Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: jerry (Page 4 of 5)

That’s Who I Am

June 3, 2012 / / 3 Comments

The Dead were not a Prog-Rock band, as that required hours of rehearsal, which was impossible when the phrase, “Let’s try that one again,” led at least three men to start wildly swinging their fists without even looking to see where they were going. The Dead were like Sinatra: one-take. If you allowed them back at the material after the first try, they would fiddle with it endlessly, eventually disappearing up their own asses entirely.

The Dead were not a Boy Band. Boy bands feature young, girlish men who conform to pre-slotted roles as the Cute One or the Shy One. The Dead was made up of men whose appearances might have been put on cans of stew. Yes, Bobby was the Cute One, but there was also the Locked in the Bathroom One, the Punching One, and Phil. Tiger, yes. Tiger Beat, no.

The Dead were not Alternative. I think it might have been the attitude towards guitars. Since Johnny Ramone threw his plastic Mos-Rite in a shopping bag and carried it into CBGB’s, one of the key signifiers of “cool” in the punk/alternative status game is who can find the shittiest, most obscure guitar. Garcia did not like that game, not one bit.  He chased the dragon with those guitars as much as with his habit. Elaborate, expensive and–most of all-heavy things that he could fuss over. And, as we all know, anything fussed with too much is shit and those last guitars, my god, the pomp and circumference!

Wolf! Wolf weighed–I looked this up–211 pounds.

The Dead were not a Country Rock Jam Band with Delusions of Grandeur. No, no: they were. That is what they were. And, damn they were good at it.

The Dead were not Electronic Music, even though they used to let Phil’s retarded cousin Ned Lagin finger his MOOG onstage occasionally. I’m talking the Ibiza stuff, KLF is gonna house you, that thing where the bass stops and then it makes this WUBWUBWUB sound, that sort of thing. First of, all the darkness would lead instantly to a round of stealthy dickpunching the likes of which this party’s never seen! WHOO! Second, the Dead would, upon seeing the other large, bass-heavy sound systems, immediately go nuclear, leading to destruction.

“Chief, what have those Grateful Deads done this time?”

“Mr. Mayor, they’ve wired the sewer lines and turned the very ground beneath us into one giant sub-woofer!”

“And what happens if something goes wrong?

“Mr. Mayor, do you know what a caldera is?”

The Dead is not Hip-Hop, although there are similarities: the guys whose job title is kinda loose, weed.

If I Told You ‘Bout All That Went Down…

May 22, 2012 / / 3 Comments

As is my wont (and my tont and my soupt), this begins with a plea, an urgent command from the Library to listen to something, something you’ve almost definitely heard before, but listen to Keith here on 5/7/77 playing Mississippi Half-Step on THE ORGAN FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE THE TOUR STARTED, THANK YOU.  Forget the sheer tonnage of beatdown Garcia is bringing: listen to the B3!

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Okay: I can tell how many people are clicking on what links and the cold, hard fact is that not nearly enough of you are going on to listen to 8/24/72 even though I keep telling you and breaking your toys in front of you and making you wear Dead Mom’s lipstick every Wednesday night. Humpday? Huh. You got no idea.

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In the early days, they all had different relationships with the concept of being in tune. Phil agreed whole-heartedly when it came to his bass and his voice in the early days, but after his vocal sabbatical, he was just all over the place. Bobby played in tune and sang out of it, Garcia sang in tune, and played out of it. Keith was just plain out of it.

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Tupac keeps making popping up, Morrison went to Africa like Rimbaud, and people will be seeing Elvis along the highway for as long as the Republic stands. Garcia? He’s gone.

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39:07 for The Other One on 9/17/72? Why? Why, Grateful Dead: why would you let this happen? Forget the sheer tonnage of notes; instead, note the date: September 17, 1972. It’s been released, officially, as Dick’s Picks 23. This is not just a show they played, this is something they offered for sale in the market with their imprimatur. In other words. the Dead are telling us that this is behavior that they are proud of. “Most bands could play a song for maybe 20 minutes and then it would get weird and sad. It took us 40 minutes. GRATEFUL DEAD RULES, EVERYBODY ELSE DROOLS”

On The Road Again

May 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The first time Robert Hunter dropped, “But what would be the answer to the answer man?” on everyone, I am willing to bet everything I have there were at least three “whoas.” I am also laying 7-2 on a “far out, man.”

But anyway…

7/19/74. Selland Arena in Fresno, California. Start with He’s Gone.

