Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To

Tag: kreutzman (Page 2 of 3)

In The Army Now

Garcia was in the service, the Army. It was normal back then for most everybody except sissies, commies, or college boys in their raccoon coats. Mickey and TC were both in the Air Force (Mickey played drums in the Air Force, because the Brass didn’t let him play for three days or so and set fire to a mess hall, so they decided to just let the monster have his Slingerlands and keep the peace.)

Phil was in college and driving a mail truck while shooting speed, which seems like a lovely way to spend a summer at age 22, so no playing soldier for him. Billy got his letter and walked into the draft office, Pall Mall dangling from sneering lips under a newly-grown but already treasured mustache.

“You send me this letter?”

“Ye–”

SHWOKKATHOOM Dicks got punched, dicks got punched left and right, my friend. The sergeant, the lieutenant, the other hard-to-spell things: all of them down, dicks punched, just punched to shit, my man. Everyone got it; sometimes it seemed like he was going harder on the people who were just randomly there. A plumber just in the office got it the worst for some reason, perhaps because he begged. Ah, you think: if Billy hates it when one begs, then therefore, one must fight back to gain his respect.

No! Never fight back. You’re not understanding the main motivator here: when Billy gets to punching dicks, Billy gets to punching dicks. It’s not a competition: it’s a thrust, an urge, he MUST PUNCH DICKS. The thing that pisses him off is the time wasted: beg, bargain, fight, offer to slobber his johnson–these all just register on Billy’s radar as vague buzzing that, every second that it lasts, trends towards white-crazy lightning ruining his brain. You’re making it worse: just lie back and think of Sausalito.

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.

Weir, There, And Everywhere

We need to talk about Bobby because I’ve been talking about Bobby and I need to know whygodammit. 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…

The Strangest Of Places

1975. Weird year. Weird shows, with an “everybody in the pool” type of vibe to them.  “Who showed up? Ned? Umm. Does he have any weed? Well, give him a keyboard, I guess.” Merl and  Matthew Kelley (pre-dickpunching incident) sit in; Sammy Davis, Jr. comes out for a number. And each set begins the only proper way a Grateful Dead show can: with an intro by Bill Graham.

The drummers weren’t quite together yet, and the sound is cluttered, but it’s HUGE and it just doesn’t sound like any other year. Garcia sounds like it’s ’72, laying down long, ropey lines and just soloing throughout pretty much every song, expecting the other 97 musicians on stage to carry the actual song. Due to the ad hoc nature of most of the Hiatus show, having a grand piano on stage was impossible (said the road crew before pantsing Keith, forcing Donna Jean to shoo them away. “You have to stand up for yourself, baby. Can’t let the bigger boys bully you. Look at me, Keith: it gets better.”) so Keith was confined to the Fender Rhodes

Did they ever really retire? Were they ever serious about it? The fake-out retirement is a classic show-biz move: Sinatra retired at least 17 times, the Stones have done five straight farewell tours, Tupac became a hologram for some reason. They certainly needed a break from playing Atlas with the Wall of Sound, there was way too much coke and the Persian was creeping into the scene.

So, they took ’75 off, playing only 4 shows, all of them backyard gigs in the Bay Area. The most well-known (justly) is 8/13, the One from the Vault release from the Great American Music Hall. The S.N.A.C.K. benefit was certainly the weirdest: the human brain hadn’t evolved for a pre-noon Blues for Allah. The Winterland show in June is the most overlooked.

But the Secret Hero show is 9/28/75–Lindley Meadows in Golden Gate Park. Check out the Franklin’s, where Mickey and Billy chase each other around with their cymbals and Garcia lets loose a roaring solo right after “…if you get confused, listen to the music play.” AND THEN THE END OF FRANKLIN’S HOLY SHIT which is like the end of He’s Gone with the long a capella call-and-response and it’s just remarkable.

Aaaaaaand then the intro to Big River, which is a mess.

P.S. Thank you to the tapers, to the archivists, to the digital cleanup artists, to the uploaders. Thank you to the scribes and the safekeepers. After all, if Bobby forgets he words to Truckin’ and it is not preserved, then did he really forget the words? (Most likely, yes. Bobby forgot the words to Truckin’ so much it was on his to-do list: hair, squats, tickle-time with Garcia, slide guitar lesson (cancelled), forget words to Truckin’.)

P.P.S.  As I was writing about my gratitude for the archivists and digital Jawas that keep everything running, Archive.org went down.

