…You killed my keyboardist. Prepare to die.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: phil lesh (Page 98 of 105)
Yes, clearly it’s Titanic and Mind-Blowing and Earth-Shattering and Vast and Under-Rated and Over-Rated and Just Exactly Perfect, but the one quality that no one ever mentions is accessible. And 5/8/77 is accessible in spades.
Sure, there’s jamming, but it’s not the Neptunian jazz of ’74, nor the acid-skronk of ’69. There’s no waste; Garcia’s long, liquid lines are building to something, always, and Billy and Mickey have their feet on the gas pedals with a safecracker’s whispered touch–little bit faster here, slower there, bigger now Bigger Now BIGGER NOW and shhhhhhh…
There is command.
The greatest ever? No. not even the best show that week–5/5, with its majestic Sugaree gets my vote–but Barton Hall has something that only Veneta and Egypt also have: mystique. Fame. Perhaps we can’t even make an honest reckoning of that night anymore. Read some Don DeLillo; it’s good for you:
Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides — pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.
A long silence followed.
“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.
We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”
There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.
“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”
Another silence ensued.
“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.
He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.
“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?”
If you heard it today for the first time, would you recognize it as THE GREATEST DEAD SHOW OF ALL TIME EVER? Would the shock of genius, the green flash of recognition hit you, run up your spine, Billypunch the dick of your soul?
If you really did meet the Buddha on the side of the road…would you know it was him?
PS I have deliberately not linked to the show on the archive because you have it.
This is–without a doubt–the worst case of White Man’s Overbite ever recorded.
And if you fall in my direction, don’t expect no help at all.
Right? Was that what you were thinking? “Help him, Phil. Stop singing the song that no one really likes and pick Bobby up.” Was that your first thought?
Because Phil’s first thought was, “Again?”
So cut him some slack. Also, give Phil credit for not immediately Mola Ram-ing Bobby’s liver out of his abdomen while he was down.
you don’t know how precious a stool is until the road crew brings you one.
you don’t know why all these people are in your living room.
you don’t know how it feels to be me.
you don’t know where garcia is.
you don’t know how you knew that if you ever collapsed onstage that phil would just keep singing, but you were right.
you don’t know how bitcoin works and, quite frankly, don’t wish to know.
you don’t know how easy it is to love you.
you don’t know if the doctor said one pill every four hours or four pills every hour so NOM NOM NOM PILLS YAY GO SLEEP NOW KTHXBAI.
you don’t know where that highway leads to.
you don’t know what happened to the rest of your pants.
you don’t know how hard it is to love you.
you don’t know the way to minglewood.
you don’t know the way to el paso.
you don’t know the way to mexicali.
you don’t know the way back to new york city, but i do believe you’ve had enough.
Sound quality is the thing–it’s a deal breaker for me. I need my shows to sound like a closeted preacher’s marriage: clean and separated.
“You gotta kinda struggle to hear everything, man, but it’s totally worth it.”
No, it is not. It sounds like a Belgian farting in a laundromat. There must be separation: Garcia and Phil at 12 o’clock, Keith and Bobby at 10 and 2. Billy spreads out along the bottom or Billy on the left and Mickey on the right. No exceptions.
My quest for aural satiety continues, festers, defines. It broods in the winter and sweats like a holy man in the summers. Some enthusiasts of an audiophile bent will settle for nothing less than FLAC files, while others–confused, spotty lads and broken old men the lot of them–content themselves with mp3 files.
I, on the other hand, make Charlie Miller come to my house and sing to me.
All nonsense, of course. No stereo here in Fillmore South with which to crank tunes, bitchin’ or otherwise. Just one of those little dock things and the computer, whom I hate and fear and will one day beg to come back. You know: Dad.
Computers combine the worst qualities of dogs and cats: they’re as stupid and literal and single-minded as dogs, and as annoyingly independent as cats. (To think of the computer this way falls into what I call the “canine fallacy,” which is that adorable habit humans have of thinking of all animals as weird-shaped dogs, much to their chagrin as a bull moose stompjacks their heads over and over with his dinner-plate sized foot. Fewer people would get mauled and eaten each year if they remembered that, out of the entire animal kingdom, only dogs have a category called “buddy.”)
Where do you even begin? The headband, right? You’d have to start with the handband.
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