Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: mickey (Page 3 of 5)

Saturday Night Dead

June 6, 2012 / / 0 Comments

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.

Casey Jones on SNL

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!

Got To Find A Number To Use

June 4, 2012 / / 0 Comments

8 – Hallelujah hatracks (Really?)

4 – Dead keyboard players. Not 4 keyboardists for the Dead, 4 dead keyboardists. How is it possible that the mortality rate for musicians in an improvisational country-rock outfit is higher than that of those guys who parachute into forest fires? The family crest of the Dead keyboardist read Pertransiit sine me (Go on without me).

3 – Fancy little shoe racks for TC’s fancy little ankle boots.

210,000 – Number of dollars Lenny Hart stole from the band while “managing” them.

40,000 – Number of dollars Lenny Hart stole during the meeting to try to explain the financial irregularities when someone left the door to the safe open. They were trusting men, at first, our Dead.

88 – Keys on a piano.

176 – How many Keith usually saw.

1 – Number of times a crew member looked Phil directly in the eyes. Just that once.

95 – Live albums released, 110 if you count the Digital Download series (One of which I’m listening to now, the Donna-tacular 4/30/77 at the Palladium in NYC. (Audience copy, if you’re into that sort of thing. Harumph. But, seriously, it’s an AUD: think about whether that’s the person you want to be. AUD guys are to Enthusiasts what fat guys fluent in Klingon are to Trekkies)

13 – Studio albums

2 – That were any good at all.

0 – Number of times the question, “How many fingers does the Grateful Dead have?” can be answered with a whole number.

12,000 – Amount extra versus a standard P.A. it cost to tote the Wall of Sound around. Luckily, it was worth the price because it was “the righteous thing to do, man.” That is an exact quote from Blair Jackson, who was actually talking about something else entirely, but FUCK CONTEXT.

6 – Months it took the righteous thing to do to break the band’s back.

2 – Drummers.

1 – Drummer.

2 – Drummers.

12 – Teenage male hustlers found horribly mutilated throughout the 80’s in a pattern correlating to the Dead’s tour schedule. The culprit was never found, but was described as having luxuriously thick blond hair and singing the high harmony part. The pattern stopped briefly in 1989, but picked up again–far more rapidly now–in 1990, except this time it was females and there’s a weird theory that there were two guys based round this mystery man they call Suburban Lanky. Doesn’t make any sense at all, if you asked me.

40 – Milliseconds after Bobby asked, “Tonight, what if we open…wait for it…with the encore?” that his dick got punched.

300,000  – Dollars spent by Mickey in the winter of 1977 to create his most ambitious percussive masterpiece to date. Mickey planned and rehearsed diligently. He spent over a year writing the score and hired musicians from all over the world, building them a brand-new studio. Then he locked them in that brand-new studio, set it ablaze, and recorded their dying screams. Lou Reed is quoted as saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” The album was never released, except in Norway where it reached #31 on the Billboard-flurgen charts.

14 – Bucks for the Oven-Roasted Shrimp and Sun-Dried Tomatoes at Phil’s new hotspot, Terrapin Crossroads. Come for the food, stay for the Phil!

Swing, Auditorium!

May 28, 2012 / / 1 Comment

I want to write a book called Tuesdays with Mickey, in which Mickey shares life lessons about the power of drumming and then tries to choke me.

Show of the Day: 2/26/77  The Help>Slip>Franklin’s is terrifyingly good, especially the Slipknot! and, it’s the first time they’ve ever played Terrapin and they choose to open with it.  You might wonder if Garcia nailed all the lyrics to Terrapin. He did, Bobby: first time. How about that?

Ramble On Rosalita

March 3, 2012 / / 6 Comments

I was raised in New Jersey, so if you say bad things about Bruce Springsteen, I have to impregnate your cousin. No, not that cousin, the other one, the one no one would expect. My family takes our New Jersey rock seriously: my cousin once punched out Jon Bon Jovi. That is an actual true fact.

