We continue our interrupted stroll through the MoMTDA to take in a small and sadly neglected exhibit called Why Would You Draw Vince?
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
Tag: vince welnick (Page 3 of 4)
Did you know this was a James R. Anderson photo? Should I be paying him? How do I erase his name and pretend I took the photo? Is that moral? I feel like that’s the moral thing to do, but let’s all remember my stance on taking dongs out at Foot Locker. (All for it.)
This thing has more watermarks than a suede jacket in the Ninth Ward.
Too soon.
- No, Mr. Owsley, you cannot “soup up” the audio tour. Stop calling it the Walk of Sound.
- Parish, you’ve got to help me: I’ve accidentally invited TWO DATES to the fundraising ball!
- Gentlemen, I’m not going to point fingers and play the blame game and name names, but using the museum to stage a fake blood drive is going to stop immediately, Phil.
- There won’t be any dinosaurs, Bobby. It’s an art museum.
- Everyone needs to put on their trousers right damn now.
- Billy, that’s not performance art.
- There have been some great reviews for Keith’s sculpture of himself. Oh, that’s actually him? He’s been lying there motionless for, like, nine days. Perhaps we should call a docent.
- No, I don’t know what a docent is, either, but it’s the museum and something’s gone awry, so you call the docent. There is a chain of command here, Grateful Dead!
- But it doesn’t matter because you have dosed all of them.
- Yes, yes: doses, docent. Quite clever.
- Billy, stop doing performance art.
- No, Bobby: the eyes of that painting are not following you around the–oh, Mickey’s cut eyeholes in the art and is standing behind the canvas looking at people. Good call, Bobby.
- Come out from there, Mickey. Why are you naked?
- Garcia’ll be fine: I put him in the sculpture park. It’s just steel and gravel out there.
- I’ve told you this already, Mr. Mydland: museums don’t have mascots. Take off the costume.
- Why is Bill Graham haranguing schoolchildren in Yiddish?
- We don’t allow camping because it is a museum of art; there cannot be filthy teenagers taking doodies directly outside.
- I’m sorry, I don’t see a “Ned Lagin” on the Will Call list, possibly because there is no Will Call list, probably because it’s a museum. Why are the whole hairy lot so fuzzy on the concept of “museum?”
- Phil, you’re doing a great job running the food court, but I think charging $200 to eat sandwiches while you jam with your sons is a bit excessive.
- Vince, for the third time: your new character, down-home surrealist Salvador Golly is just not a hit. Please stop doing the routine. Also, buddy: pants.
- We’re just going to require that there be no more naked Grateful Deads in the museum, please. It’s not an unreasonable request.
- Attention museum patrons: we are going to need to evacuate the building immediately, please. All attempts to prevent Billy from doing performance art have failed. I repeat: Billy is doing performance art.
At last: the return of Terrible Dead Art! Roaring back with the only known Vince entry in the Museum of Modern Terrible Dead Art, we see young Vince in his early “Kid Shakespeare” look.
Another manufactured brouhaha has arisen due to the (now-former) CEO of Mozilla being a bigot and other people–also bigots–being mad that he wasn’t allowed to be a bigot in peace and without suffering any consequences for said bigotry. Some words and phrases shall be misused; TotD helps you sort the gay wheat from the gay chaff.
Tolerance is realizing that Billy is going to punch dicks and accepting him for the dickpuncher he is. It doesn’t mean offering up your dick like a virgin to the lava gods during volcano season. It doesn’t mean not warning your favorite cousin, sotto voce, to move four feet to the left. Just means you have to live with Billy and his proclivities.
Freedom of Speech is a fuzzy-brained catch-all term that doesn’t exist, legally or morally. Were you talking about the First Amendment? Because that’s what’s germane here, except that it’s not. The First Amendment prevents the government from stopping citizens from saying things, except when they can and it doesn’t apply to private companies and certainly has nothing at all to do with interactions between citizens on ethical grounds. Congress can’t stop Vince from doing Samba in the Rain, but the crowd going to the bathroom during the song is not a freedom of speech issue: that’s just good taste.
Bullying is about power: the group in charge does it to the group not in charge. Gays–and their supporters–have never been in charge, save for the fashion industry, the city of West Hollywood, and any boat Garcia was on. (Garcia thought that “if you’re on the water, it doesn’t count” and got a bit boisterous about, to be honest.)
The h0mosexual agenda involves securing liberties and rights and tax breaks, then blowing some dudes. It was also what the crew called Mickey’s mustache behind his back.
