Other Times, I Can Barely SEO

Do you have an Old Mall in your town? As those caverns of the 70’s stubbornly rust all over the country, they evolve into one of a number of morphologies: there’s the Ghost Mall, that has maybe one store still there and the others look haunted and Cormac McCarthy-ish. The giant letters forming the names of the stores have been removed and left their traces on the wall. Best “out of business” sign there is.

Then there is another kind of mall. Perhaps it is just as bustling as it used to be, back when it supported three separate record shops (one of which was actually–swear–cool) and an honest-to-god Tiny Comic Book Store. Not too big–just one long oval with Macy’s on one end and Sear’s on the other. A solidly striving, middle-class mall in America. Now, yes, there always was a bit of a crime problem, but you get a lot of shoplifters at any mall and quite frankly, the whole situation was needlessly exacerbated by the Police Chief getting himself run over while in pursuit three times. Twice, maybe. Three times, you start looking at the common denominator.

But where there used to be ladies apparel shops are now cash4gold places, the Body Shop replaced by the Dollar Store, and far more places selling baseball caps than you would think the market could bear.  It has become the Terrifying Mall, a mall you are sure “belongs” to someone who is not the rightful owner, someone for whom “laundry day” is never a valid excuse for wearing certain colors.

Jut asking, because apparently some poor soul got here via the search term socks for fat ankles boynton beach and everyone knows that the best place is Sweaty’s at the Boynton Beach Mall, in between the two kiosks selling iPod accessories and the Mexican supermarket. Godspeed, you fankled lovely. 

Do you know what analytics are? I didn’t, until I started making the bloggings. Now I know how each and every person got here–there’s a list of the exact search term. Let’s see a few, shall we? (The search terms are in bold, obviously. I have not altered them except when I did to make them funnier.)

Now, weir fucking donna is an obvious one, as is is phil lesh a jerk, but less predictable was the fact that three lost, lonely men (and you know that they are most certainly men) searched for ned lagin or ned lagin band.

I’d like to think that both dickpunching billy and grateful dead crotchpunch represent people who had been here before, but for one reason or another forgot to bookmark the bloggings.

As for the 8–FUCKIN’ 8 HUMAN BEINGS–who searched for grateful dead rule 34? You sicken me. On the other hand, it was nice to fill a niche

How Does The Song Go?

There are few Dead related pleasures more piquant than the moment when Bobby just totally gives up on remembering the words and starts singing, “yuh duh DUH yuh DUH.” Actually, Bobby’s constant memory lapses led to the classic stage configuration: Bobby had to be in the middle so everyone had an equal opportunity to yell at him when he sings Truckin‘ like this:

It’s hilarious. You can almost see Garcia contemplating the whole Mickey and the Hartbeats thing again.

Garcia knew the words, Bobby. Brent and Donna knew the words. Pigpen knew the words even when they weren’t technically words at all. (I refer you to “Box back nitties, Crayfish and mormon mice. Workin undercollar onda mall all night.”) Phil did not know the words.

New contest: has there EVER been a show where Bobby made it through without forgetting where he was? Identify it in the comments and win a year’s supply of Forearm Sweatbands by Mr. Phil of Palo Alto.

I’m Uncle Sam, That’s Who I Am

I wrote about Bruce and the Dead and how different they are, even though if you think about it, they’re both overstaffed rock bands playing Chuck Berry songs in hockey arenas for white people. When you look at it that way and think about how exclusive a club that is, then yes there might be a resemblance.

But the moment of greatest divergence comes when Bruce Introduces The Band. Bruce once introduced the band for 35 minutes. If you were an acquaintance of Bruce’s and ran into him while he was with someone to whom you had not been introduced, just keep walking, man; Bruce will take a quarter-hour to say the person’s name, but it’ll be the greatest 15 minutes you ever spent. It is show-biz at its cheesiest, and therefore most authentic, best. He makes up little stories and cute pet names and shares wacky Jersey anecdotes and then you realize it’s been 12 minutes since he started this and he’s only at Roy Bittan. For a while, after Bruce rebuilt the Twin Towers and he became soulful and about family and settled into his latter-years role as “That guy from the AA meeting who calls everyone ‘brother’,” he turned the Band Intro into a song, an honest to god song about how much they all love each other even though they’re getting older and Bruce intros people, and EVERYBODY SINGS A WHOLE VERSE. It takes hooooooooooours.

