Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Seems legit.
The Dead didn’t surf: Northern California isn’t the place for it and they weren’t very much good at balancing on the ground, let alone a surfboard on the water. Also, Keith tried to put a wetsuit on once and they found him two days later all wrapped up in the thing, crying and scared.
There will be no April Fool’s Days shenanigans from these bloggings, for a number of reasons. I’ve hated the semi-holiday since my childhood. When I was four or five–and I remember this clearly–my parents pulled a “prank” on by telling me that The Muppet Movie was airing that night on TV. This was, of course, before Netflix or the internet: hell, it was before VCR’s were common, so every American living room had a TV Guide sitting on the coffee table, the shows you wished to see circled in ink. “Appointment viewing” wasn’t a catch-phrase: you watched things at a certain time or not at all. Maybe you could see an episode again during the summer, but you couldn’t bet on it.
And I loved The Muppet Movie. Not so much for Kermit and Miss Piggy; as a child, I couldn’t get enough of Charles Durning, so my little-kid heart exploded with joy at the thought of spending two hours with my furry friends: Fozzie and Gonzo and the scruffy, shaggy, slightly-sad piano player Keith Brent Rowlf the Dog!
Ha-ha, my parents cried after a few minutes. What an April’s Fool you are! The Muppet Movie isn’t on, just that comedy about the Korean War! (Sitcoms were allowed to be about proxy wars between us and the Commies back then, children.)
I pitched a conniption. Partially because of the disappointment, but mostly because of how shitty the joke was. Looking back, I can at least take solace in the fact that my parents weren’t doing it at the behest of a thoroughly untalented talk-show host, but still: this was the best they could do?
Pranks are the opposite of pizza or naps or boobies: even when they’re great, they still kind of suck.
The Dead never cared much for April Fool’s Day. Once, they opened a show on each other’s instruments. Garcia and Brent sat behind the drums, Billy strapped on Phil’s bass, and Mickey sang precisely as well as you would expect him to. When Bobby needs to help you remember the lyrics, something has gone horribly wrong.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRKeLuCevRI&w=560&h=315]
That was about it as far as Dead-related celebrations of the Feast of Fools went. Billy had been legally enjoined from pulling any pranks because they always ended up with refugee camps been set up and Doctors Without Borders being called in. Bobby pranked Keith one year by sleeping with Mrs. Donna Jean, but in all honesty, Bobby had no idea what the date was; he can’t help it if he’s lucky. People would occasionally try to prank Mickey and then Mickey would fly into a rage and break their collarbones.
The Dead didn’t care for April Fool’s Day for the same reason alcoholics stay in on New Year’s: they were Pranksters, and everybody hates a tourist.
Here’s a spectacular spectacle and bodacious creation from that magical year of 1977: 10/30 in Nap City. Overshadowed by the night before’s manic roar and stomp, as well as the first week of November’s streak of genius, this one deserves a listen.
Second set’s the juicy goodness here: Vice-Admiral of the Northern Fleet Mr. Completely pimps the weirdly placed Peggy-O for enbronzifcation, and he might be right: Check out Keith on the clavichord and LEAVE IT ON for the rest, a big Playing sandwich with a HoF Wharf Rat that threatens to tear the roof off the dump; then the downshift in the Reprise fading away to barely articulated string scrapings from Garcia until it wells up in no time at all and you remember just why they had two drummers, especially this year.
And then it’s Chuck Berry time: you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.
See what Bobby’s doing? Right hand guarding his dick, eyes on Billy? Smart move, Bobert.
Because Billy has clearly caught sight of dick.
After following disco down the rabbit hole, the Dead became infatuated with kung fu movies, and began production immediately on a film project that–against the very laws of nature–produced a negative amount of footage. Not only did they not shoot anything usable for themselves, but Garcia burned down a local movie theater the night before they began; it was a net loss, basically.
Garcia was being played by Sammo Hung. Or he was playing Sammo Hung–a lot of ideas hadn’t been finalized or written down or were any good in the first place. But Sammo was the only fat Asian guy they knew besides Buddha, who was a coke dealer from the Tenderloin.
