Fun fact: right after this photo was taken, Bill Graham charged the band $200 for “watch-band servicing,” demanded they play Sugar Magnolias, and then yelled at Bobby in Yiddish for an hour
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: bill graham (Page 5 of 6)
Another shot from the great ’76 Day on the Green show(s) the Dead did with The Who. Both the Saturday and Sunday shows are available on Dick’s Picks 33 and if you haven’t heard the ass-blasting Help>Slip>Samson>Slip>Franklin’s, then go get your mother’s sewing kit, stitch up your butt, and eat cheese. Eat it. Eat the cheese.
Why?
Two solid ’76 shows from our boys (and Mrs. Donna Jean, looking rather fetching above, but how did the British section of the afternoon go ? Blue-blooded Cardinal Steveb2973 reports on the British portion of the afternoon’s entertainment:
I went to the Sunday show. I remember a lot of Townshend’s famous windmill (and Weir doing a rather feeble imitation during the Dead’s set).
Also, Daltrey swinging his mic at the end of what seemed like an impossibly long cord, then catching it in time for the next verse. That must have been a lot of strain on the cord, because the crew had to replace the mic in mid-song once.
And at the climax of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” Townshend, who had gone off the stage, coming back on with a long, almost baseball-style slide to accompany Daltrey’s scream.
I mentioned “Johnny B. Goode” earlier. Keith Moon introduced it by saying that Bill Graham had offered them another $100 to play an encore.
Bill later charged the band back the hundred, plus 10% for restocking and another 10% just to see if they’d notice.
First off: this party’s dress code is poorly enforced at best.
Second: what’s with the handsome guy? I’m going to call him Dan Francisco.
The show I posted yesterday generates opinions: some enjoy the energy, and others think that 6/4/78 was too over-the-top, that there is a difference between being enthusiastic and being the naked guy who still keeps trying to eat cops after he’s been shot seven times. Mrs. Donna Jean joining in the NFA jam was certainly her prerogative, and I enjoyed it: she saw everyone else going out-of-tune and decided to join in. Cool beans for Mrs. Donna Jean.
The show was from one of Bill Graham’s Day on the Green shows and Warren Zevon was opening and Warren Zevon was drinking because that’s what he did that year.
It did not go well.
Zevon wasn’t a good drunk, but he was a consistent one. He blacked out, a lot. He liked guns, and kept them handy. Also: pills and hitting people, mostly the woman closest to him. His shit was fucked up.
There is a recording of the abuse that Warren threw at the mostly-Deadhead audience, but it’s not readily available; I did find this picture:
I found this on the wonderful Grateful-Dead-Photos.com that contains some nifty pictures taken by a lovely man with a good eye named Bill Fridl.
You must appreciate Phil’s bemused chuckle at watching Warren eat it, deliberately and seemingly on purpose. “Yeah, I’ll get to the coke, but first I’m gonna watch Johnny Hairline piss off 25,000 people. That reminds me, I should call Ned Lagin.”
Warren: this was a big show, probably the biggest in sheer size you had ever, and might ever, play. The Deadheads liked you coming into it: their heroes had given you the most explicit of thumbs-ups. Covering a song that was in the charts? Unheard of! (Butchering that song? Heard of!) The Dead played one of your goddamn songs: MAKE FRIENDS WITH THEM, you idiot: the audience AND the band.
And it’s odd of him to piss off famous people of any stripe: Warren was an inveterate name dropper; every song in his live show has an intro about “It’s one of Marty Scorsese’s favorites.”Warren was never quite as famous as he knew he should be. It’s not narcissism: I share the opinion. So do most people with a little bit of taste in music.
His live show was usually good, especially during the ’80’s when tough times turned him into a one-man-band, playing twelve string and, of course, piano in little theaters and big bars. When times were good, he had LA sharpies; he could never afford to take the real motherfuckers out with him, though–the guys he hung out with back home and made most of his records with.
Zevon’s first bunch of records were immediately brilliant. They were cool and funny and smart and his hair…well, you know about his hair. His next bunch (and this was a rather larger bunch; some might say ‘most’) were in retrospect full of heartless love songs that over years worm their way into you as their production makes the expected transition from ‘cheesy’ to ‘dated’ to ‘classic’. Then his last three, which were contextually beautiful back then; they stand on their own now.
Writers make sense of place, and explain ourselves to us: without grounding, there is nothing. To this day, there are parts of Lower Manhattan that still feel like Visions of Johanna. Hunter got San Francisco, and the open road, and the trail: Hunter was good with the trail.
But, Warren got Los Angeles right.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0J3ossUzhU]
Warren Zevon could write the fuck out of a song.
PLUS the Heineken.
We’ve got to talk about these matrix mixes. I just went through about eight of them, one after another, the digital version of throwing a paperback across the room after an egregious sentence. Etree is full of the damn things, and fuck me if they’re not a solid 95% unlistenable.
In Bill Graham’s great posthumous oral autobiography (seriously), he tells a story about the light show folks trying to get more power and/or control and/and money. He laughed at them. “If you don’t show up, the band goes on; if the band doesn;t show up, you don’t play. The light show is an appendage! ZAYNE HASHEN MEIN TUCHAS, TU ZAF CHARATZIM MITTEN DER PICKLESCHMECKER! “
In a Matrix, the crowd is the light show: it’s there to complement, to heighten the drama, to punctuate and underscore. It can never become a distraction. Rising, falling, cheering, and occasionally singing: all as one, a great human sweaty glob of instant feedback. Technology (and, let’s not forget the hard work and love that Jeffrey Norman and the whole crew do) now allows for a clarity, a precision to the sound that can border on the sterile.
