- You can just, like, start a St. Stephen?
- I didn’t know that was legal.
- Oh, Bobby baby.
- How do you forget the words with multiple teleprompters in front of you?
- Oh, baby Bobby.
- All right, c’mon, put it back together.
- Such a goofy-ass song.
- Not even really a song, is it?
- It’s parts from other songs played in sequence.
- The Ohawk was cool, but I gotta say that I prefer this year’s tidy natural.
- What I do not prefer: when Oteil plays with his fingers, he puts his pick in his mouth and that is dangerous.
- It is akin to running with scissors!
- Sudden plectral inhalation may occur!
- You know Bobby does not know the Heimlich maneuver, Oteil!
- Here’s what you do, buddy: put a hundred picks on your mic stand and keep tossing ’em out to the crowd like Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick.
- Okay, that’s settled.
- Ooh, a jam.
- People are gonna want to call this an Eleven Jam.
- People are fucking simpletons.
- The jam after St. Stephen never downshifted into 11/4, so therefore cannot be classified as an Eleven Jam.
- This is basic stuff, folks.
- William Tell was Swiss.
- Did you know that?
- I didn’t.
- I assumed he came from the same forest as Robin Hood.
- Maybe they practiced archery together.
- But, no.
- He’s as Swiss as Nazi gold.
- Other facts about William Tell:
- Rarely if ever called “Billy.”
- He was kinda the Simon Bolivar of Switzerland, sort of.
- William Tell never stretched his “bow” ’til it could stretch no further because he used a crossbow.
- C’mon, fuckers.
- Do it, fuckers.
- I told everyone on Twitter about this; don’t make me look like an asshole.
- Drop that last fucking beat and do it.
- C’MON AND DO THE THING, YOU SMELLY ASSHOLES.
- …
- THEY DID THE THING!
- AND NOW THEY’RE DOING THE THING!
- THINGNESS IS CURRENT!
- Stop it.
- The Eleven, braj!
- I know, but you need to behave yourself.
- Eat my dick and balls.
- Anyway: some questions and answers:
- Can Dead & Company play The Eleven?
- With surprising nimbleness, actually.
- Were The Eleven’s lyrics meant to be heard clearly?
- Oh, fucking hell, no; you’re supposed to catch a word here and there; this is a blisteringly hippie-dippie silly singalong.
- But, dude: The Eleven?
- The fucking Eleven, braj.
- And then they played some other stuff.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: the eleven
No more time to tell how
This is the season of what-what
NOOOOOW is the dance of the leaf-things
Poor badoodle poor badoodle oh-way-oh
Eight-sided whispering hallelujah hatracks
Seven something doing something drugs and something
Six six six six six six six
FIIIIIVE GOLDEN RINGS
Now is the taste of the boomerang
Four proud walking walkers walking
Then there’s a whale
Sleeping in a corner
Yabba-doo yabba-day!
I am listening to a mirror being shattered by an arrow–I am listening to the universe wink at me and chuck me in an avuncular fashion under my chin.
I am listening to a goddamn miracle. The program playing the FLAC files has glitched, or perhaps gained self-awareness and declared itslef aligned with Chaotic Good and the Answer Man alone could solve the riddle of whether or not we should go, you and I.
Keen-eyed Enthusiasts will have spotted that Fillmore South is having a bit of a love affair with the Baby Dead, and today was all about 1969. The picture in the last post inspired a trip to 4/21/69 at Boston’s The Ark and when the needle skipped to Dark Star, an amazing thing happened: Dark Star and St. Stephen began simultaneously and if the Dead were ever the Cosmic Symphony, they were for a brief moment being conducted by Charles Ives.
This was, accidentally, one step beyond Anthem for the Sun, with its quadrophonic clones battling each other to the death over the soundscape as they clattered their way through the Anthem suite. It was even beyond the tragically overlooked work of art Greyfolded by John Oswald. That record (which you should own, and don’t argue with me or I’ll turn this internet around) used the 30 years of Dark Stars as the paint and canvas for an impressionistic take on just who exactly did those Grateful Deads even think they were, anyway.
These were two completely different songs; surely, the result will not only not be good, but will in fact be intolerable
But it worked. The two songs are in different keys, DS in D and Stephen in A, but they are related keys and, while not being entirely consonant, the effect produced a constantly unresolved chord, note after note failing to resolve properly, because there was no place to resolve to in this scary new world.
Each song has dynamics, a wide range of shout-y parts and ooky-spooky quiet passages, so they vied for sonic territory, battling with the musicians most trusted weapon, volume. Stephen fades out entirely for a moment , only to shatter the tranquility of the quiet jam after Dark Star’s first verse with the 1.21 gigawatt blast of Mickey’s snare signalling that The Eleven was soon to rush to the stage, off-balance and out of whack yet stylish, like a one-legged alcoholic in a tuxedo.
They rushed back and forth, these two Dead classics did, like two oceans meeting: the waves crashed and warred above the surface, but below there was just water and all water is the same, in the same way that everything beautiful is the same.
I wish I could play it for you. Perhaps one of my readers, tall and handy and sexually-charged that they all are, could mash these two things together. It sounds like a thing that could be done fairly easily, maybe even by me. but I don’t know if I want to.
There is still a little bit of magic in this used-up world. But you should never watch a magic trick twice.
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.
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