaps you had heard something about a new PA system, a big one.
And you walk in and see this:
Would your fight-or-flight response kick in? That thing clearly doesn’t belong here, in this dimension. Should you run headlong at it and make a last stand? Welcome our new amplifier overlords? If you were a cyborg, would it give you a boner? If you were a boner, would it give you a cyborg?
Stop talking.
“We need more speakers.”
“I haven’t even told you how many you’re going to have yet.”
“We’re gonna need more that that.”
“You have an unbelievably large number of speakers.”
“You’re not listening: however many speakers we have, we need more than that. MAKE IT SO.”
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