Domo Arigoto, Mr. Bob-oto

This is being written on a Mac. For my entire life, I had had PCs, giant towers of clicking, whirring parts made out of a special alloy that emitted pheromones to all the dust in the area; no mater how many times you cleaned them, they were always filthy within seconds.

Not that I treated the insides any better: I killed every machine in my presence, through a campaign of benign neglect and increasingly reckless ideas about the location of the line between “Relatively safe to download,” and “You’re gonna download this? What are you, an asshole?” Death could not have been more inevitable had you given a kitten to Keith Godchaux.

But the new machine is pretty and inside it are the souls of all the young Chinese women who threw themselves off buildings in its honor.  (That’s one possible interpretation of reality. It’s more glorious to believe that than the fact that, to knock a couple of hundred bucks off a toy, we work people to death.)

The Dead and computers is a two-headed topic.  There’s: How did the Dead use computers; and, How do we use computers to experience the Dead?

The band’s use of computers was the answer to a question that hadn’t been asked. No one–not one single person–was sitting through, say, The Other One from 1/22/78 and thinking to himself, “You know what would make this better? If Bobby was playing his part in a tinny marimba sound.”

Think of the boredom this MIDI nonsense tried to cover up. Speaking of TOO, they played it 600 times. picture that 450th time: it’s July in New Jersey, and they’re men in their 40’s singing about some guy they knew when they were 19. You’d be gagging for a flute sound, as well.

(And we have to stop calling things MIDI, too. MIDI is the language used to trigger the synth sounds; it’s like referring to the internet as the HTML.)

As for us, the computers have made being an Enthusiast just exactly perfect. Every single note the Dead ever played online, for your perusal and cataloguing. By now, we all should have heard everything and made up our top ten lists for every single song. It’s not like there’s a another version of Bird Song out there that’s even more mind-blowing, is there?

I’ll just check real quickly.  Be right back.

Can You Pass The Test?

Grateful Dead imbibing game. Pick a show at random. Not from 1995: have more respect for yourself, would you please?

The rules:

• If Phil plays an unaccompanied bass solo, drink a Heineken. If, somewhere in the solo he hits a note that makes no sense whatsoever, drink another Heineken. If you rationalize it by telling yourself that Phil is a musical genius and means every single note, so therefore you just didn’t understand what Phil was laying down, then drink the rest of the case and imagine Phil playing in Puerto Rico and giving the donor rap in halting, old white guy Spanish.

“Me llamo Philipe. Tiene oído absoluto. Dame tus hepáticas. DAME TU HEPATICAS!”

• If Billy’s the only drummer, bet $50 that the Smails kid will pick his nose. If Mickey’s there, give your horse one hit of acid every time you can name the thing that Mickey’s hitting during drums. If he is hitting Ramrod, two hits. If he hits an executive from the record company, take the horse outside and free that majestic steed, who won’t survive two or three hours wandering through a town, especially after you fed it all that acid, you MONSTER.
• They play Might as Well and you think about watching Festival Express again–take a shot and demand your local diner give away their food “to the people, maaaaaaaaaan.”
• They play New Speedway Boogie and you feel like watching Gimme Shelter again–take a fistful of LSD and seconal, put on a bear hat, and beat Marty Balin half to death with a pool cue.  (Who brings a pool-cue to a concert?  Shouldn’t that have been, you know: a clue? “Sorry, guys, you can’t come in: I think you might be looking to cause trouble.  Just a guess.”)
• If they play Dire Wolf–drink red whiskey for dinner. Then realize there’s no such thing as red whiskey so how did my whiskey get redOMIGOD SOMEONE BLED IN MY FUCKING WHISKEY.
• If Bobby screws up a lyric–do nothing. Mentioning that Bobby screwed up a lyric is like mentioning that Billy played drums: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.  If Bobby gets every single word to Truckin’ right, go buy yourself the tightest, Izod-iest shirt you can find and pop that collar, baby.
• If they tune for one minute–hit of Persian. If they tune in the middle of the song–burn yourself with a cigarette while you sleep. If the play a song in the middle of tuning–burn someone else with a cigarette while they sleep.
• If Pig’s in the band and they play Lovelight and you still can’t figure out what the hell “Box back nitties, great bigging on the vine,” means–get drunk off a pint of cheap whiskey you keep in the back pocket of greasy Levi’s, have shouty drunken sex with Janis Joplin, and then wear a series of ridiculous hats, but actually look really cool in them.

