Honestly, Garcia: that guy next to you is trouble.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: john kahn (Page 3 of 3)
Never trust a bass player with that haircut, and I say this as a former bass player who had that precise haircut.
Listening to too much Dead? (As if that were a possibility.) here are some helpful signs that you might want to load up some other bands on your iTunes.
- You can’t look at your watch without relating the time to show dates: e.g. “It’s 2:18. BEAUTIFUL JAM.”
- Your first thought upon hearing of Russia’s invasion of the Crimea is, “Billy could stop this in 15 minutes.”
- You get a cat, name it John Kahn, and it immediately starts enabling your heroin habit.
- The only reason you do leg day at the gym is because Halloween is coming and you’re going as 80’s Bobby. Again.
- You wonder how John Travolta would pronounce Phil’s name. (Paul Loing.)
- You’ve listened to the entire 30-minute rehearsal version of My Brother Esau from 3/14/83.
- You’re 1500 posts in to a maddeningly obscure blog about the Dead.
- You refer to fat people as Wall of Pounds.
- You’re already camped out in front of Barnes & Noble waiting for Billy’s book.
- And you’re in costume.
- And you’ve punched three booksellers, seven random pedestrians, and a dachshund named Colin in the dick.
- Someone asks you what you want for your birthday and you automatically answer, “The security alarm code to Bobby’s house.”
- At international customs they ask you if you have anything to declare and you say, “1979 was really underrated.”
- You throw a tantrum when Words With Friends won’t accept “Godchaux.”
RUN, BOBBY, RUN!
This is how it always happens: a nice stranger on the internet pays you a compliment and BOOM: listening to the fuckin’ Jerry Band. (And don’t give me any guff about “Legion of Mary,” or “Reconstruction,” or whatever: it was always just the fuckin’ Jerry Band. And what that was, was Garcia and John Kahn making dope money.)
The Jerry Band mostly sucked, except for the times when, coincidentally, people like Merl Saunders or Ronnie Tutt were in the band. Odd how that happened. Otherwise, it was ponderous, unmemorable Dylan covers.
My main memory of The Jerry Band was my Dead Bodhidharma, Glenn. He dug the ’90 live CD, the one with Simple Twist of Fate on it, in which John Kahn takes an eight-minute bass solo (strike three) in the wrong key. Or for the first time on a fretless. Or with a number of head wounds and contusions. these are only some of the excuses he might have for whatever it was I was forced to sit through.
P.S. Speaking of intonational follies, check out Second that Emotion from 4/13/71 at the Catholic Youth Center in Scranton, PA. The intro answers the question “Could Garcia be so out of tune, he actually becomes in tune the long way around?”
P.P.S. Seriously, go find this recording: Jerry Garcia Collection vol 1: Legion of Mary.
My usual feeling about Dead-related side projects (BURN IT WITH FIRE) aside, the Legion of Mary, with Ronnie Tutt on the drums, kinda rocks. Ronnie also played for Elvis as part of his powerful Vegas show band. Ronnie was a bit of a Motherfucker.
Merl is, of course, Merl: no matter where merl is, when he walks in the room, people say: The keyboard player’s here. It might be the hat. Martin Fiero is on the saxophone, which is ususally a death knell, bit he’s killing it AND he was in the horn section of my beloved horn shows, so he gets a lifetime pass from me.
John Kahn remains a drug dealer who owned a bass.
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