As I mentioned, there was a scholar’s conference this week in Albuquerque, a city I have recently learned how to spell, and some of our commentators and FoTotD (Friends of Thoughts on the Dead) were there. If you don’t know what a scholar’s conference is: college professors and people who will agree to hang out with college professors assemble in a hotel to discuss things, gossip, interview for jobs, and have sex with one another.
(When academics have sex, they always decide beforehand as to whether the sex will be in MLA or ALA format.)
There was some high-level intellectualizinating going on New Mexico, but this slide (tweeted out by the apparently hairy Jesse Jarnow, whose book Heads can be pre-ordered here) is not up to grad-level standards. This is the Freshman orientation class. Now: the exact dates? This is knowledge for those with their L.S.D. (Licensed Scholar of the Dead.)
It should be noted that very few other band’s timelines so prominently features a coma. Good work, Grateful Dead.
There are, however, many other ways to split the Dead into eras not as common as “who’s in the band?” If “who’s in the Dead?” was a question worth asking, then how could the answer ever be “Vince” or “John Mayer?”
TotD presents Different Ways to Era-fy the Dead:
That’s not a goddamned word and you know it.
Hey. Stop. I capitalized things and then there was a colon. Bullet points now. You can’t talk.
It’s weird how you invented this place and still don’t understand how it works.
Maybe just like the real God.
…
Maaaan.
You’re worse than Scalia.
Sure. I will continue: Different Ways, blah blah.
How much hair did Billy have? A lot? Then, it is early in the band’s history. Less than before? Later.
Instruments. (A crucial point in the Dead’s career was when Garcia decided that guitars should weigh 25 pounds; another was when Phil went to the six-string. Do you know that Phil’s decision to go to six instead of five strings was partially based in numerology? Six is divisible by two and three, and once you have two and three, you can come up with all sorts of mystic-sounding math bullshit.)
Doomed relationships with record companies, including their own.
Kind of off-topic, but no one has ever done a scholarly work linking the performance of the Dead and the performance of the Tamalpais Chiefs flag football teams; that’s just academic malfeasance.
Road managers.
Who was doing the tapes. (That’s actually a good one.)
Swimming tests passed. (Billy was always a dolphin, but Mickey was afraid to put his head underwater and had to kick around the shallow end with the Guppy group for most of the summer. Phil refused to take any of the tests or join any of the groups, shouting at the instructor, “I’m gonna stand in the corner of the pool with a beer, man!” Bobby started out a Seahorse, then became a Flounder, and then a Bowhead Whale, and finally a Moray, at which point he bit someone.)
Was the money about to be stolen, or it had just been stolen?
There aren’t many photos of Bear, not compared to his friends, and not enough for the impact he had on huge swaths of American society. He built the Wall of Sound. (Others helped, but Bear would gladly take credit for it.) He invented the Paleo Diet. Bear was also both the best and worst drug dealer that ever lived: best because his name was a mark of quality; and worst because everyone knew his name.
Once Steely Dan writes a song about you, it’s time to go legit.
Or, get out of town. Bear took “getting out of town” to operatic levels, moving to the part of Australia so desolate and barren that even the Aborigines stayed away from it.
There was gas in the car.
Anyway, it’s the Bear’s birthday today, so jam some mind-altering chemicals you ordered off the innertubes up your butt and raise a cheek to the man.
Also: no matter how many photos of the man I see, Bear will always be played by Curtis “Booger” Armstrong in my mind.
And now the connections come pouring in: video of Bobby (and Vince) performing at the Fukuoka Dome, which is not in Tokyo, from FoTotD Jumpy Jingleberry–
Anyway, there are actually a lot of questions about this show. This was a band called Bobby and the Valentines and was Bobby, Vince, Henry Kaiser, and two other guys. It was a pick-up band, essentially, and they played Dead tunes. Real fun night out at a small theater.
But the Fukuoka Dome holds 38,000 and Michael Jackson and Madonna and people like that play there: how did Bobby and Vince book this gig? Is Vince big in Japan? Did they just tell the crowd that it was the Dead? How many more weird tributaries are there in this river?
Go read this right now: an article about the Hiatus from Jesse Jarnow entitled Shrodinger’s Dead: I’m Too Lazy To Find The Umlaut Button. Good and serious reporting that also manages to bring Benjy into it. In the piece, Jarnow describes the Dead during the Hiatus in terms of the physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat which exists in a super-position of dead and alive until observed. Schrödinger meant to ridicule quantum theory, but no one much understands physics–especially when it’s yelled at them in German–so we’ve kept the phrase and abandoned the irony.
