Billy once walked up to a young Rolling Stone reporter and said, “The thing you gotta understand about the Dead is that our magic exists in the liminal space between High and Low. It’s like bringing up Walter Benjamin, then punching you in the dick,” and then Billy punched him in the dick.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: bill kreutzmann (Page 62 of 88)
The fact that Billy’s racial rubric includes the category of “squirrely” won’t get out of my head.
“What people don’t understand is that you can’t just ask, ‘How squirrelly is a German?’ Well, are we speaking of a Bavarian or a Prussian? Because the Bavarian has virtually–and this is rare–virtually no squirrel to him whatsoever; the Prussian, now the Prussian is a river people and therefore ranks with the Laotian or Congolese in terms of squirreliness. But tops? Hands down: Bolivians. They might as well bury nuts for the winter: those fuckers are at peak squirrel.”
A drummer for the Dead wearing a Dead shirt? I am shocked. Shocked.
Mornings with Bobby and the Fat Man! was doomed to failure.
The first and most insurmountable of the problems was the six AM start time. Garcia was actually an early riser, so he would stop by Bobby’s A-Frame and roust him, except it took Bobby fucking forever to start his day. Not only was his toilet extensive and leisurely, but Bobby also insisted on–roundabout halfway through his first cup of coffee–singing The Poopin’ Song. (They sound-checked The Poopin’ Song in ’76. Honest.)
Then Bobby would start Saluting the Sun and absent-mindedly leafing through the San Francisco Chronicle while Garcia, left to his own devices, has fallen asleep while watching cartoons and playing scales on one of Bobby’s guitars and by now it is well into Drive Time and the door bell rings: it is the intern the station manager has dispatched to “go and fetch the Grateful Dead.”
Bobby gets in the driver’s seat of Garcia’s massive Bavarian rhino of a car. They cannot take Bobby’s bitchin’ Corvette because they also need to bring the intern they just dosed back; also, Bobby’s date from last night needs to be dropped off in time for homeroom.
The show would not improve: Bear insisted on engineering, which meant that if you were listening in your car, your radio had roughly a one-in-five chance of suddenly exploding. And they let Billy do the sports and it got racist: immediately and every single time.
Billy once launched into a ten-minute explanation on which race was best-suited–by genetics, culture, and an intangible factor that Billy referred to as “squirreliness”–to which position. “You need a Chinese to pitch for you: they can’t see anything BUT the strike zone. Except if he’s one of those giant Chinese sumo guys, then you put that fat bastard in your back pocket for hockey season. Uncle Billy’s got the angles figured out. Also: what about an all-Sherpa team? Those little snow monkeys, you bring ’em down to civilization and they’re like gods: it’s like Superman and the Sun.”
Things got worse from there: Bobby read the traffic, but he’s, you know: massively dyslexic, so he would just make up stuff. Bobby learned an important lesson, though: no matter how silly you think you’re being, if you tell enough people, a few idiots will believe you. So when Bobby declared the Golden Gate Bridge had been destroyed by Godzilla, long story short, Bobby’s legally enjoined from speaking about the incident, for which he claims no responsibility and admits no wrongdoing.
Mornings with Bobby and the Fat Man! was cancelled during its second commercial break. The station underwent rebranding and, upon relaunch as a Spanish-language sports talker, tripled its ratings overnight.
The Dead took full advantage of Casual Friday.
Overall, this is the worst game of Fuck Marry Kill I’ve ever seen. Sophie’s choice was easier to make. Anyway, from left to right, kinda:
Garcia, put that thing away: your stump’s giving me the heebie-jeebies.
Wow, Mickey: you found a Dead shirt. Also, that is not the haircut of a rock star: that is the haircut of a prep school kid who quotes Heidegger correctly, loves all animals, and then–the day he’s elected Prom King–gets t-boned by a drunken preacher in a Ford Taurus racing ashamedly away from an assignation with local transsexual sex worker Big Dicked Sheila.
What. The. Fuck.
Phil is adorable. I don’t know how else to put it. Maybe it’s that tight tuck he’s rocking..
Billy has my favorite of his haircuts: the Ace of Diamonds (named after its most famous wearer, Neil Diamond.) Medium length on top, combed (over?) sideways; big, poufy, blow-dried goodness for the back and sides. Aqua-Net as needed.
Also: Billy is holding an iPhone because Billy has no regard for Time Sheath secrecy protocols.
It was tough to do laundry on the road. You couldn’t trust the hotels with anything you cared about: they would just dump things in an industrial washer, turn the latch, walk away, smoke, send money orders. For delicates, a guiding hand was required.