None of them are in tune, with themselves or each other, and Garcia is the worst: he is a noticeable quarter-step away from where he wants to be for most of the song. Plus, he playing the wrong chords. Combining those two choices makes it difficult to succeed. He’s not the worst, though: Billy keeps wanting to get to the next bit a beat early and Keith is being overbearing like he could be, stomping and comping in the middle register with block chords like he did near the end…

But then, as they’re finished with the song part of the song, they turn around and snatch it from themselves and wrestle it with brawny arms and steaming loins and thrusty parts and soiled trousers and punchy crotch and shivering fists and they make Selland Arena in Fresno their lady-friend. (Which would be kinda nice, actually. Old ladies got put on the payroll. Plus, there was most certainly not going to be any of that Led Zeppelin shit going on. Yes, hotel rooms were being consumed by flames at precisely the same rate as Keith Moon went through them, but Garcia was always really sorry about it, man. You know he didn’t mean that shit.)

Here’s the only problem: Selland Arena only held 6,500 people.  How do you get 6,500 people to produce enough revenue to justify moving the Wall of Sound? During the GODDAM GAS CRISIS. And it wasn’t like nowadays, they didn’t charge rich people prices at concerts yet; hell, there were no rich people in Fresno fucking California in 1974 going to the Dead show. There might have been some cats with a roll, but nobody with any money. Even if they had money, rock bands didn’t learn how to really sell shit until the Stones’ Steel Wheels tour.

But not of that matters, because GO BACK AND LISTEN TO EYES, PEOPLE. The end of it, the Stronger Than Dirt part, where you suddenly realize again that the Dead, if they hadn’t had such strong strictures in place regarding practicing, could have been Yes. You listen good and hard to what Billy is doing: he has, as I’ve mentioned before, become Jazzbo Billy by 1974, but he was GOOD AT IT. Billy played his drums like he fucked his women: anally. (You are right, that is going too far and it doesn’t make sense, but wow did it make me giggle like a ninny when I thought of it)

Just, Y’Know: Thoughts On The Dead

May 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We forget how long ago it was, what a different world it was. To  understand my point, you must listen to Pig absolutely fucking KILLING IT on It’s A Man’s World. That was April 15th, 1970. Listen to how crisp and present the recording is, how clean and separate the instruments sound: I would wager most lay-listeners wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this recording and an official release from the era. Marvel at how such a recording got made in the same world where there is absolutely no record of a show from that same month: no tape, no poster, certainly no film but there is a contract and cancelled check, so it must have happened. There are shows as late as 1973 just…gone. Compare that to today’s DeLillo Barn of a culture, all of us pointing our iThings at each other the second anything notable happens. Holding our phones vertically, all of us.

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Everybody’s new favorite fun game: Play in One Key, Sing in Another!

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Is the most terrifying moment of your day the Silence that comes before the Fretting that comes before the Waffling that comes before the Choosing? An ’89? Surely, a Summer ’71! The wrong choice–it’s like throwing the i Ching, only to lodge the coins in your cousin Kevin’s throat and Kevin dies right in front of you and you just LOSE IT and decide that you can’t get in trouble if EVERYONE ELSE IS DEAD, TOO, so you kill your way halfway down the street before they take you down. No matter which Ching translation you use, that’s an unhealthy omen.

I almost had one of those rolls today. I chose an ’85 (4/27/85 Frost Amphitheater, Palo Alto, CA) to start off the morning. The 80’s are a giant tushee: fun around the edges, but dangerous in the middle. (I apologize for that.)

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I’ve written before about Garcia’s guitar tone being friendly, but the entire band had an ethos of friendlyness-ship. (Of course that’s a word. And if not a word proper, at least wordish.) All those references to following and leading and sharing (women, wine (Not Persian, though. Persian was not a share-y kind of substance.).) There was very little aggression in the music: no one will ever enter the Octagon with Brokedown Palace blaring. This made them a different band then–say–Slayer, who once wrote a song about Josef Mengele from Mengele’s point of view.  While many Dead songs featured unreliable narrators, none of them were so unreliable as to have committed war crimes. Committing war crimes is the very definition of being unreliable: you need to be watched, apparently. The second everyone turns their back, BOOM: you’re sewing twins together.

Slayer’s always been a bit of a mystery to me. Not the “why are they popular” part: there will always be ugly 15-year-old boys and money to be made catering to them being all evil and shit. I’m referring to the actual music. A friend burned me the Compact Disc. My good friend, Inter-Natalie. You should see her record collection. I like to listen to the hard-charging angry stuff when I am up in the gym working on my fitness, Sabbath and Titus Andronicus and the Boom Boom Satellites, so I tried a little Slayer and halfway through the third verse describing what can only be classified as “atrocities,” I quietly bowed out. I prefer to keep my tunes free of graphic descriptions of torture labs. Cartman was right: hippies hate Slayer.

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Who was it, precisely, that was clamoring for the return of Dupree’s Diamond Blues?