Playing To The Tide

Seven individuals with disparate backgrounds get thrown together by chance, fate, and poor map skills to find themselves eternally stuck in a paradise that is beautiful, but also quite inescapable. Has the cast of Gilligan’s Island actually been the Grateful Dead all along? Did they merely intend to go on a 3 show tour of Guam, Diego Garcia, and Midway and get hopelessly shipwrecked, an occurrence almost definitely attributable to choosing to combine marine navigation with cocaine.

Obviously, Garcia is the Skipper. Same body shape, same propensity to pick an outfit and stick with it, same love of hammocks. Phil is the Professor. We know who Bobby is, don’t we?

This week, Phil the Professor has lashed together 20 palm fronds, 9 coconuts, some vine, and 85,000 of the largest amplifiers ever invented by man.  He will not tell anyone else where he got these things. His plan is to drop the biggest Phil Bomb ever and use the fronds as rudimentary surfboardsto ride the giant tsunami wave to civilization. Then he will eat all the coconuts. However, Skipper Garcia thinks there is more to the story. Plus, he knows this: to be in the Dead is to choose the most expensive option, always and eternally. Will I supersize that? I’m in the fucking Dead, what do you think?

Skipper Garcia tells Bobbigan that Phil has had the amps shipped in, meaning that there’s a boat somewhere on the island.

“Do you know what this means, Little Bobby?”

“Yeah, Skip! We gotta find that boat so we can…

“So we can?”

“…ask the crew for drugs! And to cook us brown rice. Skipper, no one has cooked me my brown rice in, like…forever. I miss it, Skipper. I miss my brown rice.”

Hat!

Professor Phil is trying to explain the plan to the Billy the Millionaire and his wife, Lovey Hart. Billy is wearing the blue jacket and little sailing cap that Jim Backus used to wear. You can totally see him in it, can’t you? Like now you can’t unsee it, right? It’s kind of fucked up. I hope I didn’t just ruin Billy for you forever.

Lovey Hart is recording a song cycle based on the Polynesian pookapooka drum that requires thirteen drummers playing 19 drums apiece. Prime numbers are very important to the Polynesians. Each drum is situated on its own island, so the drummers must helicopter from island to island at staggering expense, costing $800,00 and the lives of two drummers and a dog named Colin. Colin was also a drummer. The album will never be released.

And then in walk…Keith and Donna. As Ginger and Maryanne. Okay, the conceit breaks down at that point.

The Butler Dead It

“Ah, Mr. Mydland, I see you’ve completed brushing your beautiful, silky hair 100 times on each side with your silver brush. As this is your first show with the Grateful Dead, please allow me to show you around. My name is Rutherford.”

…

“Yes, is certainly was a shame when you lost count those four times.”

…

“Yes, it was rude of Mr. Weir to kep sneaking up behind you and shouting numbers.”

…

“Yes, it did also seem to me that Mr. Weir’s decision to only yell “one,” and “two,” before bellowing nonsense syllables that he thought sounded like numbers was entirely based  on the fact that Mr. Weir is mentally challenged. What’s odd is that I’ve heard him count off Estimated. The only possible explanation, may Sweet Sweaty Jesus protect us, is that Bob Weir is getting stupider before our very eyes.”

…

“Mm-hmm. I’ll bet you’re worried. I, on the other hand, have watched that man woo, seduce, mount, and hump to completion an ice machine in Salt Lake City. And now he’s actually dumber than that. But I digress: let’s show you around backstage.

