My Favorite Things

Have I been negative? Probably. Almost definitely. What about the positives? What is lovable about this band?

• The black leather jacket Garcia used to wear.
• Mississippi Half-Step. When it gets real quiet and they sing about the Rio Grand-ee-o.
• The little songs they play during tuning–Funniculi, the Itsy Bitsy Spider, Stayin’ Alive.
• Billy playing the drums all by himself.
• Billy playing the drums with Mickey.
• The proto-version of Brown-Eyed Women from 8/24/71 (Dick’s Picks 35). The beat is turned around and the melody sounds like a children’s playground taunt and IT’S AWESOME.
• Bobby forgetting the words.
• Garcia forgetting the words.
• Phil never knowing the words in the first place and just making shit up as he went. (I’m looking at you, Tom Thumb’s Blues.)
• The Celtic jacket Mickey wore in the Touch of Grey video.
• Touch of Grey.
• The AUD of Touch of Grey from the comeback show.
• Garcia with his hair in pigtails.
• Pig.
• Branford.
• Bobby’s Chuck Berry tunes.
• Brent’s long, lustrous hair.
• Terrapin Station.
• Bobby’s wise-guy routines (“Turn around real slow, we gotcha covered.”)
• April Fool’s Day 1980–opening up the show with Promised Land on each others’ instruments. (Garcia on drums!)

Rule 34

• Stella Blew
• Casey Bones
• Touch of Grey Pubes
• Chokedown Alice
• Fuckin’
• Dark Starfish
• Nipple
• Shockingly Loose Lucy
• Fire on Your Mountains
• Vagina Cat Sunflower->I Know Her, Let’s Ride her
• Thighs of the World
• Sensually Playin’ in the Band (Billy stars in that one.)
• Ass-enger
• Ass-idy
• El Ass-0
• Brown- Aeroela’d Women
• Looks Like, But Is Almost Certainly Not, Rain.
• Me and My Uncle
• Black Peter
• Comes a Time
• Hard to Handle
• Let It Grow
• Dark Hollow (Wow, a lot of these work on their own, don’t they?
• Uncle John’s Gland
• Deep Throated Wind
• Sexicali Blues
• Estimated Pop-shot
• Sittin’ On Top Of Your face
• Please Ease Me In
• The Golden Road (To Unlimited Crotch)

I Need To Stop Buying Dead Books Off Amazon

Did you know Bobby wrote a children’s book? He did, in 1991. It was called Panther Dreams. Because of course it was. It had an environmental theme. Again, because of course it did. (Were the Dead that fucking famous in ’91? Children’s books are some high-level Regis and Madonna famous person bullshit.)

Tarot. Do you remember Tarot? It was the play TC left the Dead to score. Did you know it was a mime musical? This is a fact: I am not making it up.  Tom Constanten was the Crispin Glover of his time.

Bobby’s looks were becoming a problem. The problem was, Bobby was a pretty young man. Which meant he could essentially wear clown clothes and make them work, but when a man gets older, dignity should take the forefront. The pretty do not learn dignity.

Robert Hunter recorded an album called Amalgamalin Street. It was described as both an “audio novel” and a “rock-opera.” It was about a guy named Chet. WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

Sweet heavenly hosts, I’m sitting here listening to them, while I read and write about them. These baboons have infiltrated my very Essence. they have befouled me like worse than Billy did that Holiday Inn that time in Des Moines when he got bored. No, not that time: the other time. No, the other time.

Mickey spoke in front of the Senate? The real one, not a bunch of dogs wearing human shirts Steve Parrish wrangled in the parking lot? The actual human Senate of the United States? In this reality? Not in some Quantum Leap type deal? (Billy could totally play Dead Stockton.) The same year he also produced an album called Honor the Earth Powwow? What a world we created.

The American Book of the Dead by Oliver Trager is awesome.

By the way: Mickey spoke in front of Senate about the benefits of drum circles for the elderly. Because of course he did.

Tonight Weir Gonna Rock You (Tonight)

We don’t talk about ’71 a lot, you and I? In the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

(I need to get this off my chest: the lyrics to Dark Star–well, all of the early, yell-y songs, but Dark Star in extremis–are nothing but a freshman year way of saying, “I took the big blue pill.” In fact, the phrase “dark star” is almost identical to the phrase “midnight sun,” which is universal shorthand for “shitty lyrics.” Seriously, go check how many songs have “midnight sun” in them: it seems like a lot, but I’m going to have to go ahead and absolutely refuse to do even the tiniest iota of research for this. Nor will I provide links to examples.)

Because for a while there, in between TC and Keith, it was just the five of them. Pig did the backing vocals on Not Fade Away. Billy wouldn’t transform into Swingin’ Billy the Jazzbo Cat for three years. Bobby was in that sweet spot between learning how to play electric guitar and learning how to play slide guitar. Garcia still had the nasty sound of the Primal stuff, but he was playing these long, lyrical lines and PHIL WAS PLAYING EVERY NOTE HE COULD THINK OF AS LOUD AND AS OFTEN AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE.

