Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: 1977 (Page 10 of 11)

Long, Strange, Etc.

June 1, 2013 / / 0 Comments

How much Dead do you listen to?

I listen to two shows a day, on average. During the day, I’m in the car: it’s South Florida, so everywhere is 25 minutes away from everything; either from pure distance or rain in the summer and  Canadians in the winter. Load up a show (or three or four, just in the case we have sound quality issues) onto The Precious (which is what I began to call the iPhone after I woke up one night fondling it) and make my way through, say, 11/1/77 from Cobo Arena in Detroit that features a Hall-of Fame Estimated in great gulps throughout the day.

Then another show here in Fillmore South at night, while I write these bloggings. Or avoid writing them. Or pretend to, let’s be honest: whole lotta pretending to write goes on. Trollope finished 47 novels and uncountable shorter works while keeping up a heavy correspondence load and a job at the Post Office. Three paragraphs about how much I like an obscure country-rock song and I’m spent, man.

Plus, the temptations of those twin succubi, the internet and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.*, sing to me from the cliffs like a mangled classical allusion.

“Just ONE peek at Headyversion! And you can COMMENT on SOMETHING. It will be GOOD advertising!”

Why are you capitalizing like a Marvel character from the ’60’s?

“MY ill intent, and YOUR creeping insanity!”

Makes sense.

“You know you NEED to HEAR this 86′ Frost Desolation Row! And WHILE you’re THERE, you know you might as well CHECK the COMMENTS!”

I don’t wanna check the comments.

“It says HERE that SUGAREE is WTF!”

It says that?

“It actually says there’s XTRA WTF.”

Did you capitalize that, or–

“NO, THE GUY DID!”

Then, I gotta listen to this shit, yo!

“YAY!”

YAY!

SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU TWO? IT’S CHEROKEE NOSE-JOBS ALL AROUND IF THIS SHIT CONTINUES.

So, there are digressions to the process, is what I’m trying to say. The path of the Enthusiast is more than heavily influenced by Brownian motion.

*Avid readers and eager beavers will recall that this is what I have named the physical piece of equipment that houses The Library because it is  small, black, and remembers everything.

Greatest Story Ever Traded

May 8, 2013 / / 3 Comments

Yes, clearly it’s Titanic and Mind-Blowing and Earth-Shattering and Vast and Under-Rated and Over-Rated and Just Exactly Perfect, but the one quality that no one ever mentions is accessible. And 5/8/77 is accessible in spades.

Sure, there’s jamming, but it’s not the Neptunian jazz of ’74, nor the acid-skronk of ’69. There’s no waste; Garcia’s long, liquid lines are building to something, always, and Billy and Mickey have their feet on the gas pedals with a safecracker’s whispered touch–little bit faster here, slower there, bigger now Bigger Now BIGGER NOW and shhhhhhh…

There is command.

The greatest ever? No. not even the best show that week–5/5, with its majestic Sugaree gets my vote–but Barton Hall has something that only Veneta and Egypt also have: mystique. Fame. Perhaps we can’t even make an honest reckoning of that night anymore. Read some Don DeLillo; it’s good for you:

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides — pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura.  Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence.  The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. 

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender.  We see only what the others see.  The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future.  We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception.  It literally colors our vision.  A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.” 

Another silence ensued. 

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said. 

He did not speak for a while.  We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. 

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said.  “What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?”

If you heard it today for the first time, would you recognize it as THE GREATEST DEAD SHOW OF ALL TIME EVER? Would the shock of genius, the green flash of recognition hit you, run up your spine, Billypunch the dick of your soul?

If you really did meet the Buddha on the side of the road…would you know it was him?

PS  I have deliberately not linked to the show on the archive because you have it.

Random Thoughts On The Dead

July 11, 2012 / / 4 Comments

The Timi’i people have only five words for colors, which seems odd until you realize that they live in a triple canopied rainforest and the colors are Green, Really Green, Thing That’s About To Kill Me, Sun’s In My Eyes, and Night.

In Phil’s secret language of dreams, his word for “roadie” is the same as his word meaning “one about to be chastised.”

—————-

I sometimes need to hear five or six versions of the same song in a row. Part of that last sentence was a lie: I sometimes need to hear Mississippi Half-Step  five or six versions in a row.

 —————-

Bobby was never more than two or three feet away from the note he intended to sing. Sometimes, this was an exciting musical choice–listen to Sugar Magnolia. Sometimes. Garcia’s voice was too fragile and sweet for the rockers, but it was in tune far more often than Bobby’s. Phil’s voice had a weird barbershop quartet thing to it, plus Phil’s larynx had not been informed of the fact that Phil had perfect pitch. At shows in the ’80’s, Enthusiasts hoisted signs reading Let Phil Sing. Note that these signs did not say Let Phil Continue to Sing: it was clearly seen as a one-time thing.

Pig wasn’t so much good at singing notes as he was at singing songs.

——————-

I’ll give the Dead this: they wouldn’t have put up with that My Little Pony shit at all.

The Dead did not subvert gender roles: they rejected your post-modernity and replaced it with a system that encouraged calling your wife “your old lady,” out loud and in public and getting away with it, which if you think about it, is a pretty good trick the guys played on their old ladies.

——————–

Could it be a coincidence that Roe v. Wade occurred in 1973? Is it chance that the landmark reproductive rights decision took place the VERY SAME YEAR that the Dead was just, y’know, killin’ it?

Drum And Drummer

June 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Listen to the drummers–the two of them back there–from a perfectly recorded show when they HAD IT: when they do those long fills down every tom-tom they own and the beat starts all the way on the left and just whips around your skull at 90 mph, that’s just the best thing in the world, isn’t it? Those duk-a-duhs and when they got those rolling, the band sounds as if someone rolled a Medieval army down a cliff and recorded the clangor. (Bear did that once in 1971, to test out the specs on a new harmonica mike he was thinking about using if and when Slim Harpo showed up. Bear was nothing if not thorough.)

I’ve posted this show before, but it deserves a revival: 5/13/77 at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Chicago! Badger City, Home of Shufflin’ George, those brusque but lovable Chicagoniacs! (I an not a geography buff and I made that clear when I applied for this job.)

Just keep typing, buddy.

The two of them are just monsters on this crisply recorded show and, quite frankly, it is best for the world that these two took up drumming. If Billy and Mickey ever got in a competition to see who could start the most fights, World War III would ensue within days. These coked-up conga hobbits were possessed of a rage that, were it e’er loosed, could bring us the brink of doom.

An intern* once suggested that perhaps the strategy of shooting speed into one’s eyeball while being shuttled between Des Moines, IA, and Normal, Il, like a piece of hairy luggage in some way exacerbated certain tendencies and then Billy burst into the room drunk and naked and accidentally shot the kid in the face, like 8 or maybe 9 times. Billy didn’t even know what the kid was talking about, it was just, you know, “time to kil the intern.” Like it is every full moon.

*The Dead had interns: college kids from UCSC, Hal Kant’s niece, at least three baby-faced drifters, S.E. Cupp, and Planchette. Don’t mention Planchette around the guys: his skill set was almost entirely concentrated in the field of looming ominously. Planchette was good at finding out addresses and he always dressed in very dark green, with nothing shiny or jingly on him. You know how in the vast majority of pictures of Keith, he looks like he just saw a ghost? Planchette. They should have gotten rid of him years before the incident, but he was the only one who ever got the coffee order right consistently.Don’t mention Planchette.

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