Thoughts On The Dead

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

Tag: Rolling Stone

Thoughts On Random Entries In The Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums List Without Research

September 23, 2020 / / 13 Comments

No lie that title, Enthusiasts! The choices shall be made by Siri, as human beings are terrible at generating random numbers (and also I would probably cheat) and the tenets of Without Research shall be strictly adhered to (although I’m probably gonna cheat). Let’s jump right in and start having rockyroll fun!

#231 Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Damn The Torpedoes 

In my head, Tom Petty and Prince died the same week. (It was 2017, I think, and we all asked “How could a year be any worse?” and God heard us and saw an opening for one of His little jokes.) It was that Chinese hyperdope, which one can only assume has ceased causing trouble, as it’s no longer ever in the news.

#412 Smokey Robinson & the Miracles Going to a Go-Go

Tracks Of My Tears is on this one, and the title track, but I gotta be honest with you, Enthusiasts: Smokey Robinson has frightened me since I was Nephew on the Dead’s age. Something off about that guy.

#448 Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul

It should be noted in these times of strife that the house bands of all those old soul labels–Sun and Stax and Motown–were integrated during an era when interracial jamming was still illegal in 11 states. (FUN FACT: the ban on musical miscegenation is still on the books in Mississippi, so Dead & Company might wanna think twice about booking one of the Biloxi casinos.)

#200 Sade Diamond Life

I support the concept of Sade, but I haven’t followed the woman’s career with any attention. This is the one with Smooth Operator on it. Sade was born in Nigeria, but moved to the Cotswalds as a kid. She was at Live Aid. Seems lovely. I have now exhausted my Sade knowledge.

#32 Beyoncé Lemonade

I am not proud of the fact that of the five picks so far, I’ve only listened to the one by the white guy. Not proud of that at all, but I’ll admit it to you. And I know the hits from the Smokey, Otis, and Sade records; I’m not unfamiliar. Formation is on this one, which is the number she did at the Super Bowl when she wore that military leotard. Beyoncé is also known as Sasha Fierce.

#314 Aaliyah One In A Million

Siri, you’re killing me.

#446 Alice Coltrane, Journey in Satchidanada

OH, COME ON! Jesus, I’m gonna get canceled.

#285 Big Star Third/Sister Lovers

Nonsense. Horse-hockey. Pish-tosh. This is definitely one of the top 500 records that Alex Chilton ever made, but it’s poor compared to the first two. And, yeah, I recognize that Big Star is the whitest band that ever was so OF COURSE I’m intimately familiar with the work and can place it in proper context and y’know what: I came here to have fun, not be attacked. Back up and away from me, muchacho.

#365 Madvillain Madvillainy

MF Doom? He does a mask thing and releases a million records a year, right? He’s like Black Buckethead?

#162 Pulp Different Class

Americans who were into Britpop were just doing it for the attention. How are you gonna put this on your list of Top 500 Grooviest Sex Heroes if the best song on it is blown out of the water by William Shatner’s version?

Now listen to Pasty Poshington & the Anemia Boys do it:

NOT AS GOOD. You’re off the List, Pulp. Hand over your gun and badge.

#299 B.B. King Live At The Regal

I got a two-song threshold for the Blues. “I get it, the Blues,” I always want to say. “You’ve been mistreated, and the next chord is gonna be a D. I get it.”

#132 Hank Williams 40 Greatest Hits

Greatest Hits records on a best-of list that is not “Best best-of list?” BULLSHIT. Those hippies over at Rolling Stone are shit-pipers, and they never get tired. Listen to ’em for even a second, and you’re over the shoulder and into the ditch. Place hasn’t been the same since Fong-Torres left. He wouldn’t have approved this shit.

#292 Van Halen Van Halen

The percentage of pictures taken of Eddie Van Halen in the 70’s that prominently feature his potato salad is around 70%.

That’s not potato salad, that’s just the dude’s cock. Potato salad has mystery and a vague, lumpy shape. Nothing vague about Prince Edward there.

(SIDE NOTE: Recall that Eddie wasn’t a trendsetter in displaying his dong. That was how the cool kids were wearing their pants that year. Robert Plant and his cock have a lot to answer for.)

#311 Neil Young On The Beach

Dunno this one. I like Neil Young like I like LSD: very occasionally, and in miniscule amounts.

#428 Hüsker Dü New Day Rising

I think I screwed this whole thing up. I keep asking Siri to pick a number between 1 and 500, but it’s a discrete choice each time; the previous picks aren’t being discarded, so the math is all off. Should I have written a proprietary app for this? Do I need to learn Python? My random walk seems to have been more deterministic than I wanted.

#287 The Byrds Mr. Tambourine Man

No, I fucked this all up. I’m sorry. Disregard everything and go back to your lives. Never speak of this; my failure is all-emcompassing.

Two More Things To Read, And A Picture

October 25, 2016 / / 5 Comments

This is another article about the Grateful Dead, also from Rolling Stone, but not by David Browne, as it is from 1973 and David Browne does not have access to Time Sheath technology. (I might have let him borrow it, but there was no discussion of me in the Bobby interview, so David Browne will remain an unpilgrim, stuck in time.) The article’s a good one: half about the band’s ludicrous ramblings and plans, and half about the logistical process of getting a PA in and out of an arena.