We Could Be Heroes

The Dead neither dated nor married for effect. There are no reports of Phil squiring, say, Joyce Dewitt into the Whiskey while wearing an enormous trenchcoat containing Mickey and Billy for some reason, I don’t know, it’s just a funny visual: the two of them LEAPING out from within the coat like that was Phil’s mutant power, to be able to generate two rampaging cashfuckers at will from his vestments. Phil was actually an X-Man briefly, but chafed under the authority of Professor X and got Colossus killed again, so…

He had to transfer to Garcia’s School for Exceptional Youngsters. Garcia was a benevolent presence that infused the grounds with his personality, riding around in his Alembic-made $400,000 wheelchair; he wasn’t crippled, just lazy. His mutant power was to bring people together and spread love and cheer so that everyone in the room was having such a good time that no one saw him sneak off to the bathroom, which he would invariably burn down.

Bobby takes down villains and keeps the peace with the power of his muscular thighs.

Donna is capable of emitting a banshee wail powerful and strident enough to paralyze an enthusiast at ten paces away from a good ’74 Playin’. (Wait, she’s not a mutant? She just sang like that? Huh.)

P.S. Despite my general distaste for most of the dirges of ’76, here’s a goodie from this day in Dead history: 6/15/76 at the Beacon Theater in money-making, heart-breaking Manhattan.

Night Of The Living Dead

I will soon be decamping for human climes, back to the only land a mutt-mix of Irish and Russian Jew could tolerate. Brown hills, grey skies, no goddam monsters in the Sadd Lake my concrete development abuts. Everything has to be concrete down here; the wood rots instantly. The humidity is–do you remember the Celestials? They were Marvel Comics characters drawn by Jack Kirby that were so big that they dwarfed even the mighty Galactus and his heralds, amongst them the tragic Norrin Radd, who–

Stop that.  Or we sauce the goose.

Please don’t sauce–

Then: Schnell! Schnell! I have bolded and italicized, so you must take me seriously! Don’t make me play with the fonts, because I simply don’t know how, I lack that skill set and maybe it’s been holding me back in my search for fortune and a woman who’s just crazy enough, y’know?

May I?

Ja.

Why are you German now? How did–the point being that I’m going back to where mammals are at the top of the food chain; and seasons, instead of “a little bit too goddam hot,” and “living in a giant’s ass.” Which is where I was going before, with the Celestials: I just needed an enormous man with a relatively enormous ass. Right now, Boynton Beach, FL, is the precise moisture level as inside the rectum of a being made up of a stuff to challenge wielder of the Power Cosmic himself, the Silver Surfer!

And I say this to get to my point: maybe you’ve heard of the Zombies. They have infested these swampy marshes and fetid fens, possibly due to the malodorous Bath Salts that are sweeping the nation.

The Dead would have been awful in a Zombie Apocalypse. Garcia would be the first to go, let’s just agree on that: he wasn’t the most…aware…of people at times, but he might have had a good defense against the ghouls: accidentally setting them on fire as he nodded off.

Vince would immediately Stockholm Syndrome out, campily rolling his eyes back while moaning a little off-key, “MRAAGH,” and chomping down on random people’s arms, except that zombies, like Enthusiasts, see through Vince’s bullshit rather quickly and then it’s just shreds of flesh and Dad’s Vacation Shirt.

The Crew would do well, managing to do the load-out in only 14 hours, and thus escaping out the doors of the arena just as the hungry zombies crested the ridge. Unfortunately, the trucks were so laden with gear that could not have been left behind, because Denver is in two days and Zombie Apocalypse or not, the Dead don’t cancel shows, man, that to lighten weight and distract the fiends, the Crew had to give them Phil off the back of the truck, like that Russian family in that painting giving the baby to the wolves.

Mickey and Billy go down swinging.

P.S. Bobby is left alone by the zombies, as they only eat brains. (CHEEEEEEEEEEAP! BOOOOOOOOOO!)

