Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: jerry garcia (Page 131 of 139)
For my next trick, I’m going to accidentally set my hotel room on fire.
Sound quality is the thing–it’s a deal breaker for me. I need my shows to sound like a closeted preacher’s marriage: clean and separated.
“You gotta kinda struggle to hear everything, man, but it’s totally worth it.”
No, it is not. It sounds like a Belgian farting in a laundromat. There must be separation: Garcia and Phil at 12 o’clock, Keith and Bobby at 10 and 2. Billy spreads out along the bottom or Billy on the left and Mickey on the right. No exceptions.
My quest for aural satiety continues, festers, defines. It broods in the winter and sweats like a holy man in the summers. Some enthusiasts of an audiophile bent will settle for nothing less than FLAC files, while others–confused, spotty lads and broken old men the lot of them–content themselves with mp3 files.
I, on the other hand, make Charlie Miller come to my house and sing to me.
All nonsense, of course. No stereo here in Fillmore South with which to crank tunes, bitchin’ or otherwise. Just one of those little dock things and the computer, whom I hate and fear and will one day beg to come back. You know: Dad.
Computers combine the worst qualities of dogs and cats: they’re as stupid and literal and single-minded as dogs, and as annoyingly independent as cats. (To think of the computer this way falls into what I call the “canine fallacy,” which is that adorable habit humans have of thinking of all animals as weird-shaped dogs, much to their chagrin as a bull moose stompjacks their heads over and over with his dinner-plate sized foot. Fewer people would get mauled and eaten each year if they remembered that, out of the entire animal kingdom, only dogs have a category called “buddy.”)
They screwed Vince, let’s all agree on that. The sounds they made him use were one thing, but it was the personal stuff that really led to Vince’s failure and eventual demise. Before joining the band, Vince was named Cock Money and combs would snap in two immediately upon entering his thick lustrous mane. On Vince’s first day at Front Street, Mickey shaved him and gave him a loser’s name.
(Try saying it like Jerry Lewis: Vince WELLLLL-nick. Glaben.)
Vince didn’t want to dress like that either, but Jon McIntire would wire his Hawaiian shirts to explode if they were removed. This hurt Vince and he went to the band–except Garcia because he was in the bathroom–and told them that if wearing the shirts was so important to everybody, he would just do it. No C-4 necessary.
So Billy punched him in the dick. (In his defense, Billy hadn’t been paying attention in the slightest and just wanted to punch the new guy in the dick. Now, that was certainly not how Vince read the situation; he cried for 90 minutes. I’m just relaying facts here.)
The sounds, however, were truly the crux of the problem: wheezy, hollow tinklings made by primitive synthesizers. The aural equivalent of watching a clown car get raped to death.
A clown car get…what the fuck is wrong with you? This is the comeback special and you’re talking about Vince and a forcibly penetrated harlequinade?
Is that not the show business way?
It is not, no. Welcome people back. Maybe a list. An update on your mental health.
Doesn’t the clown rape kinda give a clue about my mental health?
Point taken.
Anyhoo, imagine if someone pulled the bullshit on you that they pulled on Vince: “Here’s your new office and your desk and you know your responsibilities, so I’ll just let you dive right in…oh, that guy? That’s the guy we hired to also do your job. But better. And everyone’s gonna love him more. Oh, and he’ll be able to get away with things you wouldn’t even dare to THINK about.”
Because there were no rules for Bruce. He was allowed to waltz into the house at all hours and turn the basement into his room and his girlfriend slept over sometimes. So unfair. Listen to the cavalcade of Dark Star teases in this show from ‘Chicago ’91 .
Seriously, if Vince had ever tried teasing Dark Star, Phil would have smacked him with a rolled-up newspaper. And a chair.
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