Thoughts On The Dead

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

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I’ll Still Sing you Love Songs

June 23, 2012 / / 1 Comment

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mke6YlGSFBU&w=420&h=315]

Take all rumor as truth. For the sake of argument and thought, take all rumor as truth. So we accept that Buckaroo Bobby was putting the spurs to my golden-shanked filly Ms. Donna Jean right under Keith’s coke-ruined nose. (We hope. The possibility also exists that Keith was involved somehow, perhaps like that crippled foreign guy making his wife do sex in that movie: orchestrating things, directing, discreetly applying the necessary lubes and balms while rubbing himself. i choose not to believe that possibility.)

So, anyway, even Keith isn’t oblivious enough not to notice what’s going on, especially when Ms. Donna Jean keeps leaving notes on their hotel room door reading, “Gone Bobby Banging.”

And now you’ve got to go onstage and sing love songs written in the letters of your name as Keith cries the quiet tears of a cuckold onto his piano keys.

Awkward.

Dave’s Nix

June 21, 2012 / / 1 Comment

In honor of the new Dave’s Pick (chosen from a year that’s often overlooked and more often underrated), tonight we will be featuring some shows that, for one reason or another, will never be officially released:

  • The January ’78 double laryngitis shows, where Bobby loses his voice as well as Garcia, leaving the vocal duties up to Phil, Donna Jean, and dear sweet Christ, you get away from that microphone, Keith. The show consisted mostly of half-remembered Dylan covers, Jazz Odyssey, and ended with the drummers doing the My Little Buttercup routine to a smattering of sarcastic applause.
  • Any ’94 where you can musically hear Garcia coming out of a blackout to find himself halfway through Althea in front of 60,000 people. Again.
  • 6/13/66 (It’s a Friday, BOO. I just scared the SHIT out of you, yo.) They played at Miskatonic University. (SPOOOOOOOKY and Liiiiiiiterary.)
  • The Rabies Show. Billy just started fucking biting people and wouldn’t stop. I don’t want to talk about–HE’S COMING BACK FOR MORE!
  • The Radio City gig with the Rockettes. Acid and stiletto heels do not mix.
  • That other ’75 show where not only were Ned Lagin and Merl Saunders invited up, but also Rick Wakeman, Emerson, the guy from Deep Purple, Bernie Worrell (he came with Merl), Doctors John and Teeth, Elton John in the Donald Duck outfit, the blue elephant-muppet thing from Jabba’s Palace, and van Cliburn.
  • Any of my beloved, yet polarizing, horn shows. Scoff if you must, but love, she is blind. Or deaf. Or Lithuanian, whichever is worse.
  • And, last and most believable because it’s true: 5/8/77. Their most famous show, and they lost the tapes. Because it was the Grateful Dead thing to do.

Dave’s Nit-Picks

June 20, 2012 / / 1 Comment

So, the new Dave’s Pick going to be 10/22/71 from the Auditorium Theater in Chicago, IL and it’s a hell of a show. They announced it, like, hours ago and the whining has commenced. Here is how you do not get me on your side of the argument: “Why haven’t we seen more releases from ’84?” Because of the amount of awfulness. There was, good sir, too much awfulness in 1984 and all the grown-ups knew this years ago. There is no groundswell; no one clamors.

It’s a good choice: go check out the powerful Comes a Time and then LISTEN TO 3;05 WHEN GARCIA GOES INTO HIS FALSETTO! In fact, listen to every single thing Garcia sings and plays on this all-time performance.

Then hit the (half-hour) Other One where Keith whips out his piano dong and shows everyone the sheer magnitude of it and everybody’s like: nice piano dong, meaty; and Keith doesn’t say anything, just keeps donging away and then remember that it’s his THIRD SHOW. Kneel before Zod.

The Strangest Of Places

June 18, 2012 / / 1 Comment

1975. Weird year. Weird shows, with an “everybody in the pool” type of vibe to them.  “Who showed up? Ned? Umm. Does he have any weed? Well, give him a keyboard, I guess.” Merl and  Matthew Kelley (pre-dickpunching incident) sit in; Sammy Davis, Jr. comes out for a number. And each set begins the only proper way a Grateful Dead show can: with an intro by Bill Graham.

The drummers weren’t quite together yet, and the sound is cluttered, but it’s HUGE and it just doesn’t sound like any other year. Garcia sounds like it’s ’72, laying down long, ropey lines and just soloing throughout pretty much every song, expecting the other 97 musicians on stage to carry the actual song. Due to the ad hoc nature of most of the Hiatus show, having a grand piano on stage was impossible (said the road crew before pantsing Keith, forcing Donna Jean to shoo them away. “You have to stand up for yourself, baby. Can’t let the bigger boys bully you. Look at me, Keith: it gets better.”) so Keith was confined to the Fender Rhodes

Did they ever really retire? Were they ever serious about it? The fake-out retirement is a classic show-biz move: Sinatra retired at least 17 times, the Stones have done five straight farewell tours, Tupac became a hologram for some reason. They certainly needed a break from playing Atlas with the Wall of Sound, there was way too much coke and the Persian was creeping into the scene.

