“Garcia! Garcia! GARCIA!”
Garcia walks over.
“What, man?”
“They look like boobies.”
“Billy!”
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: jerry (Page 3 of 5)
It’s sequel time here in Fillmore South:
Things I love about the Dead, Part the II
- When Bobby would say “Thank you,” in that silly high-pitched voice.
- The end of China Doll where it generally dissolves a little and then Garcia comes in all by himself with the “Take up your China Doll” part, which is really difficult to sing, because the notes are weird AND you have to get the time right, since you’re basically counting the band back in with it AND it’s pitched pretty high, but he got it right far more often than not.
- The beginning of Truckin’ they’d do sometimes, with the whistles and the snare drums: BRUM-bum BRUM-bum BRRRRRR rum-bum.
- Occasionally, later in the career, when Bobby would (as is the running gag with both my bloggings and, you know, actual recorded-on-tape reality) forget the lyrics to Truckin’, Phil would start BOMBING away at him and then come in on the next part where they all sing just SUPER LOUD, so clearly seething at the fact that it’s been ten years: learn the words, man.
- He’s Gone. Not so much on the “Bop bop bop” coda.
- The jam after Seastones from 6/23/74. Seriously, try to listen to Seastones. Now, on acid. But listen to what Garcia does right after: he plays the sweetest, softest lines, and leads everyone back from the dark place where Ned Lagin touched them.
- The Baby Dead. The way they would take a riff and just brutalize it, tear it apart and put it back together, mostly the same but weirder for the journey.
- Their refusal to give in to peer pressure. Often, they would be the only ones in the room who wanted to smoke and bullshit and yell at Bobby for five minutes; the other several thousand people present preferred some form of entertainment. Because, holy god, do these baboons take a long time in between songs. Sometimes for no discernible reason: you can’t hear them talking, nor are they tuning. Were they just wandering around confused for three minutes at a time? It’s not unprecedented: Thelonious Monk did it.
We need to talk about Bobby because I’ve been talking about Bobby and I need to know why, godammit. Admittedly, I go through phases: a quick glance through the archives will reveal the Mickey phase, the Keith era, and–real early on–a whole lot of Vince jokes in a row. But I always go back to Bobert W. Weir, like the swallows returning to Capistrano. (Also, if you wanted to go back to Bobby’s hotel room, you had to swallow his Capistrano. DICK JOKES!) Picasso had his Blue Period; I had a month where I made a lot of Phil jokes.
You can relate to Bobby more than the other guys, though: he was the Everyman, the Protagonist, the White Guy Abroad that Hollywood likes to make movies about. Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai? That guy.
You couldn’t relate to the others: Phil was intimidatingly smart and currently yelling at a roadie. It’s like that saying, “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere?” Well, no matter the time, somewhere, Phil is yelling at a member of some road crew, somewhere. That’s why he opened up the restaurant, to scream at busboys in halting Spanish, “TIENE OIDO ABSOLUTO! DAME TUS HEPATICAS!” Billy was scary: there was always so much blood and none of it ever seemed to be his. Garcia and Pig were…well, Garcia and Pig: one might admire or imitate or spurn, but relate?
But as everyman as Bobby seemed, he was anything but: an orphan, a rich kid, really pretty, in good shape. Wait! Bob Weir…Bruce Wayne. Huh.
Bobby was a guy who’d found a home, that family we all yearn for. Adopted, shipped off to boarding school. And, legendarily, a ranch for the greater part of a summer, hence Bobby is a cowboy, but that’s been well-established. (I make fun of Bobby for this, but what man doesn’t pursue their white whale into the sunset? People need the myths they choose; they filter them back out and it turns into Mexicali Blues, which you like more than you’re willing to admit, and kind of rules when those nutty drummers decide to turn it into a disco tune on 5/25/77
He made the Dead better, and they made him better. Bobby outside the realm of those other five or six guys was a mess with visions of Hollywood in his head, and had he been able to come up with some hit singles and gotten the right backing, Bobby could have been just as big as, say, Bob Seeger. But, like a flawed diamond, Bobby’s beauty only truly shone in one oddly-shaped, custom-made setting: the Dead.