Look at the fringes, the fraying innocence-white threads crowning Bobby’s thighs–an accident? As surely as the angle of a young ruffian’s hat or a teen goth queen’s rip in her stocking: so, not at all. A good pair of cut-offs needs to be well-tended. Jean shorts are like the modern art museums: well-curated and you only see white people in them.
So tossing his precious jorts into the laundry sack that whoever the road manager was that week would carry around twice a week was out. (This is true. The road manager would walk up and down the halls with a big sack, knocking on doors and collecting everybody’s smellies. Then he would hand out letters from home and have everyone stand by his (or Mrs. Donna Jean’s) bed for inspection.)
A laundromat was completely out. Billy always insisted on tagging along and he would start a fight at the laundromat every single time. And with the same guy: you know the guy that’s always there? Maybe he works there, maybe not, maybe he’s racing orphans in the back: who knows, but every laundromat has that guy and Billy would just lunge for him on first sight and–here’s the weird thing–the guy would always be ready. Like, maybe these fuckers have some sort of weirdo laundromat grapevine or maybe they all get wind of Billy’s pheromones a block away or maybe they’re fucked-up zen masters/existentialists who decided that, since the howling void couldn’t give two shits about us and there was neither plan nor judge, life was pointless save for the meaning we give it so the best way to celebrate this was to wait in a laundromat for the drummer of a psychedelic boogie outfit and beat the shit out him.
Phil’s hair looks good.
A small shot from the Giants Stadium show in ’78; they would play the venue most summers thereafter. It’s no longer there, replaced by MetLife Stadium, but the whole complex does continue to be located in Secaucus, which is an Indian word meaning “swampy place full of traffic and Italian bakeries.”
There had been another outbreak in Sarcophagus City and the Society needed someone to punch dicks, which meant they needed Billy, which meant they needed cash because that’s all Billy trusted. Notwithstanding the fact that the Society had switched to digital currency centuries ago and cash quite literally had to be printed special for Billy and then he couldn’t spend it: it was a problem that didn’t need to be created, but had.
Billy was the greatest of all the Hounds: he could smell dick three worlds away, and if he could smell it he could find it, and if he could find it he would punch it. He was an elegant equation.
The Retrievers finally located Billy on the small backworld where he had established a secondary personality. Wandering the backroads with a bunch of terrible-smelling primates, Billy was happy there. He very much enjoyed the nature of the planet, and sticking it in the 15-year-olds of this planet, and he loved it when macaroni was combined with cheese. He was retired now: any dick he punched was just to keep his eye in. (Billy liked to keep his eye in.) That’s what he told the Retrievers.
“I’m retired now.”
“Yes, we read the narration,” said the Retrievers.
Retrievers worked for the Society in the same way Hounds or Shepards did. They brought things back; they brought ideas back; they invariably brought diseases back; but most of all, Retrievers brought people back. The only reason to leave the Society was because it had fucked with you, and the Society only cared enough to fuck with people if they were valuable. The Society was bad at relationships; it loved a of people to death.
They brought people back: dead, alive, undead, frozen in carbonite, kicking and screaming, in flagrante delicto, whatever. When you were assigned a Retriever, you were coming back, plain and simple. It didn’t have to be bad: Retrievers spent all of their downtime punching mirrors and drinking from the bottle and having heart attacks, waiting for their orders: they lived for their orders. All that mattered was the Fetch. Easy was better than hard. Easy threw them off their games, sometimes: there are cases of Retrievers becoming confused by immediate surrender and jocularity, and taking their charges to a riverboat casino and then doing some gay stuff.
Much more usually, the subject resisted or tried to bargain or negotiate. The Retrievers had a number of de-escalation methods for these situations, and all of them began with breaking both (or all, depending on the species) of the subject’s arms.
Billy, however, was treated with respect: he was a Hound, and they were tough to break.
The Retrievers told him about the outbreak on Sarcophagus City, which was located on both planets on the binary system of Sodom and Gomorrah. The planets’ orbit was a 14 month cycle where one planet was livable, then the other. They had built identical copies of their city, and every fourteen months, everyone just moved. It was actually a pretty big holiday except for the dozens of folks who invariably got forgotten and broiled to death as the planet plunged towards the sun.
Gomorrah had now gotten too close to the star that, on average, provided life to the members of the Society that lived there, but it was Sodom that burned. This outbreak was worse than anything for a while, even worse than Sherpa Herpes, which couldn’t be avoided even by climbing mountains.
So Billy strapped his goggles on.
“Sarcophagus City,” Billy said as they climbed into the ship. “I was born there, you know.”
“That’s why it had to be you,” the Retriever replied.
To be continued…
Billy was great as Sipowicz
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