And it worked, it really worked. They were loud and nasty and occasionally funky. They actually were the dance band they’d always bullshitted about being. And the shows they have left us are a little bit of magic in this used-up world.

We haven’t talked about Pigpen; we’re gonna talk about Pigpen.

Or-Not Coleman

Sometimes the Dead would try to sound like this record, Free Jazz. It was by Ornette Coleman and also featured Eric Dolphy and a bunch of other guys who wore clothes you could never in your wildest dreams pull off. Lots of chocolate-brown trousers with immaculate creases and cigarette ashes caught in the cuffs.

This music was to the Grateful Dead what the Grateful Dead was to keyboardists: a bad influence. Go back and listen to that nonsense again. It is skreeking and skronking and the odd thing is: they’re sure that they’re killing it. At least when Lou Reed made Metal Machine Music, you knew it was the simple combination of Being the World’s Biggest Junkie and Being the World’s Biggest Asshole.

When I hear this, I hear space, and when I hear space, I just want to go around slapping people. My hand would chafe until the skin just sloughed right off, like a snake’s–that’s how many slaps I want to give out when the Noodle Monster shows its mangy face.

One More Saturday Night At The Arcade

http://gratefuldeadgame.com/

Um, are we…like…all aware  of this fuckery?

I mean…heh, heh…who are the ad wizards who came up with…holy shit, why?! WHY?

One of the selling points in the ad is “Serendipity.” The computer game where you pretend to be a tie-dye Ewok going to shows you have owned for decades but you get to pay for it is offering me “serendipity.” I might get to meet any one of the several thousand bearded weirdos that habituate every other Dead sites. Except, you know: for free, and without the implication of being a cyber-furry.

(Thoughts On The Dead says: don’t be a Cyber-Furry, kids. Furries shouldn’t have rights. Black Ford Falcons should pull up to their houses after dark and take them, away and forever. Sting could write a song about it.)

The Other Ones

Bill Graham used to introduce the band by saying, “Not only are they THE BEST at what they do, they’re also THE ONLY ONES who do what they do: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Grateful Dead.” Which was elegant and eloquent but not quite true.

Miles Davis’ 70’s bands were doing the same thing as the Dead, except without any first set niceties. Miles and the Dead shared a San Francisco stage right after Miles’ masterpiece (that should probably read “right after one of the many, many masterpieces he produced), Bitches Brew came out. Miles had been working with an electric bass player since about the moment he decided, “I must destroy this concept of the song. There is no Song! Songs were invented by white devils! I’m just going to find a bunch of musicians and freak out for 60 minutes at a time.”

Miles, as usual, is not telling you the whole story. That “bunch of musicians” has to include Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter or the entire plan falls apart. Plus, Miles’ bands are sometimes mired in the jazz tradition of laying back while someone solos, instead of the full-band improvisational composition that the Dead do. You know what I’m talking about: the stuff that’s worth sitting through all the nonsense and noodling for. When the boys flow from one song through another and back and you never realize what they’ve done until you’re already amazed; it’s a musical magical trick when they do it right.

Miles was sometimes accused of cynicism: that his ’70’s electric period was not purely a musical journey, just an excuse to go from his usual clubs to playing the much larger (and therefore more lucrative) halls and theaters that the bands on the rock circuit did. This might have been one reason, sure, but you can never discount the possibility that Miles just didn’t want to rehearse anymore, as it took time away from driving a Lamborghini packed with white women through city streets at 100 mph, then accusing the officer that pulled him over of being–dependent on the situation–“a racist cracker-ass cracker,” or “an Uncle Tom motherfucker.” Miles was a real piece of work.

There was another band criss-crossing the country in the 1970’s trying to Reconnect with The Holy through playing really loud and long: P-Funk. Whatever the hell George Clinton was calling whichever group of guys were in the room when they made the record: Parliament, Funkadelic, the P-Funk All-Stars, Funk-isyahu and the Klezmer Kids, whatever.

P-Funk was the answer to the question, “What if we gave poor black kids in Jersey and middle-class white kids in San Francisco the exact same drugs and massive amplifiers?’

And, of course: the leaders of all three of these groups are dead. I know George Clinton thinks he is still alive, but he died three years ago–trust me on this one.

Johnny B. Mediocre A Good Deal Of The Time

Spurs ‘n’ Chaps Bobby had his cowboy songs, which the drummers hated; New Wave Bobby had his oeuevre of angular, weirdly melodied songs, which Jerry hated; and Blind Lemon Bobby had his clusterfuckingly tortuous first set Blooz-stravaganza, which ear-possessors hated.

Speak not to me of wang, nor dang, nor doodle, Bobert Weir! I will not look what you done done. And you put DOWN that slide guitar, Mister! Next time I see you with that slide guitar, you better be trying to flush a South American strongman out of hiding.

