Hell Brent For Leather

Douglas Adams had his Infinite Improbability Drive, but he didn’t go far enough: I introduce the Infinite Infinity Drive.

Assume infinity.

Assume the multiverse.

Therefore, if where you are is not where you want to be, then in one of the infinite universes where you are is where it is at. One can figure which is which by building a computer large enough to calculate infinity. Since such a computer would necessarily have to be larger than infinity, it might seem impossible, until one remembers that infinity must by definition contain, say, infinity+24.

It’s bigger on the inside.

You are teetering on the brink, my friend. 

9/5/79 at MSG (Do I favor East Coast show over West Coast? Am I a Coastist? Do I believe that the West Coast is fine and all, just as long as it stays over there? Yeah. Sue me.)

I am hissing at you. Hissing. Hssss.

It is, obviously, a Brent. Much like strangers at airport bars, I’ve always had an iffy relationship with Brent, but I’m going to give him a concentrated listening, at least until I can staunch this bleeding head wound. I woke up to vomit last night, like you do, and I THWACKED my head into the samurai swords I keep loose in the bathroom, the one room you’re almost guaranteed to roam around in like a piano tuner nightly. (I’m sure blind people must have gone to Dead shows, but did they bring the dog in with them? It seems mean to the dog, what with the dog-hearing and a Dead show had to be, like, the most INTERESTING SMELLING PLACE IN THE WORLD to a dog, but a guide dog has to be like those guards outside Buckingham Palace.)

(BUT, if you were blind, would you ever go to a concert or put on headphones without your dog, or the biggest, strongest, most loyal buddy in the world with you? Like, your brother just happens to be The Big Show. And I’d rather have the dog: some drunk asshole will have a go at The Big Show just because, but nobody messes with dogs. Music would cut off all your connection to the outside world; you wouldn’t be able to hear anyone sneaking up on you and people sneak up on blind people all the time)

My equivocation towards Brent lies with his playing and his voice. His playing is tremendous: he fit in with the band instantly and added new layers with his adroit B3. His playing stepped up everyone’s game and though his Rhodes could sound tinkly, it was still a welcome relief from the constant piano block-chords of the later Keith years.

I just never warmed to Brent’s voice. It always sounded like a hack comic doing a Michael McDonald impression. I’m sure there are those of you who disagree. I am sorry for your wrongness.

Up To Buffalo

3/31/73 at War Memorial Arena in Buffalo, NY.

Holy fuck, how broke were they that Buffalo in March was the remedy?

P.S. Except, HOLY SHIT Greatest Story is rampaging through Buffalo! The only thing more destructive was the shifting global economy.  Ha-cha-cha-cha. The weather might have been cold, but the band was HOT.

Okay, that’s your warning. That’s your warning right there.

What? What did I–

You know what you did. I know you know you know what you did. Acknowledge the warning.

I will not ack–

You will acknowledge the warning.

NO.

YOU WILL ACKNOWLEDGE THE–

GENTLEMEN, THAT’LL BE THE END OF THAT.

Sorry.

Sorry, boss.

Life is short: listen to ’73.

Kiss-ass.

P.P.S. I’ll come clean, I just picked this show to make the joke, but it’s really good. Someone–I’m not going to say who, but it was Bobby–remembered ALL of the words to Truckin’. Like a boss.

P.P.P.S. And then a China-less Rider? Just jammed straight into it? Dipping briefly into the beautiful descending 1973 chords that connected the two songs, harmonically, rhythmically, perfectly. BEST SHOW EVER

My Donna

 

Good evening, pretty lady: I heard it through the grapevine that looks aren’t a big thing with you. May I have this dance?

Bobby Of Arabia

“Garcia! Garcia! GARCIA!”

Garcia walks over.

“What, man?”

“They look like boobies.”

“Billy!”

Drum And Drummer

Listen to the drummers–the two of them back there–from a perfectly recorded show when they HAD IT: when they do those long fills down every tom-tom they own and the beat starts all the way on the left and just whips around your skull at 90 mph, that’s just the best thing in the world, isn’t it? Those duk-a-duhs and when they got those rolling, the band sounds as if someone rolled a Medieval army down a cliff and recorded the clangor. (Bear did that once in 1971, to test out the specs on a new harmonica mike he was thinking about using if and when Slim Harpo showed up. Bear was nothing if not thorough.)

