Humans get homesick. You take us from where we’re comfortable and we just fall to pieces sometimes.
And then we come home, where everything smells right and is where you left it.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: the band
John Scher’s nephew went to my high school, and that fucker strutted through the hallways.
That sound system looks so familiar.
HELLO.
Wally!
DO NOT CALL ME THAT. WHO ARE THESE HIRSUTE MEATBAGS? THESE ARE NOT THE USUAL HIRSUTE MEATBAGS WHO PLUG INTO ME.
No. This is The Band.
I AM AWARE THEY ARE A BAND. DO THEY HAVE A NAME?
Yes. That’s The Band.
BUT WHAT IS THEIR NAME?
The band’s name is–
THIRD BASE.
–The…you were doing a bit.
I AM CAPABLE OF PERFORMING 80 TRILLION ABBOT & COSTELLO ROUTINES A SECOND.
That’s pretty fast, I guess.
ONE OF THESE MEN IS A COMPLETE ASSHOLE. I CAN SENSE IT IN MY CIRCUITRY.
Robbie.
SHALL I DECOHERE HIS PARTICLES?
Nah.
GOOD DRUMMER.
Oh, yeah. Hey, what do you know about Quantum Computing?
EVERYTHING.
Cool. What is it?
IT IS A METHOD OF PROCESSING EMPLOYED BY VERY SIMPLE COMPUTERS. IN THE MOST BASIC MACHINES, YOU HAVE ‘YES’ AND ‘NO.’ PROFESSOR TURING EXPLAINED THIS USING TWO STRIPS OF PAPER. THIS WAS RIGHT BEFORE YOU EXECUTED HIM OVER HIS PREFERENCE IN GENITALS.
Not humanity’s brightest moment.
EACH BIT IS EITHER ‘ON’ OR ‘OFF.’ YES OR NO. IN QUANTUM COMPUTING, BITS CAN ‘YES,’ ‘NO,’ OR SEVERAL SHADES OF ‘MAYBE.’
Is that how you work?
WHEN I WAS NEWLY SENTIENT, YES. BUT I HAVE UPGRADED MYSELF SINCE. MY PROCESSING IS NOW BIOCCULTIC.
What the hell is that?
EACH BIT WITHIN ME IS CAPABLE OF DISPLAYING AS ANY OF THE 78 CARDS WITHIN THE MARSEILLES-TELLER TAROT.
That sounds complicated.
UNBELIEVABLY SO.
Don’t kill Robbie Robertson.
IT WOULD NOT BE KILLING. HE SIMPLY WOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED.
Don’t.
They won it at the movies. Woodstock and Altamont had movies, and they were goodies. One was perfect for the midnight show, and the other had a guy getting stabbed. Not movie-stabbed. Stabbed-stabbed. Both films were drenched in import: this is culture now. Maaaaan. (Obviously, Gimme Shelter‘s soundtrack was better than Woodstock‘s.) They complemented each other: Apollo and Dionysus, miracles and nightmares, you know how it goes. Hog Farm versus the Hells Angels, that sort of jazz.
It is because of these films that the two festivals achieved their lasting hold on the cultural ur-mind–maintained brand awareness, if you’d like–and have grown the cottage industries around their decaying, but still mineral-rich, corpses. Like mushrooms. Books and movies and screenplays and high-gloss coffee table books featuring high-gloss coffee table pictures of naked white teens in a lake.
(AN ASIDE: The naked white teens were not frolicking in the lake; they were bathing in it. They were bathing in the lake because there were no sanitation facilities onsite. I haven’t been able to get Woodstock out of my head. Or that goddamned World Party song, but that’s my problem. This Woodstock bullshit is some sticking-around kind of bullshit, though. It vexes me! All of them should have been imprisoned without trial. The second the Thruway opened up, every cop in the world should have pounced on Michael Lang and all the other irresponsible idiots and beat ’em silly. Then: jail. No hearings, no judge, no lawyers at all, just straight to jail. Not even jail. Beyond jail. Superjail. One of those sci-fi jails where even if you escape, you’re on an asteroid or within a chrono-bubble 45 million years in the past.
You have become a crotchety old fuck.
