Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
I must admit that I had not heard this before just now, and it is fucking beautiful and hilarious; also, the lead singer has an intermittent fake-British accent, which is the best kind of British accent, and he counts the song in three or four times which is the proper amount of times to count in a song.
I retract any and all slander and accusations leveled at The Pop-O-Pies.
Bobby once got the lyrics to Truckin’ so wrong he summoned Chthulu
Speaking of covers, and Warren Zevon, there’s a second album of bands doing their versions of the Dead’s songs coming out…soon…and I’ll give it an honest try, but for those of us of a certain age (22, but with a Time Sheath) the only real Dead cover album will only ever be Deadicated.
Every ’90’s Deadhead had this and played it more times than they’ll admit. The record’s main problem is irrelevance. Most of the collection is just dudes jamming through first set songs. The guy from Georgia Satellites sings US Blues okay, and if you saw them do it in a bar to close the set, you’d be losing your shit: they would rock that house, then the house next doow, and then they would go to the retirement home down the street and show their ding-dongs to old ladies for compliments and old men for money. Same with Dwight Yoakum’s Truckin’, and sadly, too, Warren’s Casey Jones.
Points for trying go to Midnight Oil. Once, in the forests of New Jersey, I caught the gospel hour on one of those Sunday shows, those inexplicable shows that air on Sunday at dusk. It was just organ: one man, both keyboards and the pedals, accompanying himself and arguing with his own lines, astonishing that a human could be in so many places. Though there were no words, I knew that song was about Jesus. Midnight Oil’s take on Wharf Rat is like that. I know he’s singing about August West, but all I can think about is the guy who gets all the laughs in the fist Crocodile Dundee. You mistreated aborigines, sure: let’s move on. Last, I heard, that guy was in the Australian Parliament and had intervened in four separate attempts to eat babies: two by dingoes, once by croc, and once by dingo-croc, which is a new thing they have down there because that whole continent is a nightmare.
Dr. John’s Deal was good, if obvious. Suzanne Vega’s China Doll was perfect and fragile, but the stand-out was the last track, Jane’s Addiction doing Ripple. Perry Farrell sings the ending not as a benediction, like Garcia, but as an exultation. Also, they’re playing Ripple The Other One behind him, so that’s cool, too.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxOlQrVa-84]
On that OkCupid site (SHUT UP! LOVE IS WITHIN MY REACH!), there is a whole questionnaire dealie; one of the questions asks about the size of the Sun and Earth. Binary question: which one’s bigger. The only way to get it wrong is to be joking, because to sincerely answer that incorrectly would mean you were incapable of using a computer. (The comment section on YouTube might undermine my argument there.) I always thought that being wrong on that question was to be the wrongest you could be.
Wrong as usual. This is from an essay about the evolution of Dark Star: I was going to post it for you, until I came on this paragraph, which will go down in history as the wrongest words any human has ever said, tied with “Keith, could you watch the pharmacy for a minute?” and “I will never regret this Yahoo Serious tatoo.”
Late ‘73 versions all too often featured Weir throwing in chord progressions (often one that regrettably has become known as the “Mind Left Body Jam”) whenever he ran short of ideas (cf. 12/2/73 Boston). This is the only flaw of the dense, uncompromising 10/25/73 Madison (what was it about that town in ‘73?) Dark Star. Phil’s playing had evolved by now into dark abstractions and thundering chords. Jerry’s playing has moved in this direction as well, making heavier use of wah and feedback. Their styles achieved an apotheosis of sorts before the hometown crowd at Winterland on 11/11. (Compare Phil’s 2/15 solo to his playing on 11/11 for a measure of the extent to which his approach to Dark Star had changed.)
I am physically angered by this brio’s assertion. BRIO! What the fuck?
Excuse, please.
Yeah?
Why are you saying ‘brio’? Are you trying to do a ‘bro’ thing?
Bro? Is THAT what people are saying? I thought it was ‘brio’, like “Hey, I like your brio, your panache, your elan.”
…
Is that what you really thought?