Beyond the superficial, speculative, and shit I’ve just made up entirely, there stands the inarguable fact that Bobby was a master musician of the highest caliber, dueling it out with Phil and Garcia every night and walking away proud. He adapted this oddly-voiced, syncopated approach to rhythm guitar, finding a path that isn’t self-evident under Garcia, over Phil, and side-by-side with the keyboards, but he wasn’t flashy: like Billy, he was often at his greatest only upon second, careful listening.
But what about his songs? Lost Sailor sucks, dude! More like ‘Velveeta’. Heh heh.
Yes, what about his songs, made-up straw man? You mean like Sugar Magnolias, Looks Like Rain, Greatest Story, PLAYIN’ IN THE GODDAM BAND, One More Saturday Night, and a little thing called The Other One? Not so italicized now, are you? Like those other fuzzy burnouts were contributing anything towards the end in terms of new material? You want to hear Eternity again? No song has ever been more properly named.
Now, of course, there was this kind of bullshit:
He learned, eventually, but at first, Bobby was convinced that, gee willikers, it just wasn’t a slide solo without going ALL THE WAY up the neck to make those horrible, metallic screeches.
So, we raise our whatever’s-at-hands to Bobby. We love you, you goofy bastard. And you know what it is they say about our love…
And speaking of Lindley, how’s the Original Hipster Garcia in his old-school Pumas?
And how about the boys enjoying a real good time?
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.
Their only excuse is that they were Muppets.
I will soon be decamping for human climes, back to the only land a mutt-mix of Irish and Russian Jew could tolerate. Brown hills, grey skies, no goddam monsters in the Sadd Lake my concrete development abuts. Everything has to be concrete down here; the wood rots instantly. The humidity is–do you remember the Celestials? They were Marvel Comics characters drawn by Jack Kirby that were so big that they dwarfed even the mighty Galactus and his heralds, amongst them the tragic Norrin Radd, who–
Stop that. Or we sauce the goose.
Please don’t sauce–
Then: Schnell! Schnell! I have bolded and italicized, so you must take me seriously! Don’t make me play with the fonts, because I simply don’t know how, I lack that skill set and maybe it’s been holding me back in my search for fortune and a woman who’s just crazy enough, y’know?
May I?
Ja.
Why are you German now? How did–the point being that I’m going back to where mammals are at the top of the food chain; and seasons, instead of “a little bit too goddam hot,” and “living in a giant’s ass.” Which is where I was going before, with the Celestials: I just needed an enormous man with a relatively enormous ass. Right now, Boynton Beach, FL, is the precise moisture level as inside the rectum of a being made up of a stuff to challenge wielder of the Power Cosmic himself, the Silver Surfer!
And I say this to get to my point: maybe you’ve heard of the Zombies. They have infested these swampy marshes and fetid fens, possibly due to the malodorous Bath Salts that are sweeping the nation.
The Dead would have been awful in a Zombie Apocalypse. Garcia would be the first to go, let’s just agree on that: he wasn’t the most…aware…of people at times, but he might have had a good defense against the ghouls: accidentally setting them on fire as he nodded off.
Vince would immediately Stockholm Syndrome out, campily rolling his eyes back while moaning a little off-key, “MRAAGH,” and chomping down on random people’s arms, except that zombies, like Enthusiasts, see through Vince’s bullshit rather quickly and then it’s just shreds of flesh and Dad’s Vacation Shirt.
The Crew would do well, managing to do the load-out in only 14 hours, and thus escaping out the doors of the arena just as the hungry zombies crested the ridge. Unfortunately, the trucks were so laden with gear that could not have been left behind, because Denver is in two days and Zombie Apocalypse or not, the Dead don’t cancel shows, man, that to lighten weight and distract the fiends, the Crew had to give them Phil off the back of the truck, like that Russian family in that painting giving the baby to the wolves.
Mickey and Billy go down swinging.
P.S. Bobby is left alone by the zombies, as they only eat brains. (CHEEEEEEEEEEAP! BOOOOOOOOOO!)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjYCu0MGgoQ&w=420&h=315]
Things that would get you thrown out of the Grateful Dead’s backstage:
- ****ing Phil. I’m using the asterisks to denote the universality: eyeballing, grab-assing, mounting. Just assume anything you do that involves Phil will lead to a thrashing, then a quick exit.
- Even looking at Garcia’s ice cream.
- Not splitting Aces and Eights.
- Any Game of Thrones spoilers whatsoever.