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In May of 1969, the Dead jammed with legendary conga player Mongo Santamaria.  Also legendary was the lecture given to Bobby afterwards concerning his giggles upon hearing the name.

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Merl should have been the keyboardist after Keith. They would have looked like the Celtics in the 80’s, racially. Also, Walton.

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I don’t care if Putin has turned the place in to a Latveria-of-the-mind: THEY’RE THE BAD GUYS, FUCK THEM. They were THE BEST bad guys: evil enough (gulags, proxy wars), but not, you know, too evil (that thing that made the 40’s such an inherent downer.) They had an ideology and an aesthetic, none of this “at night, it is my bed; during the day, my clothes” bullshit these Al Qaeda fuckmuppets smell up the room with.

Check My Pulse

April 30, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Idea for sci-fi novel: An Enthusiast invents (or inherits or finds or, if this were Stephen King, extrudes) a time machine; it only has one trip in it (Get it? Trip? Because of the drug use! Because of all the drug use). He uses it to go back to 1995 and revive Garcia from his heart attack and, after proving his bona fides as a Time Traveler (with wackiness: “The president is what-now?) nurses him slowly and carefully back to health.

This act leads–both directly and provably–to a Global Holocaust. Rest assured that the words zombies, genitals, and eating will be involved and, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what order you put those words in, I want no part of it.

Without Lope Day To Day, Insanity’s King

March 14, 2012 / / 1 Comment

The Jerry Ballad is one of a number of sacrosanct moment of the show, along with the Dylan Slot, the Closing Raver, and the Brent Bathroom Break. (Or the second set Estimated in ’77; on two separate occasions, they set up their gear so they could play Estimated on an off-day.) Unlike the other categories, the Jerry Ballad has been there since the very beginning, along with the part of the show where the drummers get high while the rest of them irritate the audience and then the reverse.

The songs that work in the Jerry Ballad slot are perfect examples of what I call The Lope, that uniquely Dead stop-and-start stumble. Ramble On Rose, Sugaree. Slow it down a little and you’ve got Row Jimmy (or the later versions of They Love Each Other). Speed it up and it’s Brown-Eyed Women (or the early versions of They Love Each Other). It is the sound of a small barefoot boy in overalls ambling along with his donkey in the South that only exists in the first 20 minutes of rock star bio-pics. The donkey may be wearing a hat. Bum-BA-Bum-BA-Bum: the beat toodles to and fro.

Black Peter does that. So did Standing on the Moon and Ship of Fools and Wharf Rat. Sing Me Back Home never did that: it might be the worst of all Jerry Ballads. It is a perfect exemplar of the maxim Keep it snappy, boys! They’re DYING out there! Plus, SMBH was always a victim of the Dead’s most pernicious trait: the tempo drift. Songs have a certain tempo they sound right in. A 10 bpm deviation either way leads to the rushed, coked-out clatter od ’85, or the sludgy miasma of the Fall ’76 shows. They never got the tempo for Sing Me right, which might not have been such a problem but not for the fact that they were incapable of playing the song for anything less than a dozen minutes at a time.

(Bobby also had interests in a late show weeper. In fact, that’s what he called it: the Bobby Weeper. When he told Garcia about this, Garcia said nothing, just walked away and found Billy and the crotchpunching began.)

Prime Numbers

February 17, 2012 / / 0 Comments

They played The Eleven and Loose Lucy 98 times each. One song is more important than the other, but it is not the better song in any way.

The Eleven is more representative of Primal Dead than any other song, including Dark Star, for the simple fact that they kept playing Dark Star. DS kept popping up every few years or so, always reflective of the current makeup of the band: in the 60’s, it was a dark and speedy hellride; in the early ’70’s, it was jazzy and air-filled; in the late ’70’s, it was played in a hockey arena; and in the 80’s and 90’s, people were just happy that the song was being played at all. But they left The Eleven back in the nether reaches of the misty baroque Baby Dead.

They barely qualify as songs: Dark Star is just a head theme, then some lyrics, and The Eleven is just a party trick–Hey, look what we learned to play in! It’s not very subtle, either: it’s in eleven, about a list of eleven things, and called The Eleven. Perhaps they were auditioning for Sesame Street:

“Hi, I’m Billy!”

“And I’m Bobby, and we’re gonna teach you about the number 11, and the letter 7.”

“That’s ‘L.’ Why did we let the dyslexic guy do this? Hey, puppet-guy: c’mere.”

And then Billy punched the guy holding Grover in the nuts and then he punched Mr. Hooper in the nuts four, maybe five times. Mr. Hooper wasn’t moving after Billy got done with him. That’s really how Mr. Hooper died: Bill Kreutzmann, drummer for the Grateful Dead, dickpunched him to death.  David Gans is KEEPING THIS INFORMATION FROM YOU.

