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

The Grate Old Days

Perhaps it is better that the Dead remain in the past. Were they not very much a product of their times?  Simpler, slower times. Better times. Better enemies, for certain. You never saw the Soviet Union flying planes into things. Starting proxy wars that killed millions and aiming their nukes at the rest of the world with the abandon of Pacino waving his gun around outside the bank in Dog Day, yes. Setting off a bomb in a nightclub, no. These new bad guys are just the worst.

(Incidentally, we are told that in Arab culture, to remove your shoe and rub its sole on a person is a grave insult. Just in Arabic culture, of course: anywhere else, it’s considered high praise to take off your shoe and beat someone with it.)

You no longer need to spend $300,000 on a home studio that you will use once to record half-an-idea, then convert into an extra bedroom for a man you met at a drug dealer’s house and made your manager later that afternoon. All you need is a laptop, and where’s the laughably huge expense incurred by that? Sure, if you sent Mickey to Apple headquarters, he would accidentally knock down a lode-bearing wall and cause a cave-in, but that’s almost certainly not going to happen.

The punching would no longer be allowed, and there was an awful lot of punching. Mickey, Billy, and Brent basically walked through life wildly swinging their fists at the single most inappropriate person in the room. Sometimes, I like to think that the band’s music was just the cover story and the actual reason for the band was to allow these men to go from town to town tackling people who disagreed with them. Bobby got punched a number of time, though far less than he actually deserved. Do you know Bobby once pulled out a life-like cap gun in an airport and started shooting it off? (And you know that he made that “pew, pew” sound with every shot.)

That’s called BEING A TERRORIST. If you pull that shit now, you go to a secret prison forever. Bobby Weir is A FUCKING TERRORIST.

1 Comment

  1. Alex

    This blog is really good. Acerbic wit, a recurring theme of Mickey’s quest for the largest drum circle yet to be released, and an honest voice, unafraid of the Defenders of Liberty. Keep it up! You have a reader, and a fan. A hairy dude with a fan.

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