Who’s the opposite of Jamerson or McCartney? Phil Lesh, of course. I could not listen to all of this, I just sampled here and there. What I did hear sounded like the noodlings of a tin-eared fifteen-year-old who recently took up bass. There is nothing remotely interesting going on musically or technically. What he needs is a nun to slap his hand with a ruler.
Tales of True Adventure for Rugged Men Not Unlike Yourself
The Gertful Dead played my college campus about every year.
I remember going one year and being moderately excited to see what the deal was. I was with a group of friends, some of whom proudly possessed a few dozen bootleg GD recordings. At least one or two were musicians themselves.
About three or four songs into the show, they all looked at me with beatific bliss.
“Isn’t this amazing? It’s incredible!”
I felt so weird. My inner dialogue was:
– these songs go nowhere
– the singing is terrible. Everyone’s s hearing this, right?
I was not on drugs, but maybe that would have made things more tolerable. My friends, who were very much on drugs, asked me to remember the song titles in sequence so that they could write them down later. As I did not know the songs, and didn’t particularly like any of them, I did not do a very good job.
You poor bastard.
There’s an old joke about a Deadhead forgetting his drugs and realizing the music sucks. I never saw them, but I remember thinking that the shows were mostly about communal drug abuse, since that’s what attendees seemed to talk about most. But then there were the endless live tapes, and all those fans who could hear a portion of one and tell you what tour or even what show it was. So it’s at least feasible that it was about the music for some, although I’m more inclined to believe that such fans were daily pot smokers at least.
It’s obvious that treating this malady will require a carefully controlled study of a random sampling of Deadheads exposed to live bootlegs both on and off various drugs.
Phil has had his revenge on me via Google: YouTube now thinks I’m a fan. The first video on my YouTube app after posting this was “What Every Guitarist Can Learn From Phil Lesh.” Oh, please. “Not interested.”
You guys just reminded me that I bought and proudly wore a T-shirt in college which read, “I’LL BE GRATEFUL WHEN THEY’RE DEAD.”
I made it a minute and 14 seconds. HORRENDOUS.
If rigorous testing demonstrates that Deadheads cannot likely be cured through drug rehabilitation, behavioral conditioning offers hope.