Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: jerry band (Page 2 of 2)

Mary, Mary

July 15, 2015 / / 20 Comments

At a certain point, we all become caricatures of ourselves. For example, Donald Trump announced today that he was not, in fact, worth the $9 billion he claimed last week; it was more like 10. The sketch kinda writes itself.

Throw me in the bucket with the rest, though: I have committed the ultimate Dead-obsessive cliché – taking a break from the Dead…with the Jerry Band.

I know, I know, but it’s from the stupidly talented lineup with Ronnie Tutt and Nicky Hopkins. Nicky Hopkins sounds exactly like if you asked someone to do an impersonation of “an Englishman who won’t live to see 40.” Nicky had problems, and so does the show, but they are the ones endemic to all Jerry Band shows: everything is too slow except for the ballads.

The ballads are way too slow. (The tempo of Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is “legally deceased.” On the music, it’s written in Italian, so it sounds better, but the dirge-like nature of the tune cannot be overlooked.

Rest of it’s great: check out an uncredited Merl Saunders (?) doing his rhythm guitarist impression on the nasty and dirty clavinet on Let It Rock, a Mission in the Rain, and…

That Garcia guy: maybe he has been a bit overlooked these last weeks, but he could play a little. Sing a little, too.

 

Reason for Absence?

October 1, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Wondering where drummer David Kemper was in the previously-posted shot? No? Not even a little?

…

Well, you can kiss it. That’s right: kiss it.

Are you done?

Yes.

…

What’s “it?”

WOULDN’T YOU LIKE TO KNOW, MISTER MAN.

Knock it off or you’re going to kiss mine. Both of you.

Anyway: just where was David Kemper, ten-year veteran drummer of the Jerry Band, during the photo shoot? TotD investigates…

  • Kemper is half-Norweigian and the Winter Olympics were airing.
  • Daylight Savings Time misunderstanding.
  • He was with friends! Stop interrogating David Kemper: you’re not his real dad!
  • Billy kidnapped him out of jealousy.
  • Billy kidnapped him for money.
  • Billy kidnapped him accidentally. (Billy would revert to muscle memory sometimes and kidnap people in a fugue state, like a man driving to his previous house after work, except with more duct tape and ski masks.)
  • Afro shame.
  • Brief side note: what do you think the street value of Garcia’s flannel is? Couple hundred, right? Gotta be a couple grams of whatever in the frocket alone.
  • He had built a log flume in the backyard of his Iowa home and, from out of the cornfields, great log flumists of the past came to ride with him.
  • He was assigned to a lonely outpost in Indian country, whereupon he befriends them and has sex with a woman who is conveniently white.
  • Lupus. (It wasn’t lupus.)
  • Car hit a pelican and when he went to investigate, the pelican–merely stunned–pulled a knife and chased him down Market Street.
  • Kemper figured that Garcia wouldn’t notice whether he was there or not, so he slept in.

Sunday In My Apartment With Garcia

July 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

This is how it always happens: a nice stranger on the internet pays you a compliment and BOOM: listening to the fuckin’ Jerry Band. (And don’t give me any guff about “Legion of Mary,” or “Reconstruction,” or whatever: it was always just the fuckin’ Jerry Band. And what that was, was Garcia and John Kahn making dope money.)

The Jerry Band mostly sucked, except for the times when, coincidentally, people like Merl Saunders or Ronnie Tutt were in the band. Odd how that happened. Otherwise, it was ponderous, unmemorable Dylan covers.

My main memory of The Jerry Band was my Dead Bodhidharma, Glenn. He dug the ’90 live CD, the one with Simple Twist of Fate on it, in which John Kahn takes an eight-minute bass solo (strike three) in the wrong key. Or for the first time on a fretless. Or with a number of head wounds and contusions. these are only some of the excuses he might have for whatever it was I was forced to sit through.

P.S. Speaking of intonational follies, check out Second that Emotion from 4/13/71 at the Catholic Youth Center in Scranton, PA. The intro answers the question “Could Garcia be so out of tune, he actually becomes in tune the long way around?”

P.P.S. Seriously, go find this recording: Jerry Garcia Collection vol 1: Legion of Mary.

You like Jerry Band?

January 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I feel about the Dead the same way I feel about Star Wars: nothing outside the original is valid in any way, at all, ever. Leave me out of Further, the Jerry Garcia Band, and hundreds upon hundreds of clones of Emporer Palpatines lurking throughout the galaxy with an increasingly Wile E. Coyote-esque boomsticks. He replaced the Death Star with the Sun Crusher, and then went on to the Mom Licker, I believe. That book didn’t sell that well.  I just baaaarely accept anything Vince Welnick was involved with. Vince Welnick reminds me of a guy you wouldn’t rent a houseboat to.

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