Friday, September 14, 2018

Back In the day when the Grateful Dead were politically meaningful.

24 Hour Slumber Shaking Off Flu

I slept from approximately 11:30 PM. Wednesday, the 12th of September until just about that same time, but 24 hours later. I had had a return of what felt like a flu, I fell asleep and then fell into a fevered state in which I started to dream that there was something that I had to do to the recording that I had made before I went to sleep.

The truth was that there certainly was a simple thing to be done to the recording which could be done with 3 clicks, but in my tormented state where I was wearing my heavy "I'm a tourist, and yeah, I brought a little dough" New Orleans sweatshirt, because I guess I felt cold. The air conditioner had been fixed by the maintenance guy to the point that I had to continue to repair it by getting up and flipping the switch to "off" when it was getting a little chilly, and then, well you know the "Broken Thermometer Blues..."

But, I eventually got up and flipped the switch to off, at such a point that I was getting a little chilly, even in my "mug me," and then, over the course of a few hours, I believe my fever climbed, as perhaps the inside temperature keeping pace because it was in the high eighties by noon, and by the time that I had lay there 12 full hours and was in quite a delirious state but, yet, I connected it somehow to the "self help dialogue" hypnosis tapes which have perhaps programmed me at the "other than conscious" level to cleanse and purge myself, which laying there for 24 full hours, having plenty of nourishing apple juice but having run out of cigarettes and everything else except apple juice, I finally emerged an emaciated man, this Friday morning quite early.

I was in fact able to catch an incredible deal on a Boston Butt Pork Roast, paying 4 dollars for what had originally been priced at 25 dollars, but which was available -with the Winn Dixie Rewardsᶜ card- but then had been stuck with a bright yellow $6 off stickers. There were a lot of items bearing bright yellow stickers on that bright yellow morning. So many more than I had ever even come close to seeing when I had usually gone in there, at say 11 PM...

25 Dollar Acquisition of Butt  

About The Grateful Dead
They were lucky, the Grateful Dead, in that they had months and arguably even years to perfect their musical entity and yet non-entity, the "space jam" before the audience before them were not mostly on acid, and this they accomplished probably in the nick of time, expedited by the drug related departures of certain members and having shaken off the habit of acid to, in some cases replace it other things.

But, I guess my fondest moment as a deadhead was when, and I only saw this on a handheld video recording; one that had gone 1985-style viral, btw.

It was of the crowd at the Civic Center going as wild as if a hockey player had just scored a goal, right in the middle of a song.

And the reason was because Jerry Garcia moved.

He rocked back and forth and side to side a couple times, just while playing a little rhythm guitar riff in kind of a Chuck Berry era rock song.

He rocked back and forth, did Jerry Garcia, and it was something new, something the crowd of eighteen thousand had never seen before.

The opened up backs of VW buses in the parking lot across from the Civic Center soon abounded with tee shirts that memorialized the occasion using "Jerry Rocks" in large bold print, superimposed over a still shot taken during the rocking, and to make that point more believable at the point where he is most bent over out of his every-night-since-the-band-started-playing-40-years-ago posture and stance. And, of course the date that Jerry rocked upon.

For just a second it was like he decided to play air guitar and guitar at the same time...

But, perfect it, "the space jam," they did; to a level of consistent ambiguity so that any note they play next becomes no more objectionable nor less pleasant than any other; and then somehow make a song out of it by giving it some meaning by becoming recognizable as one of their songs, probably with lyrics by Robert Hunter, which could be taken for their poetic value in lieu of any musical content at all.

And makes sense; thanks mostly to the classically inspired melodic shapes of Phil Lesh on the bass.

He once said that, before a song starts he composes a melody, kind of frames it in his mind and then plays that melody. So this would imply that his part is static and that the rest of the band would have to pick up upon it and support it; but since the rest of the band don't know where the melody is going then they really can't do that.

But they can conclude that wherever Phil was going, they probably wanted to go, too, and lead by Jerry, they could.

And the band was mind expanding the way any band with six guys in it can be.

When Brent Midland was doing really cool things on the keyboard it was usually as a background to Jerry and Bob Weir doing something really cool, and not to mention their two drummers being strange in a sense when they are playing the exact same thing, it comes across as one loud drum set, but when they broke into contrapuntal stuff, it would soften such into where such busier stuff does well, but, for another thing, the Dead had engineers and technicians who understood that music amplified to be good and loud is only the former when it has not been amplified past the point of distortion, or to the point of being too loud.
And the neighbors complain about my friend Bobby's 33 watt Fender amp?!?


The result was that the band sounded good in the first place, as in having good sound; and it was always just loud enough.

The overall jibe at the concert was everyone was pulling for the music to be good and the deadheads thought that if Jerry and the boys could for some reason be feeling as good as they are suggesting with the music, then anybody, including themselves had no excuse not to.

But, maybe having the band as a litmus test of "does acid help your music in the long run?" is one of their greater worth's. 
   

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