For graduation, one of my friends gave, as a “graduation gift” (don’t ask, it was a suburban thing), around 10 people the exact same CD, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Not only was it the ballsiest act of record snobbery in the books, but it was the most successful: all of those recipients still listen to the record regularly. Because it’s The Wild and the Innocent, man, But it was also telling for the fact that in New Jersey in the 90’s, everyone was simply assumed to be into Bruce.

So, what do Bruce and the Dead have in common? Quite a bit, but not very much at all.

They both made their bones as live performers, got ripped off by shady idiots, and became beloved by white people everywhere. The Dead built a Wall of Sound, Bruce ripped off the wall of sound. But the analogy quickly falls apart.

Both favored the approach of putting as many people on the payroll as possible, but Bruce hired employees, and then yelled at them a lot. Which shouldn’t be held against him: it’s how most bandleaders have always treated their musicians. James Brown used to fine people for missing notes. Gene Krupa only played the drums for the permission it gave him to scream at sax players. If E Street bassist Garry W. Tallent had ever tried any of Phil’s multi-octave meanderings, Bruce would’ve just outright beat him to death in front of the rest of the band as a warning.

Bruce and the Dead never met, seemingly. They certainly never jammed together. Neither Mickey nor Phil would have taken well to being counted off in such a commanding tone; it would have ended poorly.

Yes, both favored 8-minute long songs, but in Bruce’s case, 5 of those minutes were the band vamping while he told a story about his father. Or, possibly, about the Highway of Hope or the River of Faith or the Off-Ramp of False Equivalence or whatever the fuck he’s been yammering about for the past 15 years ago or so.

(Plus, Bruce’s accent has now lapsed into either speech impediment or elaborate put-on. Growing up, I had a friend whose mom had gone to high school with Bruce, because everyone in New Jersey is required to have some connection, however tenuous, to Bruce under penalty of someone going, “What the fuck, you don’t have a tenuous connection to Bruce? What the fuck over here?” Do I need to mention that this woman who grew up not two miles from Springsteen’s house at the exact same time had not one hint of grizzled twang to her voice? At the beginning of his career, Bruce sounded like a sweathog, but now he’s Johnny 99% and he wants to Occupy It (All Night Long.))

Although, I certainly would have enjoyed hearing Garcia try to do one of Bruce’s raps:

“So, see, my dad, who was very much kind of his own avatar? If you can grok me on that, y’know? So, he was very much a man of his times–ooh, wait, I heard this cool thing about watches…

“GIVE ME YOUR LIVERS!”

“Someone take away Phil’s mic, please.”

My Best Friend, My Drummer

March 2, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Listen to this, starting at around a minute in. It’s the Stir it Up jam, you know it. But listen again to how the very instant that Garcia picks up the thread that he’s been doodling at, Billy’s right there with him.

Billy gets short shrift. The other chimps built a Wall of Sound around him, (literally*), but Billy was still sitting there like the lost Murray brother with his pervy mustache and dinky little jazz kit. Whenever Mickey wasn’t around to rope Billy into his percussion related…ideas…Billy’s entire kit would fit in the trunk and backseat of an El Dorado. He gets overshadowed, though, partially stemming from the fact that Billy is deliberately kept away from people, especially people who have crotches they don’t want punched.

Billy should be listed along with Charlie Watts and Animal Muppet as one of the greatest drummers of the time, but he labors under the double canopy of Garcia and Phil. Phil, as we have discussed, preferred to play all the notes. Other bassists would play some of the notes. Actually, most bassists would play merely a few notes repeatedly. Not our Phil, so it’s easy to forget The Rule:

The sound of a great band is made by two guys, usually the drummer and the rhythm guitarist, but sometimes the bassist. No exceptions.**

The Stones are Keith and Charlie. Van Halen is those two aging tweakers and whatever hepatitis-infected blond they can rope into screaming, “GLARBLE MONNA HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT!” for a three-month tour that lasts five weeks and ends in recriminations, lawsuits, and, finally, discussion of Wolfgang’s unfortunate resemblance in every single way possible  to A. J. Soprano that was totally uncalled for. Not cool, man.

The sound of the Dead is Garcia and Billy. Dead and gone.