Keith was really looking forward to the movie, as it would give him a chance to showcase his kung fu. The fact that the strictest definition of kung fu that Keith was capable of articulating was “That Jap shit all the black guys like. It’s far out,” really didn’t factor into Keith’s belief in his own chi and under the tutelage of his Shifu–who was the lump of soiled bed sheets in the corner Keith mistook for a person damn near every night–Keith had invented his own style: Sleepy Possum.
Keith would prepare for the match by ingesting depressing levels of depressants and by the time his opponent got there, Sleepy Possum was in full swing. The rival would gingerly approach Keith, looking around to make sure this wasn’t some sort of trap. They would usually call out, “Hello? Are you all right?” And stand directly over him, maybe a little nudge, tap with the foot.
And then Keith would punch the guy in the dick because it wasn’t Keith: it was Billy employing his Dickpunching Chameoleon stlye! (To be honest, Billy had been disguising himself and/or hiding in order to gain more direct access to his lover, the Cosmic Embodiment of Chaos, Madame Chao herself, who could only be wooed by the sound of a million souls crying out in terror, and Billy, being a canny woo-er of women both Metaphysical and Drunk, was playing this one slowly. That craven climber Tarkin blew up that backwater to impress her, and Madame Chao twirled around the dance floor with him, before slinking away in the middle of the night and leaving that thermal port hatch unlocked. Not Billy’s style: one-by-one, so she would always think about him. And Chaos was always on Billy’s mind, too.)
What was I talking about?
I have quite literally no idea.
Right: Billy becoming a master of disguise in order to more ably punch the dicks he needed to punch.
It’s weird that I understood that sentence.
It was just a trend that Billy was riding out of boredom and laziness. If everyone was going to be into kung fu, then Billy would let them think the dickpunching and disguises were some gay ninjitsu shit or whatever. Later on, in the 80’s, Billy would insist–to the point of violence–that the club they were referring to on his jacket when it declared him a member was the dickpuncher’s club, and he wanted to be in good standing. It’s Billy, what do you want: acceptable human behavior?
Mickey, as would be expected took it from goofy appreciation straight into cultural appropriation. FOR THE FIRST TIME, TotD can reveal that the true reason for the lack of Summer ’77 shows was not that Mickey had broken his arm in a drunken car accident, but that he had decamped to the Shaolin temples, which he though were in Japan. Through a series of escalating incidents in the executive lounges along his connecting flights, Mickey was sold in sex slavery. To be technical, which is what the embassy was in a very rude manner, Mickey might have sold himself into sex slavery. Who you want to believe, a warehouse full of evidence and court documents, or me?
Mickey was trying to learn how to look cool while simultaneously kicking people and wearing pajamas. This is the essence of the Martial Arts, and that’s what Mickey was going for before three shows a night in Bangkok shooting ping-pong balls out of his shoulder-vagina. (mickey has a shoulder-Vagina: look it up.)
Phil showed up the first day of shooting five hours late and surly. He asked for the script, was told there wasn’t one, set his empty down and left.
Themed box sets are the wave of the future, mark my words. Enough with these pedestrian groupings, lumping together shows merely because they appeared consecutively in the timestream.
How primitive.
One could argue that the shows have become free from temporality now, so far away from the piss-and-shit smell of the actual reality of “a show.” An Event, a thing to be done, gone to, waited on, hoped for, remembered fondly and dearly and well. Strip away the context, and we’re left with just the text–only the music remains.
So why, then, are our box sets still chained–enthralled!–by the simian processes and demands of time? We need to see the Dead’s career from above and follow the threads that link performances from across the years, even decades. Here are a few that the band have been working on:
TC: Secret Hero? It barely filled a CD, so this project was shelved and the money diverted to fund a cobbling program to help inner-city youths overcome the lures of drugs, gangs, and chickenheads by learning how to make TC’s fancy little booties. The project was a failure and resulted in multiple deaths.
Billy’s Got His Dick Out Randomly, but regularly, Billy would play the show with his dick out. You could look, you could not look.Billy didn’t care: it was muggy or something, his hog wanted some air, and Billy was a fucking American–what are you gonna do about it? This 25-CD package was to include the infamous 1973 show in St. Louis when Billy’s dick took his own dick out, and everybody freaked right the fuck out, because, honestly: what the fuck, Billy? We will not have your forays into infinite masculine regression up in this muhfuh, if you please.
January ’78: It’s Bobby Time! Those three or four shows in wich Garcia lost his voice, Bobby lost his mind, and we lost our patience. There’s only so many Mexicali Blues in a row a man can bear.