The newest release in the consistently brilliant Dave’s Picks series will be announced any day now, and once a lip-reader decodes David LeLouselatrec’s video which–according to sacred Canadian tradition–will be shot in a wind tunnel or directly underneath a wooden roller coaster, the grousing and sniping (and other bird-related verbs) can begin.
The usual suspects will loose their usual complaints. Spring ’83 was the best tour they ever did, someone will post. Vinnie, vidi, vicircus (Vince came, he saw, he made overpowering calliope noises) others will declaim. BENGHAZI MOM JEANS SECRET MUSLIM, a poster who wandered onto the wrong website will add.
It always amazed me the whinging humans–especially hobbyists of all stripes–can get up to and especially here. I can think of few long-running products that you could grab an individual item from randomly with such a guarantee of excellence. Bobbing for Dave’s Picks is like shooting a pistol while blindfolded at a Trump family gathering: no matter what you hit on, you’re going to be happy and the world’s going be better for it.
TotD has shared with you some of Dave’s Nix (shows that will never be released,) but did you know about the other series that have been proposed and turned down?
- Dave’s Flicks This follow-up to the View from the Vault series was actually ready to go but cancelled due to the Great Recession. Thanks, Obama!
- Dave’s Bics Subscribers receive four lightly-used disposable razors each year.
- Dave’s Micks Mickey comes to your house and explains in great detail the history of one of his drums, then rolls his car off a cliff on the way home, cancelling the Summer tour.
- Dave’s Chicks This limited-edition series was to consist of Dave reading the SI swimsuit issue with you.
- Dave’s Hans Blix This was just copies of the UN’s reports regarding the Iraq War with cartoon doodles of Garcia drawn in the margins.
- Dave’s Ticks Subscribers would be able to strip down and have an intern from Rhino Records visually inspect them for ticks every time they went outside.
- Dave’s Dicks This is a fairly obvious set-up for a Billy joke and let’s take it as read.
- Dave’s Licks Bobby comes to your house and puts his tongue on your food.
- Dave’s Frix In addition to a remastered show, subscribers receive a coupon for a half-off rabbit fricassee at Phil’s restaurant which Phil will not honor.
Garcia, I…I just can’t.
Nice croakers, Bobby.
And, hey: Vince! Haven’t seen you in a while.
You know my feelings on the Dave’s Pick series: it’s kicking ass on all cylinders, partly because of base-level good decisions being made concerning the first and most important choice–which show shall it be?
Aside from DaP 6, which I thought had more historical significance than musical merit, there’s not a Pick you can second-guess: perhaps the show you want hasn’t come around yet, but there haven’t been any shows of less than A+ caliber.
For example, Dave could have picked any of these shows, but didn’t. Good work, you apology-offering syrupsucker.
- That show in ’83 when Bobby put slides on every finger and realized he couldn’t play like that so he got really frustrated and started windmilling his arms around and whomping people on the heads and screaming bloody murder and, you know: this was in front of fans, like twelve goddam thousand of them–it looks bad for the organization, so eventually Billy came around from behind his drums and mercy-punched Bobby in his dick and Brent got scared and started crying because the grown-ups were fighting and in the confusion, Garcia snuck into the bathroom and that was the end of the first set.
- The marching band show. The things that happened to the flautists…
- That time Vince got “hysterical blindness”, to which everyone responded by telling him that if he knew it was hysterical blindness, then he should be able to see, to which Vince then claimed to have “hysterical deafness, as well” and tumbled over a few things rather theatrically and the night got worse from there, to be honest.
- All those benefits when Phil would yell at the sick people.
- Any of those shows in the ’80’s when they would play brilliantly one at a time, or perhaps in small groups, but almost never everybody at once.
- The show the day after the famous ’78 mescaline show, when they just sat there pushing the eggs around the plate for a bit, then tried to go back to bed, but everything hurt.
- The Pants-off Dance-off. No one needed to see that shit, Billy.
- Any of the shows they played at Summerland or Autumnland.
- The lost May ’76 performance of Jesus Christ: Superstar that not one of them was off book for.
- Those shows in late ’81, when instead of Drums/Space, Werner Herzog would just come out and rap with the crowd about man’s compulsion to defy his own mortality through art.
- Any of the shows they did on that mall tour with Tiffany.
They screwed Vince, let’s all agree on that. The sounds they made him use were one thing, but it was the personal stuff that really led to Vince’s failure and eventual demise. Before joining the band, Vince was named Cock Money and combs would snap in two immediately upon entering his thick lustrous mane. On Vince’s first day at Front Street, Mickey shaved him and gave him a loser’s name.