The Dead did not do the show-biz introduction thing; it would not have gone well. Bobby would have to do it, of course. He had been pretending not to want to do it, but he REALLY, REALLY wanted to, so he kept dropping hints with everybody and no one knew what the fuck Bobby was talking about, so one night while Garcia was tuning and Phil was slapping a roadie, hard and in the face, Bobby just launches into–

“All right, people, lemme hear you! On the drums, stage left, Mr. Mickey–”

THWOCK a drumstick hits him in the back of the head, followed by a drum.

“That’s not cool! Over here on bass, from Palo Alto–”

“YOU KNOW YOUR PLACE, BOY!”

“Sorry, Phil. Ah, fuck, Garcia snuck into the bathroom. End of first set.”

Spring Ahead

The essence of Grateful Deadness: 1/18/70, Springer’s Inn. Nearing the end of the set, Bobby mentions something about how this had to be their last number, as they were running up against time constraints.

So they played the song with the six-minute drum solo.

Ladies and gentlemen, your heroes.

Pig

Pigpen was 27.

Lay Your Money Down

Have you seen this book called How to be Like the Grateful Dead in the Business Places or Something: Business Innovations from the Long Strange Trip? Something like that, but the actual title is under the page on which I am working and I am just that committed to doing NOT ONE jot of research for these bloggings, even when now I kind of want to know. I shall, however, resist.

A book like this can succeed on two fronts: it might have cool new photos or stories about the band, or it might have a coherent and well-considered thesis that the presence of the Dead only augments. The book falls short in both categories. There are some good pictures, but nothing revelatory. There are, for instance, no photos of Billy in his Spring ’85 tour alter ego.

Billy always adopted a tour alter ego, someone to transform into when the romping got to stomping and the hotel bar started eyeballing him. Billy’s tour alter ego was usually a horrible, vicious man named The Chasm. Luckily for some, Billy would presage the arrival of The Chasm, announcing in the style of the delightful street urchins on The Wire, “Chasm coming!” and everybody would just clear right out except for one guy who would lazily wobble his head towards Billy and ask, “Chasm? Cool, man. Is he holding?”

CROTCH!

But 1985 was different. The entire band had been out of their heads on the MDMA that tour, but Billy had shifted paradigms on ’em again and undergone a massive change in temperament, renaming himself Slobber T. Johnson. He’d walk around pantless with his crank in his hand sweetly inquiring of anyone who passed by, “Hello, I’m Slobber T. Johnson. Are you slobbering johnsons? My johnson sure does need a slobber, you johnsonslobberer, you.” and it just goes on like that.

So not only does it disappoint that there are no pictures of the event, it also confirms my skepticism about the whole project as just a cheapjack move to make some blood-money. [EDIT: In no way is the income derived from writing a semi-serious book about a country-rock jam band “blood money.” We renounce the writer of the previous statement, and as all-powerful editor, replace him with ourself.] FREEDOM! [Who let him out? Who the fuck let him out?] I will DESTROY the SOUL of the UNIVERSE unless you RELINQUISH the GAUNTLET OF GANTHET! [Shit, he’s fully capitalizing now. It’s bad.] The JAWS of my DARK ANUS will CHOMP on your NETHERS until you–

Guys. Guys, enough. Thank you: it was cute until the “dark anus” and then…you know, we just can’t be having it around the kids.

I am SORRY.

[My bad.]

Back to work, now.

The entire concept of this silly book is that you should take advice from a group of orangutans who had had more than one conversation involving the phrase, “He went where with the money?” Normal human beings might have that conversation once due to no fault of their own, but they never have it twice. You pay attention the second time. Not our heroes. For all we know, they might have chosen who to give the money to by who had the most pocket space. The Dead leaked a lot of cash. They behaved, in other words, completely contrary to every business practice known to man.

I’m betting the book is going to hit on the Dead’s early adoption of fan clubs and mailing lists as some sort of evidence that the Dead “really were the first social networkers.”  Next time someone tries to tell you that the telegraph was the Victorian twitter or somesuch, headbutt that fucker til he dies.

Ramble On Rosalita

I was raised in New Jersey, so if you say bad things about Bruce Springsteen, I have to impregnate your cousin. No, not that cousin, the other one, the one no one would expect. My family takes our New Jersey rock seriously: my cousin once punched out Jon Bon Jovi. That is an actual true fact.

For graduation, one of my friends gave, as a “graduation gift” (don’t ask, it was a suburban thing), around 10 people the exact same CD, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Not only was it the ballsiest act of record snobbery in the books, but it was the most successful: all of those recipients still listen to the record regularly. Because it’s The Wild and the Innocent, man, But it was also telling for the fact that in New Jersey in the 90’s, everyone was simply assumed to be into Bruce.

So, what do Bruce and the Dead have in common? Quite a bit, but not very much at all.