So, they took ’75 off, playing only 4 shows, all of them backyard gigs in the Bay Area. The most well-known (justly) is 8/13, the One from the Vault release from the Great American Music Hall. The S.N.A.C.K. benefit was certainly the weirdest: the human brain hadn’t evolved for a pre-noon Blues for Allah. The Winterland show in June is the most overlooked.

But the Secret Hero show is 9/28/75–Lindley Meadows in Golden Gate Park. Check out the Franklin’s, where Mickey and Billy chase each other around with their cymbals and Garcia lets loose a roaring solo right after “…if you get confused, listen to the music play.” AND THEN THE END OF FRANKLIN’S HOLY SHIT which is like the end of He’s Gone with the long a capella call-and-response and it’s just remarkable.

Aaaaaaand then the intro to Big River, which is a mess.

P.S. Thank you to the tapers, to the archivists, to the digital cleanup artists, to the uploaders. Thank you to the scribes and the safekeepers. After all, if Bobby forgets he words to Truckin’ and it is not preserved, then did he really forget the words? (Most likely, yes. Bobby forgot the words to Truckin’ so much it was on his to-do list: hair, squats, tickle-time with Garcia, slide guitar lesson (cancelled), forget words to Truckin’.)

P.P.S.  As I was writing about my gratitude for the archivists and digital Jawas that keep everything running, Archive.org went down.

All Hail Kezar!

June 18, 2012 / / 8 Comments

Hey, kids! want to start your week off in just the weirdest goddam way possible? Try 3/23/75 at Kezar Stadium, where Bill Graham put on a benefit for the underfunded schools of the Bay Area called S.N.A.C.K. (Students Need Athletics, Culture, and Kicks.) (Kicks? Wow, the 70’s were weird.)

Anyway, it’s not like any Dead set you’ve heard before: it’s just a 40 minute Blues for Allah jam, but with Merl and Ned on the back up keys and Keith on the heavenly Fender Rhodes.

Wondering how Bobby’s hair looked?

Play ALL the keyboards!

And you can come up with your own fellatio-related caption here, I suppose.

And, holy shit, just listen to Garcia lead the transition back into Blues from at 30 seconds in to the fourth track. That’s why he doesn’t get called by his first name

We Could Be Heroes

June 15, 2012 / / 2 Comments

The Dead neither dated nor married for effect. There are no reports of Phil squiring, say, Joyce Dewitt into the Whiskey while wearing an enormous trenchcoat containing Mickey and Billy for some reason, I don’t know, it’s just a funny visual: the two of them LEAPING out from within the coat like that was Phil’s mutant power, to be able to generate two rampaging cashfuckers at will from his vestments. Phil was actually an X-Man briefly, but chafed under the authority of Professor X and got Colossus killed again, so…

He had to transfer to Garcia’s School for Exceptional Youngsters. Garcia was a benevolent presence that infused the grounds with his personality, riding around in his Alembic-made $400,000 wheelchair; he wasn’t crippled, just lazy. His mutant power was to bring people together and spread love and cheer so that everyone in the room was having such a good time that no one saw him sneak off to the bathroom, which he would invariably burn down.

Bobby takes down villains and keeps the peace with the power of his muscular thighs.

Donna is capable of emitting a banshee wail powerful and strident enough to paralyze an enthusiast at ten paces away from a good ’74 Playin’. (Wait, she’s not a mutant? She just sang like that? Huh.)

P.S. Despite my general distaste for most of the dirges of ’76, here’s a goodie from this day in Dead history: 6/15/76 at the Beacon Theater in money-making, heart-breaking Manhattan.

Trouble Behind

June 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Things that would get you thrown out of the Grateful Dead’s backstage:

  • ****ing Phil. I’m using the asterisks to denote the universality: eyeballing, grab-assing, mounting. Just assume anything you do that involves Phil will lead to a thrashing, then a quick exit.
  • Even looking at Garcia’s ice cream.
  • Not splitting Aces and Eights.
  • Any Game of Thrones spoilers whatsoever.
  • Any sort of ninjitsu whatsoever. Not since the last time. Brent dressed in the traditional Japanese racist pajamas and, using “ninja tools” that were almost certainly fashioned from the cutlery on the catering table, climbed halfway across the ceiling, which was quite impressive, until the ceiling fan sucked Brent’s wizard beard into the rotor and he nearly died, mostly ’cause the other guys just left him there for four or five hours. Mickey just couldn’t stop laughing.
  • Demanding to meet Ringo.
  • Introducing what were known internally as “pernicious thoughts” into Bobby’s head. There was no firm definition of such, more of a Potter Stewart vibe to the whole thing, but past concepts deemed inappropriate for Bobby include: spandex, hair dryers, mesh, Garcia is stealing your soul from you when you switch off singing during Jack Straw, platform shoes, platform boots, platform anything-of-any-kind, Last Tuesdayism (Holy shit, the next person who mentions any sort of solipsism-based paradoxical view of reality to him is getting stabbed with a knife), and everyone’s favorite: “monkey gonna getcha.”It took two hours to drag him out from under the trailer that time, shrieking the whole way.
  • Any kind of keening, ululating, glottalizing or hooting.
  • Wearing eyeblack for a game in a domed stadium. You’re just wearing makeup at that point.
  • Saying the letter ‘L’ around Billy. It wasn’t so much that you would be thrown out afterwards, it was that you would probably like to leave, having been punched so thoroughly in the dick. But, you should give it to Billy: the “L” thing did make it sporting. One clever fellow made it a good six minutes into a conversation before Billy got bored and just punched him in the dick anyway.