The Dead is no longer Primal by 1970. Mickey and TC would leave the band, everyone would watch one too many John Ford movies, and they would be in the next great phase of their run.Looking back, the Primal period was shouty and wobbly–the sound of a baby band.

But sometimes, the baby sounded like this.

P.S. Loose Lucy isn’t all that awful; it has a nice lope. It might have been a hit for .38 Special. But I don’t particularly care to hear Garcia talking about getting on top of ladies. Or, having ladies climb on top of him, which is, let’s be honest, almost definitely the case.

Johnny B. Mediocre A Good Deal Of The Time

January 29, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Spurs ‘n’ Chaps Bobby had his cowboy songs, which the drummers hated; New Wave Bobby had his oeuevre of angular, weirdly melodied songs, which Jerry hated; and Blind Lemon Bobby had his clusterfuckingly tortuous first set Blooz-stravaganza, which ear-possessors hated.

Speak not to me of wang, nor dang, nor doodle, Bobert Weir! I will not look what you done done. And you put DOWN that slide guitar, Mister! Next time I see you with that slide guitar, you better be trying to flush a South American strongman out of hiding.

But there was one more Bobby, and he was my favorite Bobby: Sock Hop Bobby, who loved the old jukebox singles and 50’s rock and, most of all, Chuck Berry. (At both Woodstock and the Trans-Canada Festival, Bobby paid way too much attention to Sha Na Na. He shrieked like a girl when he clapped for them and after their set, Bobby followed the lead singer into the bathroom and just openly stared at the guy’s cock. Like not in a gay way? It was more like–I’m not explaining this right. It was Bobby just being all, “That is a thing. That is an honest-to-god thing right there. It is a cock that cock right there and I am LOOKING. I am LOOKING right AT IT. Hey, stop hitting me.” Even for Bobby, that was a behavioral outlier. It led to a stern talking to from Phil that touched upon many subjects, but mostly “expectations.”)

Except, Phil kinda ruined most of the Chuck Berry songs, didn’t he? The rest of them were pretty adroit with the rockers: Jerry always bit into them with vigor, Bobby could yelp just as good as Bob Seger or any other white guy in the Seventies, and Keith played the shit out of the boogie piano. (Strangely enough, he was absolutely amateurish at woogie piano.)

But, Phil? No, he was far too good of a musician to play those songs well. They were brutal, dumb hammers of music, but as we all know: Phil was a surgeon. He delicately flitted about both the root note and the downbeat like a savage butterfly, exposing the inner horrible grace of the mixed-ionian-calipygian modes and the sweet, sw–PHIL, STOP FUCKING AROUND AND PLAY THE GODDAMN SONG. IT’S JUST A FAST TWELVE-BAR BLUES TUNE. STOP WITH THE CHORD SUBSTITUTION.

The Other One

January 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Who was the most useless member? Musically speaking, obviously. In a serious crisis, like a fire or a cruise boat disaster, you would want precisely none of them around. Garcia might keep a cool head, but that’s it. Bobby’s presence would result in a vast increase in casualties due to the time expended by having to explain over and over, in increasingly simpler language, what was happening and why it was a bad thing. Brent would lose the will to live immediately and just walk into the flames.

Which brings us to Tom Constanten. TC is no one’s favorite Dead member, but he is also not anyone’s least-favorite. No one puts on a tape of 1969 and admonishes his friends, “Dudes, listen to the Bach-flavored calliope noises way in the background. LISTEN TO TC TRILL FANCIFULLY!” TC seems to have been included in the group for three reasons: to make Lesh seem like less of a pretentious dick, his clothes, and mustache. Let us examine these things:

Phil Lesh is unbearable, we all know this. If you can read an interview with the man where your hand does not involuntarily start making the jerk-off gesture, then you’re a more tolerant man than I. If Phil were a modern-day hipster, he would work the fact that he didn’t own a television into the first 30 seconds of every conversation he ever had. Phil’s one of those New Atheists that likes to start internet arguments. TC demanded that the group buy him a harpsichord. We have a winner.

As for attire, the only thing to be said is that TC thought he was dressing to play Hippie at a Dinner Party #2 in the flashback scene of a random ThirtySomething episode. TC owns a cape. It is not his first cape. In fact, TC has a “cape guy.”

But the Fu Manchu was pretty sweet.

Pick Your Poison

January 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The heroin was bad enough, but did you absolutely have to chase it with ice cream, you fat dead bastard?  Why couldn’t you have been one of those skinny junkies? Anthony Kiedis was a junkie and he looks spectacular now. Of course, he’s 3’8″, but why quibble? You could have been one of those Jerry Stahl junkies, eating health food while steadily replacing his blood with smack.

But, no: you had a sweet tooth.

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