Jarnow’s article is solid: you would trust it to pick you up at the airport. I cannot help thinking, though, that there are other science-based metaphors with which to explain America’s favorite semi-defunct choogly-type band.
Bose-Einstein Con-Dead-sate Three or four hundred degrees below zero, weird shit occurs: space-time shits its pants a bit. All matter stops, down to the quark, but the fucked-up thing is that because Brownian motion is the natural state of matter, the lack of activity actually generates energy. Money for nothing. (Except, obviously, it costs a shit-ton of money to get anywhere near Absolute Zero. You can’t just have Precarious Lee wire a dozen fridges together.)
Anyway: complete cessation of activity that still somehow generates money is a good spine to hang a Longread about the 90’s on, I think.
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (Of Tour) You might know where the tickets are, but you have lost your lighter. If you find a lighter, you will lose your friends. When you find your friends, you will not know where your wallet went. When a stranger brings you your wallet, you will lose your tickets.
In short: you are precluded from ever completely having your shit together by the very laws of reality. So, relax.
Punctuated Equilibrium vs. Phyletic Gradualism (As Pertains To The Dead) Did the Dead’s style/equipment/criminal records evolve persistently and regularly, or, having settled into a phenotype, remained stable for long periods of time? Also, who’s a bigger twat: Steven Jay Gould or Richard Dawkins?
String Theory String theory is fucking stupid.
M Theory Even dumber than String Theory.
Bernoulli’s Principle (When Applied To The Dead) Wind passes faster over the top of Billy than it does below him, which provides lift and enables Billy to fly.
Drake Equation (Let’s Just Assume That They All Apply To The Dead When A Pun Is Not Immediately Obvious) Number of galaxies X number of habitable planets X planets that have developed electric guitars X aliens with beards = trillions of jams throughout the universe. So many jams.
Fermi Paradox Y’know what, Drake: you’re full of shit. Where are the jams, Drake? Show me the jams.
(In my head, Drake and Fermi shared an office and it was a nightmare:
“Where is my coffee? I swear it must have been right there.”
“There is no coffee, Drake. You have no evidence of coffee.”
“The math says the coffee exists, and in abundance.”
“And yet, you are thirsty and sluggish. Asshole.”
And then they would hit each other with their Nobel prizes.)
Newton’s Laws of Dead Motion
A Grateful Dead in motion shall remain in motion, unless he is distracted, or gets tired, or is offered drugs, or is fighting with a drummer, or doesn’t want to remain in motion.
Force is required.
They will get you for this.
Mitscherlich’s Law of Isomorphism Crystals composed of the same number of similar elements tend to demonstrate isomorphism. Same with the Dead.
Did you just copy-and-paste that from Wikipedia at random?
Listen, man: new Dave’s Picks are coming out, Prince might be the new Garcia, and the new Joker is some sort of Redditor – I simply don’t have the time or interest in close-reading anyone’s Grand Summations on Chicago.
Maybe you’d like to. If there’s anything I should have noted in these articles, then bring it up in the comments; I just need to get these fucking tabs off my browser.
The Dubious End of the Grateful Dead, which is a decent article with an awful title, is by Stephen Hayden, who is a decent writer, and appears in Grantland, which is a terrible site. He watched from his couch and gets a little too into the “DEAD INVENTED SHOW BIZ” thing, but there’s nothing objectionable about the matter.
GRADE: Spending the night in Reno just to watch it die.
As Dead Exit, A Debate Will Not Fade Awayappeared in today’s New York Times and examines Chicago, and Santa Clara, from a little-examined point-of-view: what do assholes think? No one before this article had thought to ask what nasty and self-righteous baby boomers had to say. “I got mine,” a man born through sheer luck in the right place and time to see the Dead 400 times said. “Fuck these kids: if the Grateful Dead isn’t PRECISELY LIKE I WANT IT TO BE, then it’s shit.”
GRADE: Being described as “X years young.”
Fake Rainbows, Hologram Jerrys, and the Sloppy Legacy of the Grateful Dead’s Final Shows by Rob Mitchum can be found in Pitchfork right next to the 10.0 review of Chief Keef’s latest mixtape/deposition. It may be satire: references to Nuggets, Stephen Malkmus, and Sonic Youth? Yup. Insinuation that since people Pitchfork says is cool think the Dead are cool, then ipso facto? Uh-huh. That fucking Don Henley line? Oh, yeah.