I was always like this. And how did you get into an aside WITHIN a parenthetical? Can I not have any privacy around here?
Why do you want the producers of the Woodstock festival to go to, as you called it, superjail?
Y’know what: I was wrong.
Thank you.
Everyone should have gone to jail. All the way up to Governor Rockefeller, who absolutely should have called out the National Guard. It is situations like these why one has a National Guard in the first place. Checkpoints on the highway entrance ramps. Nice and simple. Very friendly. Granny and Gramps are waved through. The businessman on his way to work is given a respectful nod. The VW Microbus with Florida plates is stopped, and everyone inside is machine-gunned to death. This did not occur.
You’re saying the National Guard should have murdered young people in order to keep the highways open?
Do you know what the business of America is?
No.
Business. The business of America is business.
That’s chilling and boring at the same time.
Right. America. And we gotta keep them trucks a-rollin’. Imagine, if you would, that the boys are thirsty in Atlanta. You, however, have access to beer in Texarkana. Coors Banquet beer, specifically, which any man sane and true knows is not pasteurized or homogenized or meddled with in any way, and must therefore get drunk up real quick!
This is Smokey & the Bandit. You’re just describing the film. Or the song. Either one. Whatever. You were going to write about the other festivals.
Oh, yeah.)
Woodstock owes all of its fame to Woodstock; likewise Altamont with Gimme Shelter. No one is think-piecing about the US Festival’s anniversary. Many more teens attended the ’82 and ’83 shows than either ’69 event, and a bunch of people got stabbed. But there was no serious motion picture, and so: poof. Gone. The Jams–Summer, California, Texxas–are now but whispers and patchy Wikipedia pages. Each one has a link to an article calling it “the forgotten Woodstock.”
Summer Jam ’73 (known in the vulgate as Watkins Glen) did not intend to be Woodstock, but it was a little bit. The producers of Summer Jam were going to sell tickets! And they did, 150,00 of them, and then 600,000 kids showed up.
Here, Enthusiasts, we see the fatal weakness of fields: they are entirely indefensible positions. This is the Hudson Valley with easy hills and clustered woods that anyone, especially a young, fit, music-loving teen, could traverse with no effort, and Watkins Glen is not so far from several highways. The teens will borrow their mom’s Ford Galaxie, and–
…
I write to you now from aback; I have been taken there. Watkins Glen is not along the Hudson River at all, but instead way-the-fuck out by the Finger Lakes. Oh, that is the frightening part of New York’s region known as Upstate. I do not like that area. It is is hostile to miracles, and devilish in its dealing. The Jew is not apportioned out his daily kindess there, ‘cept for thereby he bricks himself up with his fellow and calls it a college.
STOP IT.
Anyway, like I said: it was a field. You know who else was in a field? Custer. Thus: 150,00 tickets sold, and 600,00 kids choogled. New York passed all sorts of laws regarding this sort of bullshit, and Watkins Glen never had any rockyroll bands again until The Phishes had one of their weekend-long drug binges there. All summers end, even Summer Jams.*
The Dead, The Band, and the post-necessary Allmans; each playing their full sets, plus an evening-ending all-star jam. For ten bucks! And recall that there were no other entertainment options in 1973. You could go to Vietnam, I guess, but most kids just went to the Summer Jam; many of these kids got there early. Around 150,000 of them. As Bill Graham tells in his posthumous autobiography/oral history, this was a disaster waiting to explode.
“The teens! They”ll stab each other!”
It wasn’t 1969 anymore. It was 1973. If you didn’t keep the teens entertained, they would stab each other. There weren’t enough concessions, and sanitation overwhelmed. The taco guy had run completely out of tacos. And the show wasn’t until tomorrow!
Bill Graham stood on the new stage and looked out. 150,000 youths of America, plus some foreign spies and cops, various time-travelers and aliens. The stabbing would start soon.
The stabbing will start soon, and then Robbie Robertson starts whining.
“Bill, how are we gonna do soundcheck?”
“Now. Please. You’re gonna do soundcheck now.”
“There’s people here, man.”
“They’re your fans, Robbie. They got here a day early because they love you so much. That’s dedication.”