If I get back on topic, can we forget this ever happened?
Probably not, but let’s try.
First of all, the author is unclear on if it is the specific name of this jam or the larger fact that jams have names at all that is so regrettable. They played this theme a lot and people needed to put it in setlists; it might have been called Fred, and clearly the band didn’t give a shit. This was the stone ages, before you could just say, “Oh? The jam at six minutes in? I’ll link to it on my sound-tushee and jack off your metaverse all over my blueteeth and my parallax.” So some random guy in a shitty apartment with an awesome audio set-up named the thing because to him (and it was certainly a him), that jam he kept hearing in Dark Star and Truckin’ reminded him of a track from an Airplane record Garcia played on.
(It may well be a direct rip off of that song, and it is readily available on the YouTube, but I will be skewered with Satan’s dong before I listen to an album called Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome-Plated Nun.)
Like the name or not, by this point: that’s what the fucker’s called.
But his other point.
The war in Viet Nam had a new terror for soldiers, a job referred to as a Tunnel Rat. The Viet Cong had built elaborate burrows under the rolling jungle hills of their home, living in there for months: bedrooms, kitchens, you could watch movies, even.
And mantraps. So many mantraps.
The tunnel rat was something like the ball gunner in WWII bomber planes. He was a little guy. This wasn’t like back at home where the coach didn’t want you because of your size: you were needed. You won. Yay.
So the tunnel rat would crawl into the wet abscess in the mud with a flashlight in one hand and a .45 in the other and the number of days he had left on the tip of his tongue.
And sometimes, he would come upon a nest of Cong. Everyone would grab his weapon and the screaming, spit flying from mouths and meals flying across the room with the table, leaping up, “DIDI MAO! DIDI MAO!” Charlie screamed, because my entirety of knowledge of the Vietnamese language comes rom Deer Hunter.
Imagine the hate in that damp, cramped room that no one wanted to be in. The confusion, stench, and anger.
And you won’t be anywhere near how I feel about that statement about the Mind Left Body Jam. The MLB was, on so many occasions, the entire goddam point of why they had been playing music that evening. It was Dark Star’s Dark Star, but better: it was modular and could be packed up and placed wherever they wanted it, heroically after Truckin’ in ’74 or (in a slimmed-down version) appended to Music Never Stopped. It’s the highlight of a damn sight more than a few shows that are inarguable Hall of Famers.
Whew.
You okay?
Yeah, just need some pudding and a nap and a ’71 and I’ll be right as rain. Is anyone else wrong on the internet?
No, you got everyone.
Excelsior!
The Timi’i people have only five words for colors, which seems odd until you realize that they live in a triple canopied rainforest and the colors are Green, Really Green, Thing That’s About To Kill Me, Sun’s In My Eyes, and Night.
In Phil’s secret language of dreams, his word for “roadie” is the same as his word meaning “one about to be chastised.”
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I sometimes need to hear five or six versions of the same song in a row. Part of that last sentence was a lie: I sometimes need to hear Mississippi Half-Step five or six versions in a row.
Bobby was never more than two or three feet away from the note he intended to sing. Sometimes, this was an exciting musical choice–listen to Sugar Magnolia. Sometimes. Garcia’s voice was too fragile and sweet for the rockers, but it was in tune far more often than Bobby’s. Phil’s voice had a weird barbershop quartet thing to it, plus Phil’s larynx had not been informed of the fact that Phil had perfect pitch. At shows in the ’80’s, Enthusiasts hoisted signs reading Let Phil Sing. Note that these signs did not say Let Phil Continue to Sing: it was clearly seen as a one-time thing.
Pig wasn’t so much good at singing notes as he was at singing songs.
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I’ll give the Dead this: they wouldn’t have put up with that My Little Pony shit at all.
The Dead did not subvert gender roles: they rejected your post-modernity and replaced it with a system that encouraged calling your wife “your old lady,” out loud and in public and getting away with it, which if you think about it, is a pretty good trick the guys played on their old ladies.