GRADE: But, what does Steve Albini think?
Goodbye To Shakedown Street, The Grateful Dead’s Traveling Drug Bazaar can be found at Buzzfeed and was written by Amanda Chicago Lewis and is every bit as good as the Buzzfeed brand suggests. At the end of the piece, there is a quiz entitled “Which dead Dead member are you!?” I got Brent.
Ms. Lewis follows some suburban burn-out around as people goof on him; there are grand pronouncements; she quotes from far better writers and the whole thing blows donkeys. Nothing good has ever been created by anyone named Chicago; I include The Dinner Party.
GRADE: Is Your Fandom On Fleek Or Problematic?
Grateful Dead ‘Fare Thee Well’ Report Card by Stewart Sallo can, if read aloud, summon the Abandoned Gods and begin the Dickening. (It’s like the Quickening, but with dicks.) Let’s partially list the transgressions at random:
Maybe don’t open with John Lennon being shot in the face.
Don’t continue the analogy with Lennon being replaced for a Beatles tour because the Beatles weren’t a live act.
I can’t even with this.
“Problematic.”
This word, man.
STOP USING THAT WORD TO MEAN THAT YOU DON’T LIKE SOMETHING.
Besides the neat semantic trick of shifting agency onto the statement/person/action.
Calling, say, a book problematic is different than saying you have a problem with the book.
By employing the passive construction of “problematic,” you essentially relinquish choice to the now-inherent wrongness of our hypothetical book.
Stop blaming shit cuz you don’t like it.
Wait, isn’t this one of those Open-Letter writing ninnies who whined until Peter Shapiro called him and made him feel special and smart?
Ain’t nobody got time for this.
GRADE: You lose! You get nothing! Good day, sir!
You’re a ray of sunshine.
Sunshine’s made of skin cancer.
Jesus.
…
Anything good?
Well, yes: Call Them Hippies, But the Grateful Dead Were Tech Pioneers in Wired is a thoroughly intelligent and well-researched read by Jesse Jarnow. Good stuff on the almost-ludicrous myriad of ways the Dead did everything first, mostly due to luck and orneriness. Sure, it leaves out stuff like the Dead’s attempt to build a rail gun (it went poorly,) or their second attempt to build a rail gun (which went far more poorly in the sense that they succeeded and now, you know: the Grateful Dead has a rail gun.)
GRADE: Please don’t take your dick out in Foot Locker again.
Does anyone else remember Dave, and his Picks? They’re back!
Dave’s Picks 14 comes from the legendary, but mysterious, Academy of Music run at the end March, 1972, right before they hit Europe. As usual, it sounds pristine and clear and clean and wide; you can hear nascent (but still deeply spacey) Playin’ and the greatest love song that no one’s ever heard of Two Souls in Communion here (and while here, order the whole shebang.)
The Academy of Music in 1972 was a–
Dude.
–place full of whoopty-doo and also a lot of yippee.
I don’t know. But that’s better than you could do. It contains facts and talks to itself far less.
How much less?
None at all.
Bold choice. Ah, I was going to yell at David Lemjolnieuxir.
Oh, why? Of all the related ventures that fall under the umbrella of “Grateful Dead,” the one that bears his name is the most consistently high quality. And comes out on time.
I have some things I need to discuss with him.
At least let the man speak for himself.
As always, DL was interested and interesting when you could hear him over what I can only assume was a sharknado taking place immediately behind the camera. For those of you in countries in which the above video was blocked, please let me give you the transcript:
WHOOOOOOSHpigpenWHOOOOOSHthe bandWHOOOOOOOSHEurope WHOOOOOOSHlook a bird.
Luckily, the third and fourth DaP’s of the year generally come during less windy months in the Bay Area, so we have that to look forward to.
But, Enthusiasts, we here at Thoughts on the Dead need to look forward to nothing, because here for an exclusive interview that will go poorly is the man, himself: Dead archivist David Lemieux.
“Oh, hi. Am…am I a part of this now? I don’t think I want to be a part of this. Please don’t–”
Hey, Dave. Whatcha doing?
“–make me a part of whatever goes on in here. Um, hey.”
Great pick, man. Looking forward to it.
“Thanks. Listen, can I leave? Not to be rude, but: may I go?”
Dave, this is a safe space.
“It is not. It is explicitly not: you have created a semi-fictional version of me to use as a sock puppet for the purposes of–and I’m quoting you–yelling at me. It is the opposite of a safe space.”