“These are the dressing rooms. You do not have one, as they are earned by not dying. Mr. Godchaux, for example, never got a dressing room. He would change his trousers in the middle of the room, with Mrs. Godchaux holding a towel around him as you would for a small child at the seaside. The entire crew would laugh and laugh, pointing at the poor little man.

“This is Mr. Garcia’s dressing room. Needless to say, you are not allowed in there. Ever. Especially not if he has invited you in; all it means is that he smells narcotics on you and will not be satisfied until he looks for himself. He will check every single bit, Mr. Mydland. You have been given the talk about Mr. Garcia, correct? No eye contact–he interprets that as aggression. Also: it is his ice cream. Any and all ice cream is his. If you were to go to the shop to pick up a pint of ice cream for yourself, it would still be his ice cream. So, never ever ever–

DICKPUNCH!

“Ah, you’ve met Mr. Kreutzman. He enjoys so much to punch people in the dick. Randomly and viciously. You are aware of one of our supporters, the basketball player, Bill Walton? We have been keeping a terrible secret for years: Mr. Walton’s continuing series of injuries that have kept him off the court are, without any exception, results of being punched in the dick by Mr. Kreutzman.

The Other One

Who was the most useless member? Musically speaking, obviously. In a serious crisis, like a fire or a cruise boat disaster, you would want precisely none of them around. Garcia might keep a cool head, but that’s it. Bobby’s presence would result in a vast increase in casualties due to the time expended by having to explain over and over, in increasingly simpler language, what was happening and why it was a bad thing. Brent would lose the will to live immediately and just walk into the flames.

Which brings us to Tom Constanten. TC is no one’s favorite Dead member, but he is also not anyone’s least-favorite. No one puts on a tape of 1969 and admonishes his friends, “Dudes, listen to the Bach-flavored calliope noises way in the background. LISTEN TO TC TRILL FANCIFULLY!” TC seems to have been included in the group for three reasons: to make Lesh seem like less of a pretentious dick, his clothes, and mustache. Let us examine these things:

Phil Lesh is unbearable, we all know this. If you can read an interview with the man where your hand does not involuntarily start making the jerk-off gesture, then you’re a more tolerant man than I. If Phil were a modern-day hipster, he would work the fact that he didn’t own a television into the first 30 seconds of every conversation he ever had. Phil’s one of those New Atheists that likes to start internet arguments. TC demanded that the group buy him a harpsichord. We have a winner.

As for attire, the only thing to be said is that TC thought he was dressing to play Hippie at a Dinner Party #2 in the flashback scene of a random ThirtySomething episode. TC owns a cape. It is not his first cape. In fact, TC has a “cape guy.”

But the Fu Manchu was pretty sweet.

MexiBobby Blues

“How long are you going to play Eyes tonight, guys?”

“From immediately after drums until the heat death of the Universe.”

“So, the same as last night, then?”

“Yes.”

I once heard a ’74 Playin’ that is still being played at this moment.  It has been going on for nigh-on-40 years now because Phil is, and I am quoting a man who belongs to several tough-guy unions and yet still allows other people to call him Ramrod, “really feeling it.”

The only reason to play a song for as long as the Grateful Dead played several of their’s is if the lack of music will trigger a bomb. Like the Grateful Dead were in Speed, and Bobby is Keanu so he is pretending to be a Cop On The Edge instead a Cowboy With A Broken Heart this time.

As we’ve discussed, Bobby actually thought he was a fucking cowboy. Now, each of the Dead’s singers had a certain persona they delivered their songs through: Jerry was the Gambler, Bobby was the Cowboy, and Phil was The Guy Who Couldn’t Sing. Now, when Jerry did Deal or Loser or whatever, he was delivering these songs from a uniquely American perspective, one that he and Hunter had crafted to serve as an avatar for the Dead’s sheer Americanness.

For the Dead were the most American band there ever was: far too loud, prone to ridiculous, money-losing foreign entanglements, drugged out of its mind, and dying of diabetes. But also capable of the most astonishing grace–American. And what’s more that than the Gambler, armed with his six-shooter and his wits? Garcia and Hunter recognized this metaphor and wrung all they could out of it.

