“The FUCK did you say to me, motherfucker?”
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: jerry garcia (Page 104 of 139)
Garcia, you handsome motherfucker.
Listening to too much Dead? (As if that were a possibility.) here are some helpful signs that you might want to load up some other bands on your iTunes.
- You can’t look at your watch without relating the time to show dates: e.g. “It’s 2:18. BEAUTIFUL JAM.”
- Your first thought upon hearing of Russia’s invasion of the Crimea is, “Billy could stop this in 15 minutes.”
- You get a cat, name it John Kahn, and it immediately starts enabling your heroin habit.
- The only reason you do leg day at the gym is because Halloween is coming and you’re going as 80’s Bobby. Again.
- You wonder how John Travolta would pronounce Phil’s name. (Paul Loing.)
- You’ve listened to the entire 30-minute rehearsal version of My Brother Esau from 3/14/83.
- You’re 1500 posts in to a maddeningly obscure blog about the Dead.
- You refer to fat people as Wall of Pounds.
- You’re already camped out in front of Barnes & Noble waiting for Billy’s book.
- And you’re in costume.
- And you’ve punched three booksellers, seven random pedestrians, and a dachshund named Colin in the dick.
- Someone asks you what you want for your birthday and you automatically answer, “The security alarm code to Bobby’s house.”
- At international customs they ask you if you have anything to declare and you say, “1979 was really underrated.”
- You throw a tantrum when Words With Friends won’t accept “Godchaux.”
Given his love of T-Shirt Tuesday, it was odd how much Mickey hated Flannel Friday.
Also, Joan Baez sucks.
I like that the artist has identified Garcia here; until I saw his name, I thought this was a painting of Cecily Tyson.
Much as Al Hirschfeld would always hide his daughter Nina’s name in his drawings, Garcia would often sneak some Morse code into his solos asking for drugs and a meatball sub.
This caricature by the legendary Al Hirschfeld hung in Sardi’s for years after Garcia’s triumphant debut on Broadway as Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
“Five minutes, guys! Everybody got their cowboy hats? Serapes? We all set on folding chairs?”
The 1976 all-arboretum tour went poorly, at best. Phil was allergic to everything and Billy would climb.
One of Garcia’s most recognizable musical gestures was fanning, that quick, high atomic strum that was so often the peak of his Sugaree solo(s) or, especially, the climax of Morning Dew. It’s not that difficult to do, actually: as far a sheer manual technique is involved, all it requires is a wrist movement all men over the age of 15 have mastered. but like the old joke about the plumber, it’s knowing when to do it that made him Garcia.
Garica’s playing was, for all its brilliance, as reliant on context as the rest of the band’s: none of his solo stuff sounds as good as he when he played with those three other guys. Is Mickey here? Who’s on keys? Doesn’t matter: the core four made that sound.
He was famously attached to his guitars, not only playing the same one for the whole show, but also taking it home with him and grabbing it before his morning coffee and first unfiltered Camel. It showed up in the sharp technical runs and those little triplets all the way up the neck where angels fear to tread, but Bobby’s slide seems to need to be.
His solos (and there were one or two of them) weren’t flashy, which might explain his absence from the Pantheon of Motherfuckin’ Guitar Gods, Man that Jeff Beck and Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen have been confined (consigned?) to. None of his guitars had a whammy bar, which is the ultimate symbol of six-string silliness. Garcia didn’t do dive-bombs or sound effects; he didn’t own a goddamn talk box, mostly because any plastic tubing left around backstage was immediately plugged into a nitrous tank.
Bobby tried doing that two-handed tapping thing that Eddie Van Halen does once in ’81 and Phil chucked a mic stand at him.
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