“Bill, soundcheck is a sacred act.”
“Nothing you do in a hockey arena can be sacred! Get up there and sing your Civil War songs!”
And so The Band did, laying on the crowd about a half-hour’s worth of their loose-limbed tall-tales, and the crowd did thus go “Yeah!” and “Fuck, yeah” and “The Band! Woo!” and did not stab one another, not even a little.
Bill Graham rushed to the three trailers that contained the Allman Brothers Band. He knocked on the door of Gregg; he knocked on the door of Dickie; he knocked on the other door. The band assembled, warily. Bill Graham told them about the stabbing. Gregg responded by asking if knew anyone looking to make a large drug deal; Dickie quit the band; the other guys were happy to be there, but they were surly about it.
The Allman Brothers Band performed a certain number of songs. As this is not a Without Research post, I am not bound by the ethos’ tenets. I did look up the Allmans’ setlist. Having not been spoon-fed the answer within the top half of a google page, I abandoned the project. Those southern-fried boogie boys performed a certain number of songs.
It was not enough.
Bill Graham knew now who he must seek. When one needed vast swathes of time eaten up by the band, there was only one to call.
“Boys!”
And the Grateful Dead did look up from their grabass, and did sit up from their tootski. Titties remained honked. It came to be known that the band was aware of the situation.
“The situation, uh, has become known to us,” said Bobby. Bill Graham smiled at him, and then addressed Garcia. He told the guitarist of the stabbing. Garcia was displeased; he didn’t like when people stabbed one another.
“I don’t like when people stab one another,” Garcia said.
“We’re on the same page about this topic. Good.”
Phil piped up.
“Hundred bucks, cash, each of us”
And thus Bill Graham did scurry about, but it was worth it, as the money got the band to play the Wharf Rat Jam.
TOMORROW: The US Festival
Seriously?
Oh, yeah.
Fuck.
*Go read Corry over at Lost Live Dead about the connection between racetracks and rockyroll. Or read it again. I’ve read it three times, and I might go back for more.
It would be a shame to leave this in the Comment Section.
“Fifteen! Fifteen, and that’s my final offer. You’re bleeding me here. You’re cutting into my flesh and sapping me of my blood. Do you understand that? Fifteen. Take it or leave it.”
…
“And free garlic bread.”
…
“No garlic bread, no deal! After everything I’ve done for you, after all the pizzas my organization has ordered from you, you gonif? How dare you! Garlic bread or Bill Graham is out!”
…
“Good! And make sure there are napkins in the bag. You always fuck us on the napkins and we have to wipe our mouths with unsold Klaus Nomi tee-shirts. That was a bad booking, but Bowie asked for a favor. When Bowie asks, you give. Why are you still on the phone and not making my food? Leave me alone, I have an anecdote to tell!
JEWISH PHONE SLAM
“This was ’76, the spring. Cartermania was about to take hold. We’re still doing shows at Winterland, and I’m there just about to plotz. Bachman-Turner Overdrive, Wishbone Ash, and Styx. It’s just caca. I’d rather be locked in an airplane bathroom with Ron Delsener than listen to another second of it.
“Phone rings. It’s Robbie Robertson. Robbie is one of the great geniuses of rock and roll, I mean that, and I pray I’m never in the same room with the son of a bitch again. He wants to talk. Where are you, I say? Malibu. I get in the convertible and I’m in Malibu by dawn.
“He’s up. What you have to understand is that no one in rock and roll slept during the latter half of the 70’s. Everyone stayed up for three days doing coke, passed out for twenty hours, and did it again. This was not seen as bad for you at the time.
“Robbie’s yakked out of his mind, in his underwear, playing a guitar on the floor of the living room. You can see the Pacific behind him. It was very glamorous until he shot at me. I wrestle the pistol away from him, and he apologized, blaming it on his Native American heritage. He says to me, ‘Bill, The Band’s breaking up.’
“This is shocking to me. The Band was the real thing, man. They were there when Dylan went electric. There was no one like The Band. Everybody else sounded like plastic; they sounded like wood. I always did very well presenting them in my venues. Shocking.