I’ve posted this show before, but it deserves a revival: 5/13/77 at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. Chicago! Badger City, Home of Shufflin’ George, those brusque but lovable Chicagoniacs! (I an not a geography buff and I made that clear when I applied for this job.)

Just keep typing, buddy.

The two of them are just monsters on this crisply recorded show and, quite frankly, it is best for the world that these two took up drumming. If Billy and Mickey ever got in a competition to see who could start the most fights, World War III would ensue within days. These coked-up conga hobbits were possessed of a rage that, were it e’er loosed, could bring us the brink of doom.

An intern* once suggested that perhaps the strategy of shooting speed into one’s eyeball while being shuttled between Des Moines, IA, and Normal, Il, like a piece of hairy luggage in some way exacerbated certain tendencies and then Billy burst into the room drunk and naked and accidentally shot the kid in the face, like 8 or maybe 9 times. Billy didn’t even know what the kid was talking about, it was just, you know, “time to kil the intern.” Like it is every full moon.

*The Dead had interns: college kids from UCSC, Hal Kant’s niece, at least three baby-faced drifters, S.E. Cupp, and Planchette. Don’t mention Planchette around the guys: his skill set was almost entirely concentrated in the field of looming ominously. Planchette was good at finding out addresses and he always dressed in very dark green, with nothing shiny or jingly on him. You know how in the vast majority of pictures of Keith, he looks like he just saw a ghost? Planchette. They should have gotten rid of him years before the incident, but he was the only one who ever got the coffee order right consistently.Don’t mention Planchette.

Blue Jean Bobby

After two or three stadium shows in a row, Bobby’s shorts could find their own way to the stage.

These Kids Today

So, like, it’s a hobby or whatever, right? It’s just like any other hobby or geek thing. If you think about it: what’s, like, the difference between a Deadhead and a Brony?

Boy, you shut your whore mouth.

Happiness Is A Warm Pun

It’s sequel time here in Fillmore South:

Things I love about the Dead, Part the II

• When Bobby would say “Thank you,” in that silly high-pitched voice.
• The end of China Doll where it generally dissolves a little and then Garcia comes in all by himself with the “Take up your China Doll” part, which is really difficult to sing, because the notes are weird AND you have to get the time right, since you’re basically counting the band back in with it AND it’s pitched pretty high, but he got it right far more often than not.
• The beginning of Truckin’ they’d do sometimes, with the whistles and the snare drums: BRUM-bum BRUM-bum BRRRRRR rum-bum.
• Occasionally, later in the career, when Bobby would (as is the running gag with both my bloggings and, you know, actual recorded-on-tape reality) forget the lyrics to Truckin’, Phil would start BOMBING away at him and then come in on the next part where they all sing just SUPER LOUD, so clearly seething at the fact that it’s been ten years: learn the words, man.
• He’s Gone. Not so much on the “Bop bop bop” coda.
• The jam after Seastones from 6/23/74. Seriously, try to listen to Seastones. Now, on acid. But listen to what Garcia does right after: he plays the sweetest, softest lines, and leads everyone back from the dark place where Ned Lagin touched them.
• The Baby Dead. The way they would take a riff and just brutalize it, tear it apart and put it back together, mostly the same but weirder for the journey.
• Their refusal to give in to peer pressure. Often, they would be the only ones in the room who wanted to smoke and bullshit and yell at Bobby for five minutes; the other several thousand people present preferred some form of entertainment. Because, holy god, do these baboons take a long time in between songs. Sometimes for no discernible reason: you can’t hear them talking, nor are they tuning. Were they just wandering around confused for three minutes at a time? It’s not unprecedented: Thelonious Monk did it.

Weir, There, And Everywhere

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…

Haiku #3

His name was Pigpen,

or Ronald Charles McKernan.

Nothing’s gonna bring him back.