Tag: 7/3/15

Second Set (Post-Drums)

July 15, 2015 / Thoughts On The Dead / 40 Comments

There is no light that is not for commercial or artistic purposes left in Chicago.
This is what it looks like, from somewhere.
These are not the Lord’s lights, now: no, these flash down the aisles like they were chasing robbers, and run in rivulets across the ball caps of the crowd.
These lights are sinful and they boast.
When the Dead played New Potato Caboose in 1968, they had many excuses.
For example, it was 1968 and all sorts of bullshit was allowed.
Also, they were very young men.
Pretty much just boners with mustaches.
Soon enough, though, Playin’ starts and it’s hilarious if you listen closely.
Within the space of the intro and first verse, Billy forgets and remembers how the song goes three or four times, Bruce has to reintroduce the tempo to the rest of the band by Pounding! Very! Loudly! On! The! Beat! for a couple of bars, but then they settle into the jam.
A proper Playin’ jam should never be rushed into.
After all, you might be there for twenty minutes or so.
They do not attack the jam like children.
They woo the jam.
Woo.
Truman tells the jam how pretty it looks; Bobby takes the jam’s coat; Jeff Chimenti shows the jam all of his hand-made shirts.
The jam cannot believe how beautiful Jeff Chimenti’s shirts are.
The jam says, fuck it: let’s do this.
And they make love to the jam – some gently, others are Billy, but the love gets made as the jam envelops them all around 8 minutes in.
The Grateful Deads did this at one another.
Twelve minutes or so in: tell me if I’m crazy – West LA Fadeaway Jam.
I turned to Martin and said, “West LA Fadeaway jam!”
He denies this happened.
We’ll talk about Martin and Chris when we get to the Colonnade; that’s where we became friends, I think.
I swear I have a plan here.
Although, Triplet is really going on Bobby in an aggressive fashion up there.
If they were gorillas, Bobby would have to kill Trey or leave the nest and all the other gorillas to die alone in the forest.
But gorillas are terrible musicians, so they would never have gotten to this stage, so it’s a moot point.
Speaking of Thermidor Alobster, he has truly been studying Garcia, because he is doing nothing but soloing over this Let It Grow.
Which is exactly what Garcia used to do.
“Oh, don’t mind me. Just gonna solo. Play your farm song.”
I was the only person out of 65,000 that heroically thrust my fist into the air while screaming, “BLACK DIRT LIVE AGAIN,” but I’d do it again and twice on Sunday.
With no context, sheerly on its own musical merits, LIG is the most interesting and vital thing played yet tonight.
It is just a tiny bit too slow, so it does have that in common with what’s been played so far tonight.
The Dead have long employed the strategy they’re using to navigate the tough bits of Let It Grow: everyone but Garcia kinda stop playing, except now Garcia is not Garcia.
A shiny quarter to anyone who can tell me why Trump wasn’t standing by Bruce.
The whole point of hiring the man to be Garcia is that he was never a Jerry.
Let Garcia be Garcia, even if it’s Trey.
By now, the majority of the crowd on the floor is not so much dancing as they are shifting their weight from their bad knee to their shitty foot and back again.
The perimeter of the field is now littered with old, drunk men and young, drunk women.
Mud has been tracked in, somehow.
Women are more pregnant than you would think possible.
There are dancers and some accept their space and occupy it with grace and others bully their ways here and there.
There are babies where there should not be babies.
Baby wants to be a baby; baby couldn’t give two fucks about whether they nail the Slipknot.
Leave baby home.
Get away, baby.
I don’t need you now, baby.
Got my own shit to deal with.
During Slipknot!, Troposphere made this face.
He made that face a lot.
I’m pretty sure it’s his go-to face.
All of the Phishes can do an impression of that face.
Phil is singing Franklin’s Tower, and that’s a thing.
We will discuss Phil’s singing and its sociopolitical ramifications starting with Bird Song on July Fourth and ending with Terrapin on the Fifth.
To make up for the tempos of the previous two hours, the Dead (kinda) has decided to play Franklin’s entirely too fast.
On paper, this makes it average out, but reality is less mathematical than that.
Bruce and Truckmonster have taken this Franklin fellow out back and beaten him with tire iron.
Jeff Chimenti is like Ricky Jay taking a gig at a kid’s party: he’s doing all the stuff he’s supposed to do, but occasionally just lets loose with some organ-playing of both a slanderous and libelous nature.
There must be better combinations than the biggest sound system in the country, a Hammond B3, and LSD, right?
Fried chicken and waffles is pretty good, but not quite as impressive.
Also of note: Bobby stayed off his stool, and I ran into an old friend; she had flowers in her hair.
She had married since I last saw her; she found the whitest human being on the planet.
If this were a movie, he would be the guy trying to shut down the community center, forcing the Dead to put on a show.
Phil blatantly fucks up the “long, strange trip” line during the Donor Rap.
Making fun of the Donor Rap makes you an asshole.
Noting that they got longer every night is fine.
Bobby played acoustic and sang Garcia’s old parts and everyone else sang whatever parts they felt like, just like they always did.
We sang our parts, too, and when Bobby asked for songs to fill the air, we obliged him.
We would have obliged them anything that night.
I did not get my transcendental moment; it did not come and they cannot be forced.
I tried, anyway.
Maybe tomorrow.