It’s easy to forget that these shows took place in buildings, buildings just chock-full of people going through some real heavy shit, man.
So when David Lemieux announced that the next Dave’s Pick would be November 30th, 1980 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, part of the big news was that this would be the first (?) official release that could rightly be called a matrix and from the small (for the Dead: it’s still a two songs that take up 20 minutes) snippet of the finished product, they’ve just killed it. Go listen to the drums, how you can hear them playing not just in the band, but in the room. They sound like they are fixed in space in a way that hasn’t been so clear before. The crowd cheers them on at every turn,
As opposed to–and I’m not making this up–one I listened to (briefly) where the matrix was where a compressed-sounding SBD met an AUD that was just dudes shouting out one another and yelling out names of songs that could never in a million years be played at that moment in the show. (Seriously, Mr. Bro-tato Head? You’re shouting for Wharf Rat in the middle of the first set? Go jerk off your uncle.)
p.s. It doesn’t take more than half-a-dozen comments on the announcement page before someone starts someone starts whining that, while the show’s from the ’80’s, it’s not from far enough in to the decade. Bravo.
The thing about surviving the Holocaust at age six is that a bunch of long-hairs dosing you isn’t such a huge thing that you take off your sweater.
“Have you seen a kid about this tall? Being eaten by a pine tree? No? All right, keep an eye out.”
Also: Phil’s tushee.
PLUS, good old days or not, a child shouldn’t be sitting directly next to–and immediately under–a speaker. That’s just common sense, people.
Winterland was to rock what Trafalgar was to the Empire, but with slightly more dead Brits. It was the proving ground, where you came to make your bones; perhaps even more the place you came to call it a night. The Band, the Pistols, hell: the Sixties and the Seventies probably both came to a close in the cavernous barn that somehow managed to be sweaty and chilly at the same time.
Crumbling around the crowd and bent under the weight of the Ghosts of Capades Past, Winterland was a dump: outmoded and dilapidated even before it began its run as the House That Bill Graham Built.
There’s a Yiddish word: haimish. It means a whole bunch of things, because of all the things Jews enjoy about themselves (and, trust me, there are many), the “fact” that Yiddish words take at least twenty minutes, three anecdotes, and a Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda to explain. The gist is homey and comfortable, like a couch made out of boobs.
That’s what Winterland was, all thanks to Bill Graham and if you didn’t give him all the thanks, he would scream about you to Herb Caen and then 86 you while yelling lines from old Elia Kazan movies. He offered haimish…as long as you weren’t acting like a schmuck. Don’t even get me started on what he would do to gonnifs! The only person allowed to steal in Winterland was Bill.
He had a great scam: at the end of the night, the promoter and the road manager sit there in the office and count the ticket stubs. X stubs and Y dollars equals cash on the barrel. So Bill would have the ticket takers gently, carefully, lovingly take the ticket, not rip it…for the first two or three thousand folks, anyway, so when the Dead looked out…
…and saw what was clearly around eight or nine thousand filthy, filthy hippies, Bill could point to the receipts and actually mean the old line: Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?
“Twerking? TWERKING? No, no: Bill Graham productions would never be involved with any such thing–twerking, what is this? We have clean, family acts: Pentangle’s opening for Moby Grape this weekend; next month we have The Cream and Albert Ayler is on the bill because these fakakta kids don’t know what’s good for them, so BILL GRAHAM’S GONNA MAKE ‘EM LISTEN!
“No twerking, no, what the fuck is that? why are you even asking me about twerking? Are you aware of how I spent my childhood and you’re still saying the word ‘twerking’ to me? Astonishing. BILL GRAHAM’S THROWING YOU OUT OF THIS BILL GRAHAM PRODUCTION!”
Thanks to Friend of TotD, Steveb, for alerting me to the existence of this picture, which I had never seen before, but will now be getting tattooed on my face.
In case you don’t read the comments, he posted a portion of a cool article about the gig (12/6/80 at the Mill Valley Recreational Center) pictured above and in the last post. Check it out:
There’s a sweet story behind this gig, which was on 12/6/80. To quote from an article by Steve McNamara in Marin County’s Pacific Sun newspaper, which I have actually saved all these years:
“The Dead live in Mill Valley
“In New York and San Francisco people sleep on sidewalks for days in order to buy – at nearly any price – tickets to a Grateful Dead Concert. So it was remarkable to spend a mellow Saturday afternoon at the Mill Valley Recreation Center listening to The Dead play, free, to an audience of no more than 70. The occasion was the annual Christmas party of the Marin-Sonoma chapter of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. Rodney Graves, who has a form of muscular dystrophy, is a good friend and Alto School fifth grade classmate of Justin Kreutzmann, son of Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann. The boys were talking about the party and how it would be nice to have some entertainment and one thing led to another. ‘We all live in the county,’ said Bill Kreutzmann, ‘and when I explained what was happening to the other guys it seemed like a nice thing to do.’
“Followers of The Grateful Dead – Deadheads – are the most loyal and fervent group in the world of music. They insist that The Dead are more than music, they are a way of life – an assertion that baffles fans of less complex musical groups. An element in this love affair is the low-key decency and intensely human presence of band members. Crazed pop stars they are not.”
In addition to the picture you used, the article includes several others, including one of Bill Graham taking Garcia for a ride in his motorcycle sidecar and one of Garcia, cigarette in mouth, signing an autograph outside on the deck.
As always, the recording of the show is available on archive.org. It was definitely a relaxed event.
EDIT: Go listen to this show: it’s spectacularly fun. Listen for Bobby forget to tell the band what the song was, then count off Cassidy anyway, only to have one of the drummers shout “What are we playing?!”
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