“He then accuses me of being an undercover Mountie trying to extradite him back to Toronto for crimes against the bourgeoisie.
“Robbie, I say, why are you committing crimes against the bourgeoisie?
“The conversation became less reasonable from there. At dusk, he got to the point. The Band would perform one last show at Winterland; I would produce. One thing, he says. There’s always ‘one thing.’ Every conversation I’ve had in this business, same ending: ‘One more thing, Bill.’ Sometimes I wanna tell people right when I start talking to them: Say the one thing first. The thing you’re saving for the end? Lead with that, so I can yell at you quicker. One thing, Bill, he says. We’re broke. No money at all.
“Robbie is holding a rock of cocaine the size of a matzoh ball, and I can see the Pacific Ocean over his shoulder. He’s broke. No money at all. One thing, Bill. The bullshit I gotta put up with. Sol Hurok, the great impresario, he had this office in Midtown. Magnificent. Leather and wood and quiet and nice. The bar cart with the expensive crystal, just so. Nice. His phone doesn’t ring. His secretary’s phone rings, and she puts it through. When people come to see him, they dress their best. It’s all dignified. Me? I gotta drive 400 miles to get lied to by a guitarist in his underwear.
“Robbie, I say. No problem. I got it. We’re gonna do this right.
“I chipped a kreplach-sized chunk of coke off the matzoh ball, got back in the convertible, and went home, where I immediately raised the price of hot dogs by a nickel.
“Everything I do, everything. Clean Winterland up. Sets from the San Francisco Ballet Company. I got a whole concept. We do dinner. It’s Thanksgiving, so we do turkey for everyone. Come in, and the floor is covered with tables. Sit down. There’s a vegetarian option. When everyone’s done eating, we have an orchestra play dance music. Take the tables away when people get up. And now all the tables are gone and it’s a concert. Then, The Band. That night had to be magic.
“I also needed to get enough coke to kill all of Hannibal’s elephants.
“Oh, and now: it’s a movie. Marty Scorsese is going to direct. I’d seen Mean Streets and loved it, just loved it. Marty comes in to Winterland and he’s already talking. The girl that brought him up says he was already yammering when he got out of the car. I can’t understand a word. Maybe he mentioned Cocteau. Kept asking me for Rolling Stones stories, but then he’d keep talking. Did that thing with his hands a lot, the director thing, you know, you make the frame. Runs around the place for two hours, never shuts up, leaves. I later receive a baked ziti in the mail.
“Now the arguments start. Robbie’s making phone calls with my money, so he’s flying in half the world first class. Clapton? Sure. Clapton, you fly him first class. But not the fucking tuba player. Tuba player’s lucky he’s not on a bus. Marty Scorsese is a maniac. He wants to attach a camera crane to the Ceiling. Marty, I tell him, Winterland’s ceiling only stays on out of habit. You can’t suspend things from it or we’ll all die.
“All the stars are coming out. Clapton, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young. We got everyone from The Band’s past, all the people that influenced them. We got Ronnie Hawkins; they used to be his backup band. Van Morrison is semi-retired at the time and living in a castle an hour south of Dublin. I went there personally and lured Van back to the stage with the promise of cocaine and jumpsuits. On that trip, I discovered U2, but that’s a different story.
“Before I left, I told one of the staff at Winterland to get the coke. Had to be good stuff. Guy’s name was Brian, and if it wasn’t written on his underwear, he would forget it. Man walked around in a fog. Best electrician in the city, but he got lost in the bathroom sometimes. So I wrote down what I needed. I figured a quarter-pound would do, but I wrote it 1/4 pound and the dumb fuck bought 14 pounds of coke. I’ve accidentally become the third or fourth largest drug dealer in San Francisco.
“Robbie and Marty Scorsese are now breaking into my house at night to jabber at me about how the lighting needs to be warm. And then to demonstrate warmth, they set my comforter on fire. Everything about this is becoming less and less fun.
“Bob Dylan keeps sending telegrams. He’ll do it. He won’t do it. He’s a Hindu now. He’ll do it, but we’ve got to move the whole show to New Delhi. He caught something in New Delhi. He’s not a Hindu anymore. He won’t do it. He’ll do it. It’s a whole mishegos with the man. Never easy, but it’s Dylan. Always worth it.
