Bobby was wearing his mask before the show, but he caught sight of himself in a mirror and started screeching “MY FACE! MY FACE!” and it took an hour and three Hershey bars to get him out of the utility shed.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: phil lesh (Page 84 of 105)
Standing in a shaft of light…
What the fuck is that thing on Billy’s head?
Seriously, I’m freaking out here.
Damned kids and their instagram. Filters all over everything to make it look cool.
Also, three songs later, Bobby whipped the scrunchie out and he and Mrs. Donna Jean had a hair-off for 20 minutes until Phil yelled at them.
Laying my dong on the table here: Phil is giving me a Spider Boner, which is when your arousal is so great it frightens you, or vice versa.
The ‘stache is like mass murder: sometimes you’re forced to admire something evil just for its scope.
Phil and I are both of the opinion that anyone Gregg Allman hates as much as he hates Dickey Betts can’t be all bad.
- Keith, dude…don’t put your face on the goddamn mop. Can’t even believe I had to tell a man in his thirties that, to be honest.
- That look Garcia’s giving Bobby’s mop? That’s the look, that’s the look of love.
- Billy’s a fucking Tom Waits song over there.
- The skull cradled in Mickey’s arm wasn’t a skull the morning this photo was taken: it was a man, a man with a family and a wife and a mistress and a boyfriend who just happened to order the last bear claw at the coffee shop. Mickey loves his bear claws.
- Good evening, Mrs. Donna Jean: would you care to join me for some wine and cheese and barbiturates?
- Seriously, Billy looks like the first chapter of Flowers for Algernon.
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.
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