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Could it be a coincidence that Roe v. Wade occurred in 1973? Is it chance that the landmark reproductive rights decision took place the VERY SAME YEAR that the Dead was just, y’know, killin’ it?
Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street. See, Bobby? I can do it and I’m a dog.
When Bobby forgets the words is when I love him the most!
It’s sequel time here in Fillmore South:
Things I love about the Dead, Part the II
We need to talk about Bobby because I’ve been talking about Bobby and I need to know why, godammit. Admittedly, I go through phases: a quick glance through the archives will reveal the Mickey phase, the Keith era, and–real early on–a whole lot of Vince jokes in a row. But I always go back to Bobert W. Weir, like the swallows returning to Capistrano. (Also, if you wanted to go back to Bobby’s hotel room, you had to swallow his Capistrano. DICK JOKES!) Picasso had his Blue Period; I had a month where I made a lot of Phil jokes.
You can relate to Bobby more than the other guys, though: he was the Everyman, the Protagonist, the White Guy Abroad that Hollywood likes to make movies about. Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai? That guy.
You couldn’t relate to the others: Phil was intimidatingly smart and currently yelling at a roadie. It’s like that saying, “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere?” Well, no matter the time, somewhere, Phil is yelling at a member of some road crew, somewhere. That’s why he opened up the restaurant, to scream at busboys in halting Spanish, “TIENE OIDO ABSOLUTO! DAME TUS HEPATICAS!” Billy was scary: there was always so much blood and none of it ever seemed to be his. Garcia and Pig were…well, Garcia and Pig: one might admire or imitate or spurn, but relate?
But as everyman as Bobby seemed, he was anything but: an orphan, a rich kid, really pretty, in good shape. Wait! Bob Weir…Bruce Wayne. Huh.
Bobby was a guy who’d found a home, that family we all yearn for. Adopted, shipped off to boarding school. And, legendarily, a ranch for the greater part of a summer, hence Bobby is a cowboy, but that’s been well-established. (I make fun of Bobby for this, but what man doesn’t pursue their white whale into the sunset? People need the myths they choose; they filter them back out and it turns into Mexicali Blues, which you like more than you’re willing to admit, and kind of rules when those nutty drummers decide to turn it into a disco tune on 5/25/77
He made the Dead better, and they made him better. Bobby outside the realm of those other five or six guys was a mess with visions of Hollywood in his head, and had he been able to come up with some hit singles and gotten the right backing, Bobby could have been just as big as, say, Bob Seeger. But, like a flawed diamond, Bobby’s beauty only truly shone in one oddly-shaped, custom-made setting: the Dead.
Beyond the superficial, speculative, and shit I’ve just made up entirely, there stands the inarguable fact that Bobby was a master musician of the highest caliber, dueling it out with Phil and Garcia every night and walking away proud. He adapted this oddly-voiced, syncopated approach to rhythm guitar, finding a path that isn’t self-evident under Garcia, over Phil, and side-by-side with the keyboards, but he wasn’t flashy: like Billy, he was often at his greatest only upon second, careful listening.
But what about his songs? Lost Sailor sucks, dude! More like ‘Velveeta’. Heh heh.
Yes, what about his songs, made-up straw man? You mean like Sugar Magnolias, Looks Like Rain, Greatest Story, PLAYIN’ IN THE GODDAM BAND, One More Saturday Night, and a little thing called The Other One? Not so italicized now, are you? Like those other fuzzy burnouts were contributing anything towards the end in terms of new material? You want to hear Eternity again? No song has ever been more properly named.
Now, of course, there was this kind of bullshit:
He learned, eventually, but at first, Bobby was convinced that, gee willikers, it just wasn’t a slide solo without going ALL THE WAY up the neck to make those horrible, metallic screeches.
So, we raise our whatever’s-at-hands to Bobby. We love you, you goofy bastard. And you know what it is they say about our love…
Sometimes Bobby sang
Truckin’ just like this: Bum buh
Dah da duhda da.
Three guesses whether Bobby remembered all the words to Truckin’ the night this photo was taken.
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