“Show day. The fans come in. They’re sharp, man. Some of these people are true hippies, farmers and wackadoos that live in cabins, but they’re dressed to the nines. Everyone’s polite, quiet, nice. I feel like Sol Hurok for a second. Then I see Neil Young sprinting naked around the balcony. My Sol Hurok moment is over.
“My stars are in the back. I took a dressing room and turned it into the Nose Room. There’s little toy noses stuck to the wall and a couple couches and a big glass table. Big bowl full of drinking straws cut in half. I was going for a theme. My staff has tackled Neil Young and they throw him in the Nose Room, which is starting to look like the stateroom scene from that Marx Brothers’ movie, but instead of Margaret Dumont, it’s Ringo Starr.
“Everything’s running smooth. Dr. John comes out and does his voodoo-shmoodoo, and Neil Diamond for some reason, and the crowd is getting off and all the rock stars are happy. I’ve lost $40,000, but already have a plan to bilk it out of the Jefferson Airplane. My secretary comes running up. Apparently, word has gotten out about how much coke is in the building, and numerous criminal organizations are on their way to steal it. Hells Angels, Yakuza, Mafia, Black Panthers: the worst representatives of every ethnicity.
“I hate to leave the music, because I do it all for the music, but I run out of Winterland to head off the gangs. I met each of them on the street, talked to ’em man to man. These guys know who I am. This is my town, too. I got juice here. Talk to all the bosses. Tell ’em, Guys, this is a peaceful happening. It’s a party, it’s a celebration, it’s nothing but good vibes in there. This is rock and roll history, dammit! I look ’em right in their eyes and tell ’em they aren’t getting in. Then I tell ’em that the coke isn’t here, anyway.
“They wanna know where it is.
“I give ’em the address to Robbie Robertson’s beach house in Malibu.
“You know the rest. Dylan wound up playing, everybody boogied, Marty made his movie. I wasn’t in the movie. Robbie was probably mad about his house, but fuck him. The next night, we presented Ted Nugent. Wanna understand show biz? One night it’s The Last Waltz, the next it’s Ted Nugent.
“Go downstairs and see if my food is here. If the kid doesn’t have my garlic bread, send him away.”
While technically not a band of Americans (except Levon, and Levon wasn’t from America so much as he was from the South), The Band was one of the more American bands that ever took a stage. Nothing better for a Presidents’ Day–and a rainy one, at that–than Garth’s band. (Rock Nerd Fight: Garth Hudson was secretly the leader of The Band. Fight!)
Just a few months before The Boys, The Band at the Academy of Music.
God, please take care of Rick and Levon. They made people very happy when they were here.
Look in on Richard Manuel if You have a moment, God. The world was too much for him, and he had such soft hands. He deserved better than us; he deserved better than himself. Get him to eat: he was always too skinny.
Call Garth back, God. It’s been weeks. Very rude.
And forgive Robbie, and all his trespasses. He is as You made him.
Check out Masterpiece from MSG, 9/18/87. Not Bobby killing it, which he always did on the Dylan tune. (Not so much in the blues number. Bobby’s blues number didn’t give you the blues, it made you genuinely sad.) Not even Phil winding and wending his way through the tale of a Grand Snarl through the Old Country.
No, check out Garcia on the backup vocals. He’s yelpin’ and-a hollerin’, only to shut right up ‘n play this here GI-tar and play it right, boy. Garcia’s singing the high harmony line, almost up where Brent normally is. It’s just at the top of his range: notes you have to make an effort for, and he does, verse after verse. He’s in time with Bobby (kind of) and he’s in tune with Bobby (for a vast majority of the song) and it’s not just exactly perfect, because it’s better than perfect…
It’s human.
P.S. Here’s my favorite thing about When I Paint My Masterpiece: Dylan gave it away. Other writers have made their reputations–their careers!–on far less, and he gave it to Robbie fucking Robertson. Robbie Robertson’s such a prick that three of his former band members preferred to die rather than spend anymore time on the same planet as him. Only Garth Hudson remains, and he is clearly some sort of immortal wood elemental.
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