Watches, Enthusiasts, are a dead technology fetishized by anoraks and the moneyed bored; they’re like horses for your wrist. But this Guardian article about the luxury watch market is excellent and fascinating, filled with all kinds of hilarious facts. Did you know the fancy timepieces, the shit Josh buys, the real high-dollar stuff: they don’t keep particularly good time; a quartz watch beats them, and obviously your phone beats everything.

(There are activities that require watches still–outdoorsy bullshit, and navigating, or if you’re off the grid–but we don’t keep the time in clocks any more. Along with everything else in our society, we’ve translated time into binary and entrusted it to the computers. If you want to know what time it is in 2016, you need to ask the computers, otherwise you ‘re just estimating.)

I promised you a picture; here is it:

art-jerry-woodcut-jpg

Goes with the Bobby one, doesn’t it?

Dosie Do, Dosie Don’t

October 7, 2016 / / 2 Comments

Go read this. It’s by Jesse Jarnow, who is great, and it’s about acid and at this point I am confident in making the assertion that Jarnow is the King of Acid. The man has cornered the market; no one is more acidic; Jarnow owns acid.

The article’s an overview of the fifty years since the Dead played a party “celebrating” the illegalization of LSD, though to say that acid was “legal” before that is stretching it: it was more like the authorities hadn’t heard of it yet. The second they did, though: boom. Although in the authorities’ defense: acid is weird and scary, and the negros like to feed it to our daughters.

Plus, it contains a little bit about micro-dosing, which is utter foolishness, but instead of calling it utter foolishness, Jesse does this:

Fadiman argues that 10 micrograms of LSD taken every few days on a careful cycle, with disciplined self-observance, can make one a healthier person. Though none of the scientific research supports Fadiman’s theory, and there is no formal measure of how many have tried, microdosing’s compelling name and concept has given it a viral life of its own.

See? His way is much better.

Plus–and I did not know this and I can foresee myself becoming furious over it–some in the psychedelic community (they used to be called dopesuckers, but now they’re a community) have likened going public about their drug use to coming out of the closet, which is not the dumbest thing I’ve heard this week, but you have to remember what year it is. In any week in a normal annum, that analogy would have been by far the dumbest bullshit I’ve ever heard: insultingly glib and reductive and privileged, and anyone espousing it in public should be mocked, also in public. Unfortunately: 2016, so that’s not even the dumbest thing I’ve heard today.

A Quick One, Then I’m Away

May 25, 2016 / / 7 Comments

If you care, there is an article between the covers of the Rolling Stone about Dead & Company; we learn two things. One: although this piece is not written by FoTotD David Browne, author of So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead, it is written by David Fricke. We can therefore deduce that a superfluous “e” is required to write about the Dead for RS. And, two: Bobby wants to go back in the studio, because that’s where the Dead shines.

Send Six Copies To My Mother

February 14, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Things are happening, Enthusiasts. People are meeting and rehearsing and signing things and arguing with Phil: the Grateful Dead show is back on the air and one of the most important members of the cast is the new boy.

Trey sat down with a reporter from Rolling Stone, a magazine that–like certain choogly-type bands–has been coasting on its reputation for almost 40 years now. It is a good interview and Trey says the only thing that matters: that he’s taking this seriously and wants to do nothing other than make some good music this July Fourth weekend.

Trey did say some other things that were unfortunately left out of the article, but–due to TotD’s vast network of spies–we can now present Things Left Out of Trey’s RS Article:

  • He’s already started soloing.
  • Bobby keeps measuring his inseam and talking about how hot it gets in Chicago in the summer.
  • Trey won’t be playing Garcia’s guitar, but he will be wearing Garcia’s underwear. (There are holes and stain. To be honest, everything that’s not a hole is a stain.)
  • Just as he’s been spending his days learning the Dead’s repertoire, Billy has been listening to Phish. This is, Trey explains in the interview, part of Billy’s program of “every time you think you’re fucking clever and try to slip some of that Gamehenge bullshit in, you get punched in the dick.”
  • Mike Gordon keeps calling him and not saying anything and then hanging up.
  • Bobby keeps offering him pain pills to “take the edge off” and it’s going to end poorly.
  • The openers are (in order) Feel Like a Stranger, Bertha, and Shakedown. That wasn’t in the article: I’m just guessing, but I’m right.
  • Billy’s way of teaching people songs is to throw half-empty tall boys at them.
  • That is also Mickey’s preferred teaching method.
  • The rehearsals are going to be at Bobby’s studio. Phil had a great idea to hold them at his restaurant and charge folks $300 to eat short ribs while they watched, but everyone hated that idea, and it was Jill’s idea.
  •  Bruce Hornsby is a brutal and sadistic man who may or may not belong to ISIS.
  • There are actually no shows planned: the Dead will be cashing all the mail order MOs, fleeing the country, and resettling in places without extradition treaties or taboos about senior/teen fox humping. It’s all been a long con.
  • Mickey professes to dislike Indian food, yet aways smells of chutney, and it’s driving Trey mad.

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