Dead Freaks Unite

June 7, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Quick question followed by hysterical rantings, accusations of treachery, cries of poverty (abject, moral, financial), and threats of reprisal.

Why not crowd-source the next Dead release? Put the 6 or 8 shows being decided among online and let the Enthusiasts decide. Why wasn’t that part of the Grateful Dead Game, that feculent folly? Someone explain that thing to me or I’m going to have one of my little fits and we can’t have the couch cleaned again: it’s more duct tape than sofa now.

Here’s my vote for the next one, pulled from a well renowned for its sweetness and goblins, but in fact all the more worthy because of its brethren: to listen to any show from Spring ’77 is to demand comparison and 4/22/77 at The Spectrum in Philly more than holds it own against any comers. The Peggy-O is the equal of the vaunted 5/7; the Scarlet>Fire might be better than 5/8.

P.S. The Scarlet>Fire is better, just objectively better. Don’t argue with me and go eat some fiber. And, hey: if you like what I’m doing, then wave the flag, huh?

P.P.S. Listen to Keith during the Dancing jam at 7:45: he hits these beautifully dissonant chords with the Hammond, which he uses quite a bit this show, but then he starts playing like a child, a drunken hairy child prone to smacking people, doing smack, smacking smack, and occasionally shoplifting. EDIT: There is no evidence whatsoever that Keith was a shoplifter. The smack, yes, but we have every reason to believe Keith paid for his candy bars.

Thereafter, Keith goes back to the piano to play some of the most gorgeous lines he’s ever laid down (you jive turkey) as if to reinforce his point.

P.P.P.S. They have, collectively, taken this show out back and beaten the living shit of it. BEST SHOW EVER! You stop that, you big bully.

Saturday Night Dead

June 6, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Found this and thought you’d like it, but before you click on it, know this: you will be going to a desert, a ghost mall of the internet, a junction far, far across the Rio Grand (EeyOoo): MySpace. There exists a MySpace. Still. I wonder if their office still has the half-pipe and yoga studio? Didn’t “Tom” die in an auto-erotic asphyxiation thing last Winter Solstice? (That’s how I mark time, because of my beliefs. TOLERATE ME.)

So, you have to go to MySpace because, well, it’s on MySpace, but mostly because I don’t know how to grab the video, so just aim your clicker over the blue letters–not the blue thing, the blue let–good aaaaaand: there’s your bank account, Grandma.  Love you, Gam. NOMNOMNOM your face Gam. Gonna kill you in your sleep, Gam. NIGHT!

EDIT: I’m not even going pretend to know what went wrong there. It’s beyond just apologizing and moving on: this is High Crime or Misdemeanor time.  Fuck…WHOO, where was he even GOING with that? These are decent folks out there getting high and listening to the Dead while reading about the Dead. Fuckin’ stoner-ass stoner asses. Who am I again? Am I the Reader or the Faithless Narrator? Sometime, he uses italics for one, and sometimes…sometimes, I think this is all just a bunch of obscure lies and silliness, man.

SUPEREDIT: Play the video or I’ll teach you what the word ‘flense’ means.

So: the Grateful Dead playing Saturday Night Live on 11/11/78. (You should open the video in a different window or, you know what?  You’re bright and capable and more than equipped to wrangle the doodads. Just be yourself all over the place.

Casey Jones on SNL

And we start off with everyone’s favorite secret genius, Buck Henry!

And Billy!

.26     It’s called conditioner, Garcia. Plus–and I’m just saying–for a guy who always bitched about being on TV, he certainly does play adorably to the cameras.

.38     Here we see Donna, who for some reason is easy skanking.

.50    Was Phil just yelling at the drummers on live TV? Seriously, can no one get Phillip Lesh to exhibit anything even resembling human behavior?

1.05   Donna was always dressed like your grade-school art teacher that time you ran into her at the supermarket.

1.15   We need to talk about Bobby’s pants. Young man, are you wearing jodhpurs? Or are they riding pantaloons? Are you playing Young George Washington? Will you golf later? If so, is your caddie Bagger Vance? Are you the renegade scion of the House of Bourbon? How are those socks staying up–is there a garter in play here? EXPLAIN YOUR PANTS.

1.45   Although if we’re going to be honest, they do hug his ‘tocks quite nicely. Bobby’s sexy and he knows it.

2.00  The slide. That’s a choice.

2.22   Hey, there are other people in this band!  (None of whom are attractive enough for a close-up, apparently.) And a great shot of both drummers, um, drumming.

3.00  Donna gives me boners.

3.12   It’s Rowlf the dog!

3.27 Hey, Mickey’s in this band!

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