(We do, though, have recordings of the shows, which we may listen to at our leisure. For your enjoyment, and to bolster my pro-Billy stance, listen to the Mind Left Body Jam in this China/Rider. It proves my point: Phil played the bass, but Billy played songs. Man.)

*Billy refused to sit directly under the massive center speaker conglomeration, primarily because he had been up all night doing drugs and shooting at the Invisible Ones with the people who erected the thing.

**I am including Rush in this. The sound of Rush is generated by Geddy and Neil. Lifeson, while technically known in official musician terminology as “a motherfucker,” has always been generic, generally.

ADDENDUM

Recently having written a post about Springsteen, I have come to the realization that the sound of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band is generated by Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, making it an ultra-rare piano/drum combo.

Another Dick’s Pick In The Wall

February 22, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The Wall of Sound. Sweet heavenly Jesus: the Wall of Sound. These befuddled men asked themselves, “How much Sound do we need?” The answer–apparently–was, “A Wall’s worth.”

The problem was not really with the Sound so much as it was with the Wall. It was also an intractable problem, due to the fact that the very definition of ‘wall’ is something you cannot move easily, if at all. Hadrian’s Wall? Great Wall of China? All still there, mostly because of bunch of longhairs and bikers didn’t drag them around the midwest for months at a time. That a wall not be portable is its sine non qua is obvious with even my cursory knowledge of siege warfare, all entirely gleaned from 8th grade World history and whichever Lord of the Rings movie had the big castle fight scene. You know the name: it was the one with the little gay hobbits and the monsters and dragons and it lasts for nineteen fucking hours.  (Although, seriously, what kind of nimrod builds a castle with a drainage canal thing in the FRONT, where is easily accesible to your enemy, provided your enemy is a monster, WHICH HE TOTALLY IS AND YOU KNEW THAT GOING INTO THIS, SO WHY DIDN’T YOU BRICK THAT THING UP, GRAND MOFF TARKIN?)

It took 12 hours to set the Wall up. The Amish can knock off 6, 7 barns in that amount of time. If something takes you twelve hours to build, it should be permanent. These facts, though, pale in comparison to the fact that they chose to do this during a gas crisis. You cannot haul 75 tons of anything around during a gas crisis and expect to turn a profit: it’s one of the first things they teach you at Wharton, right after, “mention Trump and you fail.”

The Wall didn’t stop at the speakers, all of which were custom-built at a special facility in Daly City, CA that lights its workshop with burning cash. No, the boys also had new space-age instruments made up for themselves, most famously Garcia’s Wolf. Phil also got a new bass, so heavy and laden with doom it looked like the melee weapon of Phil-Garr the Grateful.

I will break my own iron held rule about research to quote at length:

Phil is using a new quadraphonic bass, the electronics of which were designed and built by George Mundy and the body and pickups by Rick Turner. The new bass has the same versatile qualities as the old bass: three pickups (bass and treble pickups covering all the strings, and a quad pickup which has a separate signal for each string); on each of the bass and treble pickups there are controls which enable him to select 1) the band-width of the filter, 2) the center frequency of the filter, 3) the kind of filter being used and 4) mix unequalized unfiltered direct sound with the filtered sound. The variety of sounds which can be achieved on the bass is the result of the many different combinations of these variables which can be used. The new bass has a frequency response with a crisper tone, and two quad pickups instead of one, the new one being a frequency-detector pickup. The main addition to the new bass is a Digital Decoding Circuit such that ten push buttons on the bass allow Phil to select any one of sixteen quad spatial arrangements of his speakers, and eight in stereo mode

I DARE you to make sense of any of that. And then factor in the fact that this is all to play Chuck Berry tunes. You can see how the Hiatus was, maybe, a necessary and inevitable thing–what comes after the wall of Sound, after all? The band made a brief and desultory attempt to build an exact replica of Versailles out of speakers, drugs, and promissory notes, but after spending $200,000 and Mickey burning down the model, the boys lost interest.

