Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now ’tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?
Raise a glass for times gone by.
What do you get the man who was everything?
Garcia, you’re not fooling anyone: we all know what’s in the briefcase.
(Picture unabashedly stolen from fuckyesjerrygarcia.tumblr.com.)
Though the man who owned the farm was a huge Deadhead, even he had to admit that the new scarecrow was just not working.
4/16/78, West Virginia. Holy shit, they must have been broke, although it seems like WV would be pretty in the spring. Check out Garcia’s solo in Peggy-O, the way he leads the chord changes. Just listen to Peggy-O: this version is astonishing.
In fact, Garcia has been on fire the entire show and for most of the tour, but sweet Sally in the alley, would someone take that slide from Bobby. For the children, if nothing else.
And then listen real careful to Ship of Fools, where Garcia implores us to “Looky here,” before he tells us how late it was when he got around to believing.
P.S. in the New Orleans tradition, when the body is brought to the church, the Second Line follows, playing traditional funeral dirges. IKO IKO IS NOT ONE OF THEM, GENTLEMEN. Hop to it, guys: you’re killing me.
Rage on, you cataracts and hurricanoes, rage on. We take a break from our tour in progress to match the show to the day: thick and rainy and hot and weird and that can only mean one thing: the Wharf Rat>Sugar Mags from 6/20/83 at the Merriweather Post Pavilion.
The lightning was hitting the struts and buttresses of the sound system and Phil was answering God right the fuck back with his own thunder and the crowd was swimming in mud and Bobby was dosed out of his head and starts babbling about Aborigines.
So, a Grateful Dead show.
Oooooh. OOOOOooooooOOOOOOooooh. (What’s weird is that if you use two ‘h’s, it’s no longer spooky. Well, yeah, it’s spooky, but in an unclean way: Ooooooohh. Right? Just got fifty shades of creepy in here.) It’s Friday the Thirteenth. Oogie-woogie.
The origin of our dreadful fascination with the date arose when Jesus was 13 and Joseph came in from a hard day of being a fictional character offscreen and said “Thank God it’s Friday,” and Jesus leapt up and screamed “You’re not my real dad, I hate you.” and stormed–well, I was going to say into the other room, but the Christs* probably had more of a loft thing, right? The open floor plan was big in Judea in, well, I guess it would have been 13, wouldn’t it have been?
So, then Jesus opened his religion and after that there were Knights Templar, who liked to roam around Europe building hospitals and having gay orgies. That got the Pope mad so he killed them all and, even though none of this really happened, it took place on Friday the 13th which is why on this date, we kill black cats on sight with impunity.
(There is a good possibility that none of that is true.)
So, tonight is filled with horror and foreboding (totally out of context, check out Bobby’s slide solo in Werewolves of London). Jason would have cut a swath through the Dead like Mrs. Donna Jean through a Holiday Inn, as would Michael Myers, mostly because Jason is a blatant rip-off of said Mr. Myers.
Freddie Krueger would have had no luck with the boys; there was nothing he could conjure up in their dreams that was scarier than things they had seen while awake.
Draculas of all sorts were known to avoid the Dead for fear of catching something. Or, more likely, catching everything. The weird, quickly evolving bacterium and viruses that followed each tour did some wonderful things (from a science point of view). There was one pathogen that caused a nearly 80% result for an incurable disorder called Total Nipple Refraction. TNR, man! So, like pretty much anyone with three or four brain cells, the draculas stayed away from the tour blood.
Werewoofs also would have been no sweat. A guy who turns into a raging beast once every 28 days? So, like, half-a-Billy?
It doesn’t matter anyway: Bobby still demands his nightlight to sleep.
* Until the age of 25, I thought that Christ was his last name. Like, “Hi, we’re the Christs. I’m Joseph, and this is my wife Mary.”
Garcia’s chin.
Billy, because he was inside casually removing a 16-year-old’s bra while drinking a Coors Light. Billy didn’t want to play Cowboys & Indians: Billy wanted to play his drums, punch some dicks, and fuck every high school chick he could.
God bless Billy fucking Kreutzmann.
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