The Complete Wagner’s Ring Cycle by Phil and Ned 12 discs of atonal, non-synchronous, apathetirythmic (that’s when you know where the beat is, but you don’t care) musiqúe concrete loosely alluding to, obliquely referencing, and distinctly ignoring the text of Wagner’s multi-evening magnum opus. Sometime in August of ’73, Phil and Ned shot way too much crystal meth and did all 16 hours at once and the fall-off from beginning to end is rather severe. At one point, Phil audibly wanders out of the studio and has to be lured back in with candy.
GD: The Tahoe Tweezer by the Grateful Dead Like, nine or ten discs of the Tahoe Tweezer on repeat. The packaging is a plain cardboard box containing a poorly Xeroxed photo of Phish with Garcia’s head taped over all four of theirs’. It’s both disconcerting and telling how far through the decision-making process this idea got before falling by the wayside.
Having Fun Onstage With Bobby The yellow dog joke! The deer poaching joke! The clever asides, wisecracks, and japes! That weird Okie accent he does for no reason sometimes! Two full discs of him ending songs with ‘THANK you!’ in that high-pitched voice. It was scheduled to be released last July, but Bobby locked himself in to TRI Studios for three days and immediately upon getting free, locked himself out. Then he soured on the whole project, which is a shame because the gold lame suit he had ordered from Nudie Cohen had cost $45,000.
Egypt ’79, ’83, ’84! During the Heineken Years, Phil would occasionally just refuse to believe they weren’t back in the Land of the Pharaohs and mostly people just rolled with it, except for when, at one of the ’83 shows, Phil saw a swarthy guy backstage and screamed, “GET DOWN, ANWAR SADAT!’ and tackled the poor hairy bastard. Covering five mostly-well played shows that take place mostly in desert cities, although the ’84 was in Maine, which worried people, but amused Billy because he’s awful.
The new Dave’s Picks, number 9 of what I hope will be an infinite series, has been announced. The Dead’s only Montana show, and it is am all-time, but perhaps underrated great: 5/14/74 in Missoula. This is in Big Sky Country, which has earned its name by having nothing in the way of an immense canopy of blue. I’ve seen pictures, and if I were there and ventured outside, I would immediately drop to the ground, clutching at shrubbery in fear of shooting upwards: falling to death in reverse, ever upwards.
Billy’s deft snare work and light hand cymbal was always what separated him from the common, thundering horde. Billy put the ‘b’ in subtle, and that was evident on the cowboy songs at this show, and they played fucking all of them. Bobby saw that sky and screamed, “Bobby the Kid RIDES tonight!” And then he leapt on the back of a hefty groupie and put his spurs (Bobby was wearing his spurs; this would be the last time it was permitted) into her sides. Except, you know: she wasn’t a horse, so she just had the wind knocked out of her and collapsed. Bobby skinned his knee.
And listen to 3.18 into the Weather Report Suite, when Garcia’s guitar chokes back a tear…
The PITB (I always hated that shorthand: my brain insists on pronouncing it like a Bronx Cheer) from Montana is a masterpiece, with a the band stretching out for hours in between Mrs. Donna Jean’s wails. Keith stays on the down-and-dirty Rhodes piano and Bobby plays flamenco flourishes until they completely whiff on the transition back into the song, each of them stuttering and deferring to the others, like Englishmen arriving at a door simultaneously.
The Dark Star is a ’74 Dark Star, and if you don’t know what that means, then I hope Billy punch your mother right in her dick.
The Pig and Keith and Brent thing is well-intentioned, and the attention to detail on Phil is laudable, but if Billy or Mickey ever saw how small they were in comparison to everyone else, the rest of the afternoon would be measured in Holiday Inn bars, “borrowed” cars in ditches, and small East African military dictatorships that both flourish under Billy and Mickey’s benevolent, though confused rule, then implode into death and sin, when MIckey finds different native people banging on things and drags Billy along.
It’s a Stealie! Their faces make–
Yes, we allOOH, a Stealie!
—a Steal…you are a horrid thief: the thunder of others’ is your prize.
…
Nice.
Plus, Billy and Mickey are staring fucking LOVINGLY at each other. It’s unsettling.
And where’s fucking Donna?
They didn’t travel light.
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