Tag: 1977 (Page 7 of 11)

• Donates a lot to charity, and not just that: the right charities, y’know?
• Stops the car to help turtles across the street.
• Ducks, too.
• The greatness of the sound of the Betty Boards is very rarely better demonstrated than on this show; her soundscape is like an army cafeteria tray: everything has its own space; those spaces fit together into a whole.
• The holes make a whole.
• The Lazy Lightning>Supplication. When Bobby starts ranting about how dizzy ain’t the way that you’re making him feel, you believe him just a bit.
• Bobby dizzy.
• Phil. Just: Phil. So much Phil. Too much Phil?
• If you think there’s such a thing as too much Phil, then you can’t sit with us at lunch anymore.
• Jill sometimes has too much Phil and slips a xanax in his smoothie and the afternoon is so much quieter.
• 5/8/77 did not throw a Hungry Man Frozen Dinner at anyone, let alone an old man, anywhere.
• Getting back to Phil, and the muchness he displays this evening, his opening notes to Scarlet Begonias are perhaps the most joyous he has ever played, almost overwhelming – a violent joy.
• There must be a point at which superballs no longer superball, right? Even baseball-sized balls of the bouncy rubber don’t do that neat whipping-around-the-room thing that terrifies the cat so much, so the threshold at which mass supersedes boing must be rather low.
• But, what if Bear got a hold of the formula and emboinginated the shit out the rubber to the point where you could make half-ton cannonballs out of the stuff and they would be just as bouncy as the little toys?
• Then you get a helicopter and a pilot with nothing to live for and drop the fuckers onto downtown Los Angeles during lunch hour.
• ZIP! ZAMP! WHOPP! SPRANGG!
• Buildings would come down, right? I’m neither an architect nor a civil engineer, but I would imagine some new piles of rubble would be built that day.
• Your helicopter would be shot from the sky, but rightfully so.
• Anyway: that’s what Phil sounds like – a superball the size of a pizza oven ricocheting off the Staples Center and taking out an overpass for the 110.
• Also, probably killing a shitload of people.
• Am I alone in saying that Phil’s tone from Barton Hall this night was not worth the lives of several dozen strangers, all with lives and dreams and families? Some of whom had their pets with them?
• There will be collateral damage in the animal companion sector. Mistakes were made.
• Phil during S>F is like: “Oh, that’s what you do. Okay. Got it now; no more questions, Mr. Lesh.”
• And then Garcia starts playing twiddlydwam and hootywow with his MuTron.
• The MuTron has the greatest name of all the effects pedals, and those were some good names, but it wasn’t on-the-nose like the Wah Wah or needlessly vulgar like the Big Muff
• Y’know, just to break character and be honest without the silly surrealistic nonsense: they are absolutely killing this Scarlet>Fire and I fucking love the Grateful Dead. They make a good noise.
• The spring tour was Keith’s last consistent one with the band. There are shows from November of ’77 that his drugged-out droning make nearly unlistenable, but he is still playing his ass off here.
• DEWWWWWWWW.
• Fuckin’ DEEEEEWWWWWWW, brah!
• Bro, I need you to here and chest me in the manliest of fashion: thrust your pectorals into mine, for they are jacked and stoked and knock-out and turned-around – I say “yes” to being bro to my bro. I will be your Bromeo, but you need to motherfuckin’ RECOGNIZE this DEW that THE BOYS are puttin’ down, Bro J. Simpson.
• Okay, I’ve never done this before, but fuck it: Cornell Day. Here’s a list WITHIN a list.
• Things The Dew Is Better Than:
• Mountain Dew.
• Voodoo.
• Sussudio.
• Israeli pop singer Dudu Fisher.
• Da Doo Ron Ron by The Crystals. (That’s a damn good song in its own right, though.)
• Scooby Doo.
• Scuba Doo. (This was a Hanna Barbera cartoon about divers with a talking seal friend who solved underwater mysteries. It was not a hit.)
• Sodoku
• Dog doo.
• There is no try; only do or do not.
• Deuteronomy
• The Dew is not better than doobie, but it is most certainly better with doobie.
• Until next year, Enthusiasts.

Chicago will not look like this. Not thrown together and temporary: you will not see any seams or inner workings, unless you pony up for the VIP Road Crew Experience. For only five grand, you get to show up at dawn, carry speakers around, and punch people at the band’s behest.

There will be more shirts; there’s so much more of all of us these days.

Outside balloons will not be permitted into Soldier Field. For the courtesy and safety of all, there will be officially sanctioned balloons on sale in the facility for $12 each. (Each balloon comes with a limited-edition string as a free gift.)

There will be far, far less smoking. However, there will be infinitely more vaping, as there was no vaping in 1977. So, mathematically, any vaping at all would be infinitely more, but you get my point.

She’ll be there. She’ll be there, and when the band kicks into one of their good-time songs, she’ll think about an afternoon in New Jersey a lifetime ago, when she was beautiful and he was born to take his shirt off and the music played so damn loud you couldn’t hear anything at all.

TotD is considering a serious downgrade in the ranking of 5/5/77: yes, the Sugaree is Hall of Fame–there can be no argument; this is a fact; it is true in the way the Moon is true and real in the way that hunger is real.

The rest of the show, however, is spotty and weirdly-paced and plagued with interminable bouts of tuning that kill any momentum that had accrued. The Scarlet>Fire is good, but a pale cousin to the famous Cornell version. After that is a mess, as well: a stand-alone St. Stephen with no jam, a criminally slow Sugar Mags, and, of course, more tuning-athons.

How dare you, Grateful Dead? How dare you play a show I find somewhat lacking in energy 40 years later? Did you consider my feelings at all, Grateful Dead?

What the fuck, man. Thought we were cool.