Trouble Behind

Things that would get you thrown out of the Grateful Dead’s backstage:

  • ****ing Phil. I’m using the asterisks to denote the universality: eyeballing, grab-assing, mounting. Just assume anything you do that involves Phil will lead to a thrashing, then a quick exit.
  • Even looking at Garcia’s ice cream.
  • Not splitting Aces and Eights.
  • Any Game of Thrones spoilers whatsoever.
  • Any sort of ninjitsu whatsoever. Not since the last time. Brent dressed in the traditional Japanese racist pajamas and, using “ninja tools” that were almost certainly fashioned from the cutlery on the catering table, climbed halfway across the ceiling, which was quite impressive, until the ceiling fan sucked Brent’s wizard beard into the rotor and he nearly diedmostly ’cause the other guys just left him there for four or five hours. Mickey just couldn’t stop laughing.
  • Demanding to meet Ringo.
  • Introducing what were known internally as “pernicious thoughts” into Bobby’s head. There was no firm definition of such, more of a Potter Stewart vibe to the whole thing, but past concepts deemed inappropriate for Bobby include: spandex, hair dryers, mesh, Garcia is stealing your soul from you when you switch off singing during Jack Straw, platform shoes, platform boots, platform anything-of-any-kind, Last Tuesdayism (Holy shit, the next person who mentions any sort of solipsism-based paradoxical view of reality to him is getting stabbed with a knife), and everyone’s favorite: “monkey gonna getcha.”It took two hours to drag him out from under the trailer that time, shrieking the whole way.
  • Any kind of keening, ululating, glottalizing or hooting.
  • Wearing eyeblack for a game in a domed stadium. You’re just wearing makeup at that point.
  • Saying the letter ‘L’ around Billy. It wasn’t so much that you would be thrown out afterwards, it was that you would probably like to leave, having been punched so thoroughly in the dick. But, you should give it to Billy: the “L” thing did make it sporting. One clever fellow made it a good six minutes into a conversation before Billy got bored and just punched him in the dick anyway.

Saturday Night Dead

Found this and thought you’d like it, but before you click on it, know this: you will be going to a desert, a ghost mall of the internet, a junction far, far across the Rio Grand (EeyOoo): MySpace. There exists a MySpace. Still. I wonder if their office still has the half-pipe and yoga studio? Didn’t “Tom” die in an auto-erotic asphyxiation thing last Winter Solstice? (That’s how I mark time, because of my beliefs. TOLERATE ME.)

So, you have to go to MySpace because, well, it’s on MySpace, but mostly because I don’t know how to grab the video, so just aim your clicker over the blue letters–not the blue thing, the blue let–good aaaaaand: there’s your bank account, Grandma.  Love you, Gam. NOMNOMNOM your face Gam. Gonna kill you in your sleep, Gam. NIGHT!

EDIT: I’m not even going pretend to know what went wrong there. It’s beyond just apologizing and moving on: this is High Crime or Misdemeanor time.  Fuck…WHOO, where was he even GOING with that? These are decent folks out there getting high and listening to the Dead while reading about the Dead. Fuckin’ stoner-ass stoner asses. Who am I again? Am I the Reader or the Faithless Narrator? Sometime, he uses italics for one, and sometimes…sometimes, I think this is all just a bunch of obscure lies and silliness, man.

SUPEREDITPlay the video or I’ll teach you what the word ‘flense’ means.

So: the Grateful Dead playing Saturday Night Live on 11/11/78. (You should open the video in a different window or, you know what?  You’re bright and capable and more than equipped to wrangle the doodads. Just be yourself all over the place.

Casey Jones on SNL

And we start off with everyone’s favorite secret genius, Buck Henry!

And Billy!

.26     It’s called conditioner, Garcia. Plus–and I’m just saying–for a guy who always bitched about being on TV, he certainly does play adorably to the cameras.

.38     Here we see Donna, who for some reason is easy skanking.

.50    Was Phil just yelling at the drummers on live TV? Seriously, can no one get Phillip Lesh to exhibit anything even resembling human behavior?

1.05   Donna was always dressed like your grade-school art teacher that time you ran into her at the supermarket.

1.15   We need to talk about Bobby’s pants. Young man, are you wearing jodhpurs? Or are they riding pantaloons? Are you playing Young George Washington? Will you golf later? If so, is your caddie Bagger Vance? Are you the renegade scion of the House of Bourbon? How are those socks staying up–is there a garter in play here? EXPLAIN YOUR PANTS.

1.45   Although if we’re going to be honest, they do hug his ‘tocks quite nicely. Bobby’s sexy and he knows it.

2.00  The slide. That’s a choice.

2.22   Hey, there are other people in this band!  (None of whom are attractive enough for a close-up, apparently.) And a great shot of both drummers, um, drumming.

3.00  Donna gives me boners.

3.12   It’s Rowlf the dog!

3.27 Hey, Mickey’s in this band!

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.

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