- Any sort of ninjitsu whatsoever. Not since the last time. Brent dressed in the traditional Japanese racist pajamas and, using “ninja tools” that were almost certainly fashioned from the cutlery on the catering table, climbed halfway across the ceiling, which was quite impressive, until the ceiling fan sucked Brent’s wizard beard into the rotor and he nearly died, mostly ’cause the other guys just left him there for four or five hours. Mickey just couldn’t stop laughing.
- Demanding to meet Ringo.
- Introducing what were known internally as “pernicious thoughts” into Bobby’s head. There was no firm definition of such, more of a Potter Stewart vibe to the whole thing, but past concepts deemed inappropriate for Bobby include: spandex, hair dryers, mesh, Garcia is stealing your soul from you when you switch off singing during Jack Straw, platform shoes, platform boots, platform anything-of-any-kind, Last Tuesdayism (Holy shit, the next person who mentions any sort of solipsism-based paradoxical view of reality to him is getting stabbed with a knife), and everyone’s favorite: “monkey gonna getcha.”It took two hours to drag him out from under the trailer that time, shrieking the whole way.
- Any kind of keening, ululating, glottalizing or hooting.
- Wearing eyeblack for a game in a domed stadium. You’re just wearing makeup at that point.
- Saying the letter ‘L’ around Billy. It wasn’t so much that you would be thrown out afterwards, it was that you would probably like to leave, having been punched so thoroughly in the dick. But, you should give it to Billy: the “L” thing did make it sporting. One clever fellow made it a good six minutes into a conversation before Billy got bored and just punched him in the dick anyway.
Found this and thought you’d like it, but before you click on it, know this: you will be going to a desert, a ghost mall of the internet, a junction far, far across the Rio Grand (EeyOoo): MySpace. There exists a MySpace. Still. I wonder if their office still has the half-pipe and yoga studio? Didn’t “Tom” die in an auto-erotic asphyxiation thing last Winter Solstice? (That’s how I mark time, because of my beliefs. TOLERATE ME.)
So, you have to go to MySpace because, well, it’s on MySpace, but mostly because I don’t know how to grab the video, so just aim your clicker over the blue letters–not the blue thing, the blue let–good aaaaaand: there’s your bank account, Grandma. Love you, Gam. NOMNOMNOM your face Gam. Gonna kill you in your sleep, Gam. NIGHT!
EDIT: I’m not even going pretend to know what went wrong there. It’s beyond just apologizing and moving on: this is High Crime or Misdemeanor time. Fuck…WHOO, where was he even GOING with that? These are decent folks out there getting high and listening to the Dead while reading about the Dead. Fuckin’ stoner-ass stoner asses. Who am I again? Am I the Reader or the Faithless Narrator? Sometime, he uses italics for one, and sometimes…sometimes, I think this is all just a bunch of obscure lies and silliness, man.
SUPEREDIT: Play the video or I’ll teach you what the word ‘flense’ means.
So: the Grateful Dead playing Saturday Night Live on 11/11/78. (You should open the video in a different window or, you know what? You’re bright and capable and more than equipped to wrangle the doodads. Just be yourself all over the place.
And we start off with everyone’s favorite secret genius, Buck Henry!
And Billy!
.26 It’s called conditioner, Garcia. Plus–and I’m just saying–for a guy who always bitched about being on TV, he certainly does play adorably to the cameras.
.38 Here we see Donna, who for some reason is easy skanking.
.50 Was Phil just yelling at the drummers on live TV? Seriously, can no one get Phillip Lesh to exhibit anything even resembling human behavior?
1.05 Donna was always dressed like your grade-school art teacher that time you ran into her at the supermarket.
1.15 We need to talk about Bobby’s pants. Young man, are you wearing jodhpurs? Or are they riding pantaloons? Are you playing Young George Washington? Will you golf later? If so, is your caddie Bagger Vance? Are you the renegade scion of the House of Bourbon? How are those socks staying up–is there a garter in play here? EXPLAIN YOUR PANTS.
1.45 Although if we’re going to be honest, they do hug his ‘tocks quite nicely. Bobby’s sexy and he knows it.
2.00 The slide. That’s a choice.
2.22 Hey, there are other people in this band! (None of whom are attractive enough for a close-up, apparently.) And a great shot of both drummers, um, drumming.
3.00 Donna gives me boners.
3.12 It’s Rowlf the dog!
3.27 Hey, Mickey’s in this band!
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