They both made their bones as live performers, got ripped off by shady idiots, and became beloved by white people everywhere. The Dead built a Wall of Sound, Bruce ripped off the wall of sound. But the analogy quickly falls apart.

Both favored the approach of putting as many people on the payroll as possible, but Bruce hired employees, and then yelled at them a lot. Which shouldn’t be held against him: it’s how most bandleaders have always treated their musicians. James Brown used to fine people for missing notes. Gene Krupa only played the drums for the permission it gave him to scream at sax players. If E Street bassist Garry W. Tallent had ever tried any of Phil’s multi-octave meanderings, Bruce would’ve just outright beat him to death in front of the rest of the band as a warning.

Bruce and the Dead never met, seemingly. They certainly never jammed together. Neither Mickey nor Phil would have taken well to being counted off in such a commanding tone; it would have ended poorly.

Yes, both favored 8-minute long songs, but in Bruce’s case, 5 of those minutes were the band vamping while he told a story about his father. Or, possibly, about the Highway of Hope or the River of Faith or the Off-Ramp of False Equivalence or whatever the fuck he’s been yammering about for the past 15 years ago or so.

(Plus, Bruce’s accent has now lapsed into either speech impediment or elaborate put-on. Growing up, I had a friend whose mom had gone to high school with Bruce, because everyone in New Jersey is required to have some connection, however tenuous, to Bruce under penalty of someone going, “What the fuck, you don’t have a tenuous connection to Bruce? What the fuck over here?” Do I need to mention that this woman who grew up not two miles from Springsteen’s house at the exact same time had not one hint of grizzled twang to her voice? At the beginning of his career, Bruce sounded like a sweathog, but now he’s Johnny 99% and he wants to Occupy It (All Night Long.))

Although, I certainly would have enjoyed hearing Garcia try to do one of Bruce’s raps:

“So, see, my dad, who was very much kind of his own avatar? If you can grok me on that, y’know? So, he was very much a man of his times–ooh, wait, I heard this cool thing about watches…

“GIVE ME YOUR LIVERS!”

“Someone take away Phil’s mic, please.”

My Best Friend, My Drummer

Listen to this, starting at around a minute in. It’s the Stir it Up jam, you know it. But listen again to how the very instant that Garcia picks up the thread that he’s been doodling at, Billy’s right there with him.

Billy gets short shrift. The other chimps built a Wall of Sound around him, (literally*), but Billy was still sitting there like the lost Murray brother with his pervy mustache and dinky little jazz kit. Whenever Mickey wasn’t around to rope Billy into his percussion related…ideas…Billy’s entire kit would fit in the trunk and backseat of an El Dorado. He gets overshadowed, though, partially stemming from the fact that Billy is deliberately kept away from people, especially people who have crotches they don’t want punched.

Billy should be listed along with Charlie Watts and Animal Muppet as one of the greatest drummers of the time, but he labors under the double canopy of Garcia and Phil. Phil, as we have discussed, preferred to play all the notes. Other bassists would play some of the notes. Actually, most bassists would play merely a few notes repeatedly. Not our Phil, so it’s easy to forget The Rule:

The sound of a great band is made by two guys, usually the drummer and the rhythm guitarist, but sometimes the bassist. No exceptions.**

The Stones are Keith and Charlie. Van Halen is those two aging tweakers and whatever hepatitis-infected blond they can rope into screaming, “GLARBLE MONNA HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT!” for a three-month tour that lasts five weeks and ends in recriminations, lawsuits, and, finally, discussion of Wolfgang’s unfortunate resemblance in every single way possible  to A. J. Soprano that was totally uncalled for. Not cool, man.

The sound of the Dead is Garcia and Billy. Dead and gone.

(We do, though, have recordings of the shows, which we may listen to at our leisure. For your enjoyment, and to bolster my pro-Billy stance, listen to the Mind Left Body Jam in this China/Rider. It proves my point: Phil played the bass, but Billy played songs. Man.)

*Billy refused to sit directly under the massive center speaker conglomeration, primarily because he had been up all night doing drugs and shooting at the Invisible Ones with the people who erected the thing.

**I am including Rush in this. The sound of Rush is generated by Geddy and Neil. Lifeson, while technically known in official musician terminology as “a motherfucker,” has always been generic, generally.

ADDENDUM

Recently having written a post about Springsteen, I have come to the realization that the sound of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band is generated by Roy Bittan and Max Weinberg, making it an ultra-rare piano/drum combo.

You Know Our Love Will

Listen to Not Fade Away, all the way through. Please. I promise you it’s worth your time.