But there was one more Bobby, and he was my favorite Bobby: Sock Hop Bobby, who loved the old jukebox singles and 50’s rock and, most of all, Chuck Berry. (At both Woodstock and the Trans-Canada Festival, Bobby paid way too much attention to Sha Na Na. He shrieked like a girl when he clapped for them and after their set, Bobby followed the lead singer into the bathroom and just openly stared at the guy’s cock. Like not in a gay way? It was more like–I’m not explaining this right. It was Bobby just being all, “That is a thing. That is an honest-to-god thing right there. It is a cock that cock right there and I am LOOKING. I am LOOKING right AT IT. Hey, stop hitting me.” Even for Bobby, that was a behavioral outlier. It led to a stern talking to from Phil that touched upon many subjects, but mostly “expectations.”)

Except, Phil kinda ruined most of the Chuck Berry songs, didn’t he? The rest of them were pretty adroit with the rockers: Jerry always bit into them with vigor, Bobby could yelp just as good as Bob Seger or any other white guy in the Seventies, and Keith played the shit out of the boogie piano. (Strangely enough, he was absolutely amateurish at woogie piano.)

But, Phil? No, he was far too good of a musician to play those songs well. They were brutal, dumb hammers of music, but as we all know: Phil was a surgeon. He delicately flitted about both the root note and the downbeat like a savage butterfly, exposing the inner horrible grace of the mixed-ionian-calipygian modes and the sweet, sw–PHIL, STOP FUCKING AROUND AND PLAY THE GODDAMN SONG. IT’S JUST A FAST TWELVE-BAR BLUES TUNE. STOP WITH THE CHORD SUBSTITUTION.

The Big Retcon

I am now retconning the Grateful Dead. All thirteen of you know that I have, up until this momentous occasion, unofficially declared everything post-Brent to be only dubiously existent. Yes, there’s scattered evidence here and there, but–and I say this impartially–doesn’t it just make more sense to believe that the band mysteriously disappeared in a 1979 plane crash? Well, their plane didn’t crash: a plane crashed into their tour bus. Six of one, half-dozen of another.

But as of now, I declare all of the Land of Welnickia barren and off-limits. Vince is no longer in continuity. He has ceased to be canon: Vince is the Dead’s version of the Expanded Star Wars Universe. (You know the Expanded Star Wars Universe, right?  The place where everybody had Jedi babies and the Emporer had hidden so many clones of himself in so many places that by the time they were four novels in, every 13th person on Coruscant was named Not Secretly Palpatine’s Clone. Then a moon fell on Chewbacca.)*

Isn’t life easier now? No more nonsense hype about the 91 Boston Garden shows, no more having to pretend that the oakland ’92 Dark Star was as good as a ’72.  ANY ’72. Five less years taking up space in your head.

You’re welcome.

*That really happened, the Chewbacca thing. These guys whose galaxy is even far, farther away than the one our heroes live in, attacked Luke and them and Luke and them fought back or something and then Chewie was helping to evacuate a planet –like  you do–and the bad guys threw a moon at him. So now, Chewie’s dead. Except he’s not really, because he was only ever just a pituitary case in a Space Monkey suit

Shit Grateful Deads Say

• I spent a million dollars on this thing.
• Hey, Healy? Could you turn me up a bit? I can’t hear myself over Lesh and Weir.
• You smell like Heineken; let me have your liver.
• Fuckin’ Weir.
• Fuckin’ drummers.
• FUCKIN’ DONNA!
• Healy, if I still can’t hear my bass 60 seconds from now, I’m going to stab you. I will physically stab you with an actual knife. You need to bring it up at 800 cycles…that’s it: Ramrod, bring me my knife.
• No, Ramrod: to ME my blade.
• Bring everyone their knives, Ramrod!
• Would someone pull Mickey off that cop? Just grab him, but be careful…OOH, I should have told you that Billy was probably gonna punch you in the dick. He does that and other human beings seem to just accept it.
• Jerry, get out of the bathroom.
• No, not “I need a million dollars.” I told you that I have already spent a million dollars and now the million dollars is gone forever and we will almost certainly never get one cent of it back. What did I do with it? Stop hassling me, man.
• Yes, of course  it seems perfectly logical that we allow the crew to have a full vote on everything we do. How can that be anything but a sound business practice that will, in no way, end in numerous deaths. Why do you ask?
• Who the fuck bought a harpsichord?
• Yeah, they call me Captain Billy; I’m kinda the captain. Would you like to touch the captain in a sensual way? Come! Let Captain Billy practice his sensuality all over you, my zaftig nightchild!
• Soooo…you should just assume that every single thing you see  is just absolutely drenched with acid. All of it, even on the insides of things in defiance of all laws of nature. We encourage a culture in which is acceptable to drug one another at any time with any amount of any drug. Some workplaces have fantasy football; we have chosen to amuse ourselves through poisoning one another. We have almost definitely poisoned you already.  Enjoy your backstage passes, Congressmen.
• Healy, can you–
• –Healy, you turn him up and I’m gonna buy, raise, and train attack dogs–like Michael Vick-type shit–and then I will set them on you and fucking LAUGH.
• –you’re just, like, mean.