Just a couple quick questions. I promise you I won’t accuse you of things.
“You do that a lot. It’s unsettling.”
No accusations. No weird stuff. You’re doing such a great job with the Dave’s Picks: they’re both a worthy successor to Dick’s Pick’s, and stand on their own. A neophyte would do worse than to simply listen to the DaP series in order to get an overview of the band’s music.
“Oh, all right.”
What’s the next Pick?
“Can’t talk aboot it.”
…
“Really?”
What? What did I do?
“Gonna gimme the thick Canadian accent, eh? Oh, c’mon!”
All right! Sorry. Sorry. You’re right: no one should do that to the English language. Gimme something on the next pick: it’s surely chosen?
“Ahhhh, ok. The show did not take place in California. Wait: that might be the one after this one. Disregard everything I said. It’s gonna be a great show, I know that.”
What about the Big Box Set? Are the rumors about the May ’77 Betty Boards true, and that’s the Big Box Set? Tell the nice people about it.
“It’s big. Bigger than Europe.”
Literally?
“Like, the actual continent?”
Or the rock band.
“Still talking physically?”
Yeah.
“Neither. It’s a couple dozen CD’s in a nice case with some books and stuff. There were five big Swedes in that band and Europe is a place. Places have to be bigger than things. It is their complementary nature.
“Things need places to be.
“And without things, how do you even know there’s a place? These two simple words encompass this reality and all others, at their cores.”
That’s some deep shit, David Lemieux.
“No charge.”
We should be in the next season of True Detective.
“Sure.”
Anyway: I like your videos. I might be one of the very, very few people who made it all the way through due to the wind noise which makes it painful to listen to with headphones, but I like them. Your enthusiasm is catching.
“Well, thanks. I appreciate that.”
I take your advice, too: I downloaded a copy of Mickey’s 1972 album Rolling Thunder. I also noticed you really made a point of the liner notes. Guy named Jammy Jerbil wrote ’em?
“Jesse Jarnow. He’s a tremendous young writer and smart young man and everybody is very, very high on the kid. Great, great writer and tremendous addition to the Grateful Dead creative family.”
…
Jimmy Jumpjump?
“I think we all see what you’re doing.”
IS HE PRETTIER THAN ME?
“Stop this. You’re just embarrassing yourself.”
NO, YOU’RE NOT. SHUT UP.
“Okay, what’s going on here? Jesse is very nice to you on Twitter.”
He is, yes.
“So, you should be happy for him.”
Yeah, that’s the way brains work.
“Regardless: do you even want to do liner notes? You’ve expressed no interest in ever writing a straight review and, you know, buddy: we just can’t have Mecha-Billy showing up in anything official.”
You mean you won’t admit to Mecha-Billy in anything official.
“Okay, whatever, sure. You want an audition?”
For the liner notes gig?
“Yeah.”
Now?
“Yeah. What show do you want to do?”
Any show? Wow. How about a dark horse teenage favorite, 9/10/91?
“Oh, 9/10/91? You need to bring Bruce and Branford’s lawyers into this? Good choice, dope. That’s why you can’t do the liner notes. Just pick something obvious.”
Fine, how about 4/12/78? The Duke show.
“Well, you know: not that obvious.”
…
There was no show I could have picked you wouldn’t have been mean about, is there?
“No. Okay, let’s hear the liner notes. Just gimme a taste.”
Huh. Okay.
“No rush.”
Don’t do that. Gimme a second. Okay: Webster’s dictionary defines “Grateful Dead” as a large and hairy brute, given to raping and pillaging, but only statutory rape, and it was the seventies.
…
“Are you kidding me?”
You’re saying it needs a polish?
“More references to rape than you usually see in liner notes to live albums by choogly-type bands.”
Okay, I can tone it down.
“Way down. Way, way, so much more way down.”
I got it, I got it: The Grateful Dead’s concert at Cameron Indoor Stadium on April 12th, 1978, only makes sense if you imagine that–through some arcane and evil magicks–cocaine has acheived physical form as a rabid polar bear rampaging through the building, and eating all the people who it didn’t infect with the Curse of the Werepolar Bear.
“Do you not hear the problem?”
Did I misspell Cameron?
“That was not the problem. Which, again, boggles the mind that you can’t hear.”
How about this: The Duke show: great, you know it by heart, blah blah, let’s talk about Bobby’s potato salad.
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