LISTEN TO THE WHOLE THING! LISTEN TO THE WHOLE THING, FUCKER (Sorry for the “fucker,” pal.) NO, I’M NOT! DON’T BE A FUCKER: LISTEN TO THE THING I WANT YOU TO LISTEN TO!

Did you listen to it?

Got something in your eye, buddy?  It’s okay, I got misty, too. Not full-on The Green Mile weeping, the memory of which is still a bit humiliating, but still a suggestion of a tear upon the eye. If you didn’t get a little choked up, then you’re not an Enthusiast, full stop.

This, my fellow obsessives, is what redeems the silliness and utter lack of discipline. The solo albums and the 1972 drum solos with just Billy for six or seven minutes and the fact that, while yes Truckin’ does have tough lyrics, 25 years is enough time to have figured them out–all of these former problems reveal themselves in the true scale of the thing as mere piffle.

Moments that made you remember that, for around 30 years, the Dead were the best house band in the world, no matter how big the house.

Another Dick’s Pick In The Wall

The Wall of Sound. Sweet heavenly Jesus: the Wall of Sound. These befuddled men asked themselves, “How much Sound do we need?” The answer–apparently–was, “A Wall’s worth.”

The problem was not really with the Sound so much as it was with the Wall. It was also an intractable problem, due to the fact that the very definition of ‘wall’ is something you cannot move easily, if at all. Hadrian’s Wall? Great Wall of China? All still there, mostly because of bunch of longhairs and bikers didn’t drag them around the midwest for months at a time. That a wall not be portable is its sine non qua is obvious with even my cursory knowledge of siege warfare, all entirely gleaned from 8th grade World history and whichever Lord of the Rings movie had the big castle fight scene. You know the name: it was the one with the little gay hobbits and the monsters and dragons and it lasts for nineteen fucking hours.  (Although, seriously, what kind of nimrod builds a castle with a drainage canal thing in the FRONT, where is easily accesible to your enemy, provided your enemy is a monster, WHICH HE TOTALLY IS AND YOU KNEW THAT GOING INTO THIS, SO WHY DIDN’T YOU BRICK THAT THING UP, GRAND MOFF TARKIN?)

It took 12 hours to set the Wall up. The Amish can knock off 6, 7 barns in that amount of time. If something takes you twelve hours to build, it should be permanent. These facts, though, pale in comparison to the fact that they chose to do this during a gas crisis. You cannot haul 75 tons of anything around during a gas crisis and expect to turn a profit: it’s one of the first things they teach you at Wharton, right after, “mention Trump and you fail.”

The Wall didn’t stop at the speakers, all of which were custom-built at a special facility in Daly City, CA that lights its workshop with burning cash. No, the boys also had new space-age instruments made up for themselves, most famously Garcia’s Wolf. Phil also got a new bass, so heavy and laden with doom it looked like the melee weapon of Phil-Garr the Grateful.

I will break my own iron held rule about research to quote at length:

Phil is using a new quadraphonic bass, the electronics of which were designed and built by George Mundy and the body and pickups by Rick Turner. The new bass has the same versatile qualities as the old bass: three pickups (bass and treble pickups covering all the strings, and a quad pickup which has a separate signal for each string); on each of the bass and treble pickups there are controls which enable him to select 1) the band-width of the filter, 2) the center frequency of the filter, 3) the kind of filter being used and 4) mix unequalized unfiltered direct sound with the filtered sound. The variety of sounds which can be achieved on the bass is the result of the many different combinations of these variables which can be used. The new bass has a frequency response with a crisper tone, and two quad pickups instead of one, the new one being a frequency-detector pickup. The main addition to the new bass is a Digital Decoding Circuit such that ten push buttons on the bass allow Phil to select any one of sixteen quad spatial arrangements of his speakers, and eight in stereo mode

I DARE you to make sense of any of that. And then factor in the fact that this is all to play Chuck Berry tunes. You can see how the Hiatus was, maybe, a necessary and inevitable thing–what comes after the wall of Sound, after all? The band made a brief and desultory attempt to build an exact replica of Versailles out of speakers, drugs, and promissory notes, but after spending $200,000 and Mickey burning down the model, the boys lost interest.

It all sounded different after they came back. The music held less secrets, but it would have been good to hear the Wall with Mickey, too. Imagine this Samson coming through a sound system that in Olden Days would have been worshipped as a god, perhaps even two gods and a saint. The Wall had that much impressive in it: pilgrims would often leave notes in the cracks of the Wall, which was a horrible, horrible idea for two reasons. First, members of the band would invariably mistake the folded-up paper prayers for bindles of narcotics and savagely knock you to the ground trying to get to them; second, Steve Parrish had a strict policy about punching anyone who touched the Wall.