(Try saying it like Jerry Lewis: Vince WELLLLL-nick. Glaben.)
Vince didn’t want to dress like that either, but Jon McIntire would wire his Hawaiian shirts to explode if they were removed. This hurt Vince and he went to the band–except Garcia because he was in the bathroom–and told them that if wearing the shirts was so important to everybody, he would just do it. No C-4 necessary.
So Billy punched him in the dick. (In his defense, Billy hadn’t been paying attention in the slightest and just wanted to punch the new guy in the dick. Now, that was certainly not how Vince read the situation; he cried for 90 minutes. I’m just relaying facts here.)
The sounds, however, were truly the crux of the problem: wheezy, hollow tinklings made by primitive synthesizers. The aural equivalent of watching a clown car get raped to death.
A clown car get…what the fuck is wrong with you? This is the comeback special and you’re talking about Vince and a forcibly penetrated harlequinade?
Is that not the show business way?
It is not, no. Welcome people back. Maybe a list. An update on your mental health.
Doesn’t the clown rape kinda give a clue about my mental health?
Point taken.
Anyhoo, imagine if someone pulled the bullshit on you that they pulled on Vince: “Here’s your new office and your desk and you know your responsibilities, so I’ll just let you dive right in…oh, that guy? That’s the guy we hired to also do your job. But better. And everyone’s gonna love him more. Oh, and he’ll be able to get away with things you wouldn’t even dare to THINK about.”
Because there were no rules for Bruce. He was allowed to waltz into the house at all hours and turn the basement into his room and his girlfriend slept over sometimes. So unfair. Listen to the cavalcade of Dark Star teases in this show from ‘Chicago ’91 .
Seriously, if Vince had ever tried teasing Dark Star, Phil would have smacked him with a rolled-up newspaper. And a chair.
It wasn’t like roulette, you see. The casinos have made fortunes since they installed those immaculately legible tote boards listing the numbers that have landed previously in red with big ol’ tempting empty spaces in between and they’ve been raking cash in because your dumb ass has evolved to think 15 is gonna hit because it’s due. It makes sense to believe that present events are based upon past observation: that’s why people instinctively shielded their crotches whenever Billy came around, for al the good it would do them. Billy was like Gretzky: he could always find your five-hole.
But just as it is a logical fallacy to think that the rules of real life apply in the casino, it is also a mistake to think that Hoyle has any say over the world. (It’s called the Ludic fallacy, which I know because it is one of those facts that gets lodged in my brain instead of, say, how to find love.) So, why do we forget that about the Dead? Why do we lionize certain shows only to ignore the rest of the week? These men were, appearances to the contrary, human. They had good runs. But the forest is invisible but for the trees, especially when some trees are, y’know, Barton Hall or Red Rocks. They suck up all the light.
Talking about the Dead is to talk about overshadowing. Garcia overshadowed the rest of the band, Mickey’s overkill overshadowed Billy’s light touch, ’77 and ’73 overshadowed all the other years, and Vince’s playing overshadowed the charitable work he did as a participant in the saddest Make-A-Wish event ever. Even Vince knew enough to be embarrassed.
We let ourselves think the greatness appeared as weird happening, crepuscular beams from a murky sea. Not so. 5/19/74 is rightfully well-regarded, especially the raging Truckin’>Mind Left Body jam. but listen to the very next show, 5/21/74 at UCLA the University of Washington* where they proceed to pull out a GODDAM 45 MINUTE PLAYIN’. Give the kids some Robotussin, shoot the dog and LISTEN to this thing, to the peaks and valleys that spring like Zeus out of inchoate spaciness one after another. (And, since it’s a GREAT matrix mix, listen to the appreciative audience cheer every twist and turn. Listen to ’em ROAR for Donna in Playin’. hell, listen to Donna!
Yeah, 2/14/70 is historic, but 2/11 is better. Yes, 1977 was THE year, but y’know: ’78 kicks more ass than an avowed lover of kicking ass who had spent his last dime to enter an ass-kicking contest in an attempt to win enough money to open his own business, a high-end Ass-Kickery.
*Thanks to a comment by an Esteemed Enthusiast, the location of the 5/21 show has been amended to note the actual location. For his Sherlockian abilities, he will receive a lifetime supply of Bobby Weir’s Shorts Shorteners. Shorts too long? Shorten ’em with Shorts Shortener!
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