First Set

July 15, 2015 / Thoughts On The Dead / 50 Comments

I missed the first two or three songs of the July 3rd show.
Stadiums are built so they can fill up or empty in ten minutes, but not the field.
The field is deliberately designed to be tricky to get to.
There are only two points of access, and one of them is being taken up by a temporarily-funct choogly-type band.
You’ve created a nice little choke point for yourself, plus the folks on the floor need wristbands.
Which they ran out of just as I got to the gate.
Back-up began immediately, and then people started helping.
Helping is to be pronounced sarcastically.
Couple of fuckers literally tried to start a riot.
There were no cops, and no security: just volunteer ushers trying to do the best job they could.
If you didn’t have a wristband, you wouldn’t be able to leave the floor, which seems reasonable, but the stronger the waves of pressure on my back, the less I cared.
Years ago, WBCN hired Green Day to play a free concert in the Hatch Shell in Boston.
Someone punched the bass player, or something or other, and the band left the stage after four songs.
Riot.
Crowds are stupid beasts, but they turn quickly.
The assholes kept helping, and yelling for the crowd to do what crowds will do.
The volunteer usher I was standing with was in law school and wanted to see the Dead for free; I figured I would throw her under a table and hunker down in there.
Trey played the opening chords to Bertha a little too slowly, and a small brown guy and a large white guy sprinted up with the missing wrist bands.
Welcome back, my friends.
It looked like this:
But with more people, and with more Trellis Abdominizer.
He began the weekend like a motherfucker, motherfucked his way through the holiday, and then deliberately got a non-direct flight home so he could fuck mothers all the way back.
Which brings us to the first of problems.
Not problems, really.
Problems have solutions: this is intractable.
Not only is there nothing like a Grateful Dead concert, but there’s nothing like any kind of concert.
Sitting on your couch with headphones on, listening to a crisp Charlie Miller SBD has so little in common with the actual event that it makes more sense to judge them as separate events than even as facets of the same diamond.
Tripp sounds great on Bertha instrumentally, but the tape reveals his voice as weaker than I remember.
Mostly because when he sang about getting tested and arrested, 65,000 people were screaming along with him.
I don’t know about the rules regarding the SBD’s of the Chicago shows, but they are available; I won’t post them, but if they get posted in the comment section, they won’t be taken down.
They just finished up Passenger and Bobby asked the crowd if they were “ramping up for a sane Fourth?”
They didn’t play Passenger for all that long: ’78 to ’80 or ’81, and the song never felt the need to be ten minutes long.
There really isn’t ten minutes worth of song in Passenger, if we’re honest.
The sun is now setting on Soldier Field and the closest thing there is to a Grateful Dead is going into The Wheel, and the Deadheads are taking off their sunglasses and swaying and davening and asking each other if this isn’t really more of a second set song.
It totally is.
I did not notice that Bobby was wearing what had been sold to him as a lengthy short but were in fact jeans.
I only had a direct view of the band on the second night: on the 3rd, I was on the floor and am not Bill Walton; on the 5th, there was a speaker bank in between our seats and the stage.
Transom is doing quite a bit of Phishy bullshit in this The Wheel, but then he nails the transition into Crazy Fingers, which may be our first honest-to-gosh “>” of the night.
The Grateful Dead may have played Crazy Fingers at an acceptably professional level, like, four times in the history of the song.
Although, Garcia was the one who always fucked it up, so maybe his death was a good thing for Crazy Fingers.
OHMIGOD, CRAZY FINGERS HAD GARCIA KILLED.
Stop it.
Fine.
It was almost dark now, and Candace Brightman started doing this sort of thing:
And as she does this in the soft and magic last light, Trey sings the line “I try” over and over, too many times, and it is a mantra and you cheer with him and for him.
We will all try, Treyvon, and we will do our parts as the spotlights pick out love and point out kindness and pin joy down like a butterfly in the perfect Chicago dusk.
The acid has kicked in.
So has The Music Never Stopped, which is too damn slow, and the tape reveals a frustrated Billy trying to goose the thing up to no avail, but it doesn’t matter when Bobby proclaims that everybody’s dancing and all of us rush to prove him no liar.
And then he asked us if they were ever here at all, and a stadium got a catch in its throat and knew it would be the first of many.
Mickey is audible for the first time during the jam, and Bruce is whanging on the bottom octaves of his Steinway as his right hand bounces down the top notes.
And now Bobby is ranting about Never Stopping and you know no one’s phoning this sucker in: Bobby’s gonna Bobby as hard as he can and then Trey starts fanning the guitar like the old man.
THE THING WITH THE NOTES.
THAT THE OTHER GUY DID
…
I LOVE THAT FUCKING THINGYAAAAAAAAAY.
It is dark now and all the people are a crowd and we are there to see the Grateful Dead and against all odds, they might have shown up.
Set break.

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