Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: hiatus

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

My Old Kentucky Home

April 23, 2012 / / 4 Comments

“Hey, Bobby? I was hoping you’d play slide tonight,” is a sentence only uttered by one man in history.  It is our bad luck that the man was Bobby. He used to talk to himself a lot, on the road somewhere between Iowa and Summer. Immediately after viewing the classic made-for-TV movie ‘Sybil,’ Bobby demanded the rest of the group recognize his other selves, except Bobby had named them all Bobby and they all had his personality and, quite honestly, Bobby hadn’t even decided real concrete-like on precisely how many of them there were, so the whole situation just played itself out, quietly and quickly

Dear whoever put together the soundboard tape for 4/21/78 at Rupp Arena: thank you for doing what you did, allowing me to–at virtually no expense–possess this show, this wonderful artifact. But there is no such thing as 4 minute and 40 seconds of stage banter in 1978. Maybe in ’70, they would have sat there bullshitting with the rowdy kids in the front row on the Fillmore East, but no longer. Not here, now.

From the end of the Hiatus (June of ’76) to Keith leaving the band (2/17/79) can be seen as a gradual speedening up. Not a typo, a choice: speedening.

But here’s the thing about 4/21/78 at Rupp arena: apparently no one showed up and the security was dicks. That’s the story. Which is the problem with knowing anything, really, about the actual gig part of it–it removes the textuality of the text (well, not just the text, but also the text) and places the praxis of the ur-Dead and the…ah, fuck it. i can’t even make fun of that kind of crap anymore.  The best thing one can say of any music is nothing, there’s music on, shit the fuck up. But the second best thing you can say is, “Listen to this. Now, Now, you must.” When he got excited about an upcoming song or passage or transition, my friend Glenn would grab your forearm and he was strong. There was no getting away from the Sugaree he was offering you.

What I’m getting at is that I like to look up the shows that I listen to and read the reviews, but sometimes you see things like this:

This was a really good show for the Dead. I am from Lexington so I know they were probably playing to just a few thousand fans inside a huge 24,000 capacity seating arena. I guess that’s what they mean when they say their were plenty of seats down in the front. This was the first time the Dead ever played Lexington and it would also be their last time. That’s too bad, I wish I knew why.

HOW CAN YOU WISH FOR THAT INFORMATION? IT WAS CONTAINED WITHIN YOUR PREVIOUS SENTENCE. THEY DIDN’T PLAY THERE AGAIN BECAUSE NO ONE SHOWED UP

 

PS: Seriously, go listen to the Rupp show. They’re killing it.


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