It all sounded different after they came back. The music held less secrets, but it would have been good to hear the Wall with Mickey, too. Imagine this Samson coming through a sound system that in Olden Days would have been worshipped as a god, perhaps even two gods and a saint. The Wall had that much impressive in it: pilgrims would often leave notes in the cracks of the Wall, which was a horrible, horrible idea for two reasons. First, members of the band would invariably mistake the folded-up paper prayers for bindles of narcotics and savagely knock you to the ground trying to get to them; second, Steve Parrish had a strict policy about punching anyone who touched the Wall.

Record Shmecord

February 20, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Terrapin Station is majestic. Its lineage, probably, is the Weather Report Suite, but it also resembles in its twists and turns the early songs, with their crudely welded-together bits (Looking at you, New Potato Caboose.) Not Terrapin: each section flows logically from the previous theme, like a an elegantly proven math equation. It slaloms like whatever louche aristo is the skiing champion this year. It requires finesse and exquisite timing to pull it off; some nights they had neither. But when they did it was the emotional highlight of any show. It is a grand entry into the canon.

Terrapin Station, a bit less. This was the album wherein, no longer able to generate drug addicts in-house, were forced to draft a drug addict from another band. They also tried to trade Keith for a speed freak and an alcoholic to be named later, but the deal fell through.

Terrapin Station was produced by Lowell George from Little Feat Keith Olsen, as much as anyone can produce the Grateful Dead. He tried to erase a percussion track of Mickey’s, and if you’ve been a loyal reader of this blog, you’ll know what happened next: everybody’s favorite fun game, Mickey Physically Assaults Business Associates. None of their records were any good. Common knowledge.

So: we can either spend 400 more words mocking In the Dark, or we can check out Phil (with GREAT HAIR!) leading the way through a 1972 China>Rider in some city that had been occupied by Nazis within the decade.

Good choice:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InUzFclYD00]

Addendum: In the comments below, a Fellow Enthusiast points out that I originally conflated Lowell George, who was actually the producer for Shakedown Street with Keith Olsen, the true producer of Terrapin Station. This commenter is correct and wins a year’s supply of  “Brent Mydland’s Silky!” The hair products for men with silky hair. Keep it Silky, boys!

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.

Good Lovin’

February 14, 2012 / / 1 Comment

The Dead used to masturbate together. Not just in the old days, when Pig would whip out his thick, greasy hog and announce, “Let’s put our hands IN our pockets!” No, it was a constant throughout the years. Lineup changes, health problems, financial chaos? The music got them through, along with regular sessions of group masturbation. It was men being men together and, occasionally, all over each other. And what could be wrong with that?

Oh, hell, I can’t hold on to this horrible knowledge any longer: the Dead were gay. Very, very gay. And much like metal fans with Rob Halford and Ronnie James Dio, we had absolutely no idea. This the kind of thing that Dead.net won’t tell you, my friends! LOOK AT THE EVIDENCES!

Do I even have to make the joke about Garcia being a bear and Bobby being a twink and Phil being the guy at the orgy still wearing socks?

Ramrod. His name was Ramrod. No matter where on the planet you are, if you get into a taxi and say “Ramrod,” you will be taken to a gay bar.

Mustaches, mustaches, mustaches.

(Okay, this has to stop: I’m just taking out some frustration on you, Fellow Enthusiast. Sitting here listening to 2/23/93–Ornette Coleman sits in for the last half of the second set and they open up with a Mardi Gras-infused Iko Iko and IT’S AWESOME except I’m breaking rules all over the place: a Vince? Listening to a Vince, even with Ornette Coleman? PLUS, I’m listening to drums->space and IT’S AWESOME, TOO and now I’m worried that I’m turning into one of those drums->space people and the only step after that is quibbling about different recordings of the same show. That’s no life at all.)

(Oh, right: the Dead are, of course, not actually practicing homosexuals, which, of course, would be perfectly fine and would probably be real good for Mickey. He needs some masculine energy around. Not Billy, though. Let’s face it, Billy was gonna be punching anyone you placed in front of him. Also, I don’t think Dio’s gay: like always, I will be sticking to my ban on research of any sort. If Dio were gay, though, he’d be roaming around the fantasy world of Homoslavia with his giant penis sword, riding on top of a penis dragon, and penising everything around him with his penis. Penis.)

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