Posts Tagged ‘Grateful Dead’
“Look out kid / It’s somethin’ you did / God knows when / But you’re doin’ it again”*…
Feeling for ferment, as we are in fraught times like these, we might wonder if something is brewing… and we might cast our eyes back to a somewhat analogous time…
Ben Arthur revisits a transformative moment in American culture through the lens of J. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop….
… A few months before “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released, Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders of the Fugs formed LeMar, short for Legalize Marijuana. The organization formed to push for the active use of marijuana, as well as to combat police oversight. On July 29, 1965, the New York Police Department took in two LeMar members (Jack William Martin III and Dale Wilbourne), but the man they really wanted was Ginsberg. When offered a lighter sentence in exchange for information on the poet, Martin declined to rat. His bail jumped from $5,000 to $100,000.
On August 11, LeMar had planned a benefit for their two fallen comrades at the Broadway Central, a sprawling hotel between the East and West Village. On the program was Jack Smith’s glamorous, experimental drag film Normal Love, and Barbara Rubin’s Allen for Allen,a tribute to her muse/lover. The Fugs were to play, along with the Falling Spikes, a garage rock band featuring John Cale, Lou Reed, and at one point Tony Conrad. Allen Ginsberg had poems to read, along with William S. Burroughs, Piero Heliczer, and Andrei Voznesensky.
The event never took place: the Great Bust finally happened. Dylan was a few months off, but who’s keeping track anyways? Heliczer, the benefit’s emcee, had just begun introducing the night’s proceedings when a group of plainclothes officers stormed in. They weren’t wearing trench coats, and they weren’t wearing coonskin caps; they wore Hawaiian shirts that Smith likened to the “moldy 1940’s saloon-rioting waterfront scum of Flatulandia.” Five cops lunged toward Martin, their former detainee, and dragged him out of the room. All hell broke loose. Cops shoved, punched, and kicked. The attendees returned the aggression, making it an all-out brawl. Outside, people were thrown into police cars, only to escape and keep fighting. Smith sucker punched an officer from behind. He was slammed onto the sidewalk and tossed into a cop car. The entire group, now outside on the street, turned into a so-called “mob,” refusing to let the NYPD leave. Once the officers took off, a full detail flanking them, they beat Smith and threw him in the Manhattan House of Detention, colloquially known as “the Tombs.” Just a few nights later, the narcotics division raided Ed Sanders’s apartment, searching for drugs. Instead, they took two of his films, Amphetamine Head: A Study of Power in America and Mongolian Cluster Fuck.
These raids were all too common in Manhattan’s underground: bookstores, studios, offices, apartments, theaters, churches, and gallery spaces were all targeted. Locally, the NYPD would press charges of obscenity, distribution of pornography, or drug possession, flying in blatant opposition to artists’ civil liberties. It seems that nearly everyone in an alternative scene was targeted. Nationally, FBI surveillance zeroed in on Bob Dylan, his manager John Hammond, and Broadside, a magazine that published Dylan’s lyrics alongside political satire. Cranking a cheap mimeograph machine, they published early Dylan protest songs, like “Talking John Birch,” a Guthrie-esque satire of communism. The jokey song, published in 1962, was a far cry from the deep, interwoven “Subterranean Homesick Blues” of 1965, which captures an intense surrealism that defined the decade.
In 1966, less than a year after the Broadway Central melee, the Falling Spikes were performing under a new name. Now under the guidance of the enigmatic Andy Warhol, the band morphed into the Velvet Underground. At the corner of Park and 59th stood the Hotel Delmonico, where the Velvets were attempting to attack the senses and minds of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. This incarnation was called “The Chic Mystique of Andy Warhol,” and it combined the films of Warhol, the drone rock of the Velvets, and the transgressive interrogations of filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Jonas Mekas. Apparently, the event was a chance for the shrinks to understand the inner workings of the “creative mind.”
Cocktail hour began with two Warhol films: the first being 1964’s Harlot, in which Jack Smith’s prima donna Mario Montez sensually eats a banana. Next, the group was subjected to Henry Geldzahler, a 97-minute silent film in which the former curator of the Met smokes a cigar, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the camera placed before him. One could connect this film, with Geldzahler’s literati status, to this group of psychiatrists: growing ever more disconcerted and fearful of the sights before them.
After nearly two hours of films, dinner was served, and the Velvets took the stage, accompanied by poet Gerard Malanga and superstars Edie Sedgwick, Mary Woronov, and Ingrid Superstar all fervently whip-dancing to the music. As these unsettling disturbances occurred on stage, Rubin and Mekas catechized the black-tied psychiatrists: “What does her vagina feel like?” “Is his penis big enough?” Shoving disorienting lights into the shrinks’ faces, Rubin insisted they would be stars in an upcoming Factory film. Grace Glueck, in a New York Times article the next day, documented the reactions of the doctors attending, who, of course, psychoanalyzed the night’s proceedings: “‘I suppose you could call this gathering a spontaneous eruption of the id,’ said Dr. Alfred Lilienthal. ‘Warhol’s message is one of super-reality.’ said another. […] “You want to do something for mental health?” asked another psychiatrist. “Kill the story.”
Over time, the one-off event morphed into something of a regular institution. At first, it was called “Andy Warhol, Up-tight,” but it would later become the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” an anti-hippie version of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests with the Grateful Dead. “The auditorium, every aspect of it—singers, light throwers, strobe operators, dancers—at all times are screaming with screeching, piercing personality pain,” Mekas wrote in The Village Voice. “I say pain; it could also be called desperation. In any case, it is the last stand of the ego, before it either breaks down or goes to the other side.”…
So very much more at “Delicate and Dirty” from @lareviewofbooks.bsky.social.
* Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (and here, the “offical video” of the song, whihc was filmed by D. A. Pennebaker for the documentary Dont Look Back)
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As we remember that, while history doesn’t repeat, it can rhyme, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that South Park premiered on Comedy Central– where it runs to this day. The animated saga of Stan, Kyle, Eric, and Kenny and their exploits in their (titular) Colorado hometown has won five Emmys and a Peabody Award. A theatrical film, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, was released in June, 1999 to commercial and critical success, and scored an Academy Award nomination.
The show’s 27th season recently launched– with a bang.
“Some folks look for answers, others look for fights”*…
Max Abelson takes a break from his (essential) coverage of money and power at Bloomberg News and Businessweek to appreciate the community that’s grown up around the Internet Archive’s Grateful Dead Archive (where one can find– among the over 15,000 concert recordings– not one, but two full takes of the show pictured above)…
On the Archive, the writing about the Dead’s live music often transcends the personal mode and approaches something closer to the galactic. Nothing brings out that cosmic style like “Dark Star,” a song that the band stretched from a three-minute studio single into its own solar system. Ginosega left a flight log for the same forty-three-minute 1973 version that played in the friend’s basement: “About 12 minutes in, Phil fires the engines and turns the ship out of orbit, until at 17 minutes we have arrived in the deepest, darkest part of the galaxy.” The trip isn’t half over. “Only at 21 minutes into the song do they actually start playing the song.” The post, which has a kind of sci-fi internal logic, describes interstellar wind and multicolored ooze, before, “at about 36 minutes, we start the return trip, passing through more familiar systems on our way back home.”
One of the magical things about how high the Dead flew is that they managed to do it without, say, Sly Stone’s rhythm, Joni Mitchell’s poetry, or Brian Wilson’s voice. The allure of this band—whatever it is that keeps sparking so much cosmic wonder and nostalgia—is foggy and mysterious. Paumgarten, in his New Yorker piece, identified a sprawling combination of factors, including Garcia’s soulful charisma and Appalachian gloom, the band’s 26,000-watt sound system, an ethos of group improvisation, and the “particular note of decay” in each cassette swapped from hand to hand. You can think about the Archive as not just the best tape rack of all, but as a collection of thousands of swings at saying the inexplicable. A user named Scottie78 was so moved by a half-hour version of “Dark Star” at the Spectrum in Philadelphia in 1972 that he not only came close to leaving a bullet point for each minute, but more or less created an identification system to differentiate the micro-micro-genres he heard, from “Space Jazz” and “Acid Jazz” to “Acid Jazzgrass.” It’s embarrassing and magnetic at the same time.
Others tip over from starry-eyed to freaked out. “So cacophonous, atonal and scary that it could potentially traumatize animals when played loud,” Phleshy said in 2004 about a version from Rotterdam in 1972. “If this explanation sounds stupid in words, then listen to the last half-hour of ‘Dark Star’ in a darkened room and see if you feel remotely secure.”
The line between the personal and astronomical is thin. Boboboy’s recollection of the 1989 show at JFK Stadium is what Didion might have described if she had witnessed more people sway: “I clearly remember seeing the swirling masses of thousands on the floor from my perch all the way back.” The dancers below looked like birds up above, “a flock of starlings cruising the sky, but in slow motion.”
Some of the writing aims even higher. “When you want to know what it is like being in heaven, cue up the second set,” Seedanrun wrote about the band’s beloved 1977 show at Cornell. “When you want to feel what it is like to be face to face with God, dim the lights and really focus on the ‘Morning Dew.’”
The glory of that show, performed inside the university’s Barton Hall on a snowy night in May, is perhaps the nearest the Dead Archives come to consensus. The thought of sullying it with a rating scale offended a user named GruUbic: “If this is five stars, is heaven a 4.5?” In 2004, BillDP went further, calling the show “the single best live performance I have ever heard from any group at any time.” His authoritativeness is only outdone by the dumbstruck. “Mere words cannot do justice,” Grateful Hillbilly posted in 2015. “Words like amazing and unbelievable and incomparable don’t capture the immensity of awe.”
[Brewster] Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder, tells me that he wishes more of the web was shaped like the Dead Archive. “What you’re looking at,” he said, “is from an era of the Internet that I think is best typified by what Tim Berners-Lee called ‘pages.’” Today, he said, instead, what dominates is the “feed.” (“Horrible word,” he added.) Facebook and Twitter scroll by endlessly, unaccountably, and unpleasantly, but “it wasn’t always that way, and it was a choice.” Each Dead show, he said, is “something you can anchor to, it’s something you can revolve around.” He went on: “By making things endure, we can have people cherish them, use them, and invest in them. So the writing is fundamentally different. I think we should go back to it—or forward to it.”…
The way the internet was… and should be? “In the Dead Archives,” from @maxabelson.
* The Grateful Dead, “Playing In The Band” (written by Bob Weir, Robert Hunter, and Mickey Hart)
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As we go hear Uncle John’s Band, we might send bluesy birthday greetings to Ronald Charles McKernan; he was born on this date in 1945. Better known by his stage name, Pigpen,” he was a founding member of The Warlocks… which became the Grateful Dead. He was the band’s original frontman, playing harmonica and electric organ; but Jerry Garcia’s and Phil Lesh’s influences on the band became increasingly stronger as they embraced psychedelic rock. Pigpen’s contributions receded to vocals, harmonica, and percussion (though he continued to be a frontman in concert for some numbers, including his interpretations of Bobby Bland’s “Turn On Your Love Light” and the Rascals’ “Good Lovin'”).
Pigpen was unique among his bandmates in preferring alcohol to psychedelics, and sadly succumbed to alcoholism– from complications of which he died in 1973.
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