Except Bobby actually thought he was a fucking cowboy. He apparently spent part of one teenaged summer a’ropin’ and a’rasslin and a’rompin’ and a’ridin’ and whatever the fuck else gentiles do in the summer. You can imagine Bobby traipsing through the fields, shirtless, asking the farmhands if they thought he was pretty.

Thereafter, Bobby was a fucking cowboy and we had to sit through Mexicali Blues every other night

They Love Each Other

I’m not listening to the Donna songs. Sunrise, somesuch. Just not going to do it. They won’t be excised like drums/space from my library, but I’m skipping them.

Now, I am a Donna Defender. Go listen to 5/19/74 in Portland–and I have no idea which Portland because I will not be doing any research, thank you–to the way she matches Bobby’s every lyrical gesture in BIODTL.  She turns a tune so pedestrian that the only interesting thing about it is counting the beats in the introduction into a laid-back trifle full of sweetness.

And other times she howls like a banshee with the key to Hell’s executive bathroom. More than one time, she just out of nowhere lets loose with these yelps as if she had just gotten a good look at Keith without steeling herself beforehand.

Because, let’s face it, Keith’s face could most generously be called unfortunate. He looked like a muppet the dog had gotten to. Keith wore tightie-whities, I’d bet my life on it.

But Keith got bored and Keith started comping endlessly behind fucking everything. I think he was just asked the pronunciation of his last name once too often and snapped. What could he possibly have to be depressed about? He got to stay in a hotel every night, tonight in Normal, IL and tomorrow in Tuscaloosa, AL! Where he would get to play Estimated Prophet. Again. While fucking Bobby sleeps with his wife. Guy’s got it made.

Work the Jab, Weir

Gentlemen, I realize the songs all want to be twenty minutes long. But you don’t have to let them. Do you fuckers know you once played El Paso for over 8 minutes?  And those minutes were in a row, mind you. It wasn’t like they hid El Paso in a sandwich of other stuff and kinda broke up the El Paso: it was 8 straight minutes of Bobby pretending to be a cowboy. Again. As always.

The only person I can think of that pretends to be a cowboy as much as Bobby is George W. Bush. The whole band went through a cowboy phase, but Bobby just Philip K. Dick’ed his cowboy persona and by this point, if you woke Bobby up in the middle of the night by screaming, “Stampede on the brazoes!” he would grab his hat and jump on his lovely steed and ride off into the purple skies of justice. Bobby stopped pretending he was a cowboy at some point and, in his mind, became a Rider of the Prairies.

What I am trying to get to is that Bobby Weir was a raving goddam lunatic. This is the only possible explanation for some of his choices.

There is only one documented instance of someone treating Bobby in the manner you would treat anyone who behaved in this manner, but–and here’s the important part–was not a rock star. In Sam Cutler’s entirely fallacious and therefore delightful book about road managing the band in the 70’s, Bobby liked to sneak up on people sleeping on planes and fuck with them. This was, obviously, back in the days when wild-eyed lunatics were allowed to wander around planes giggling to themselves. So Cutler pops him in the nose. Like you would if you were dead-asleep because this plane ride was the only 90 minutes in the day you weren’t dealing with the promoter, the union, the crew (we’ll get to them), or the 7 sweaty gibbering drugsuckers whose every whim needs to be catered to, because if they’re not happy, then how do you expect them to play Sugaree for 22 minutes?

So this is pre-cell phone or obviously, wi-fi, on planes. There are no phones. There is no problem that can be settled now; we are en route and incommunicado until Des Moines. You have just gone through the maddening ritual of getting these hairy morons through an airport and now all you want to do is catch a quick nap before you have to check them into the hotel. Which, if anything can be learned from every single other time you have attempted to check these baboons into a hotel, will go poorly at best.

And now Bobby wants to lurk up from behind you and grab your face.

P.S.  And you know he wouldn’t pull that shit on Jerry.