Crazy Fingers

Dumbek and his boyfriend celebrated their 10th anniversary on Friday. (Dumbek said, “Lord you know they made a fine connection,” which you might have noticed is also the title of this post, and that’s from a song.) Dinger, Dumbek’s boyfriend, posted about the soundrack of his life. For a lot of us, the music of the Grateful Dead is the soundtrack of our lives, which may be why we quote their lyrics on our blogs.

Me, I’m in a mixed relationship (in spite of which, we’ve got a fine connection), but I definitely like seeing two deadheads connecting.

Brian is moving in, officially (i.e., his stuff is moving in) on Monday, and we’re spending the weekend packing up his apartment and making the final preparations in our apartment. I’ll finally get my crap out of the Brian room and put it away, and I’m going to pull a network cable through the wall so he can have access to the internet in there. The cable connections are in the living room. If we hard wire his computer to the cable modem, through a router (rather than use WiFi), he’ll get a 100 mbs connection. Besides, his older G4 Macintosh isn’t WiFi ready and neither of us wants to deal with that.

We went to his friend’s party last night, which was a big cigarette smoking fest. Such a disgusting anachronism! But his friend also gave a recital on his harpsichord (yes, the guy owns a harpsichord and knows how to play it), which was fun (and people didn’t smoke as much while he was playing), and I got to talk to some interesting people.

I visited my aunt in the hospital this afternoon. She’s doing well after her knee replacement. I saw my friend Lex on the street on the way over there, since that’s his neighborhood. It always brightens my day when I run in to him.

Tonight, we had a fire in Brian’s old apartment (he decided not to renew the lease, which ends at the end of the month, so he won’t be subletting it), and we’re going to sleep here one last time. We watched Home at the End of the World on In Demand. (In keeping with the recent theme of “everyone in Chelsea is connected,” I should point out that Michael Cunningham, who wrote the novel and screen play for Home at the End of the World, is one of the people we see around from time to time, both here and in Provincetown.) The movie intensified my desire to experience mushrooms with Brian, which happened to have been the topic of conversation at dinner tonight. He’s not totally on board with the idea. “It’ll deepen our connection,” I said. “We’re already connected,” he responded.

Lord, you know, they made a fine connection.

Last week Oliver posted a list of Allman Brothers songs (and links to mp3 files) he used to entertain himself on a road trip to New Haven. I love the Allman Brothers as much as the next gay boy in Chelsea (I’ll be at the Beacon in March, hopefully with my boyfriend, and if my iPod isn’t playing the Grateful Dead, it’s as likely to be playing the Allman Brothers as it is Neil Young or the Jerry Band). But I really love the Dead. I think I’ve mentioned here that on several occasions, I’ve accosted Oliver on the street and announced the date of the show I was listening to at the time.

So for the past week, I’ve been obsessing about a particular show, 10/27/79 (Cape Cod Coliseum). When I saw Oliver’s “Free Music Tuesday” post last week, I realized I wanted to share two songs from that show which are particularly hot. Dancin’ in the Street > Franklin’s Tower. In total, the two songs run over 30 minutes, because the jams are so smoking hot. The entire show is amazing, but I keep listening to Dancin>Franklins again, especially on the StairMaster or Arc Trainer, which is unusual for me (usually, I listen to shows end-to-end). These two songs are also excellent driving music.

Unlike Oliver, who’s afraid of getting sued because he’s sharing Allman Brothers songs, it’s ok to put these Grateful Dead recordings out there. The Grateful Dead allow us to trade recordings of their concerts, as long as no money changes hands, and as long as its for noncommercial use. After a protracted controversey last fall, which I shall not rehash, it was established that it is ok to trade, online, audience recordings (made from a location in the audience, with microphones and taping equipment the taper brought into the show), but not soundboard recordings (made by plugging in to the band’s sound system, either by someone who bought a ticket to the show, or by the band itself, for archival reasons; many of the Grateful Dead soundboards in circulation were made by the band itself, and put into circulation by Dick Latvala, the band’s archivist, or other people affiliated with the band).

So here it is, for your listening pleasure: Dancin’ in the Street > Franklin’s Tower. It’s about 35 megabytes in all, but it’s worth it. Download both, listen to them back-to-back.

Although I love sharing this music, and turning people on to it, I’m not sure this is something I’m going to do all the time. I’ve only got so much bandwidth.

However, if you want more:

• Dead on Friday — pointers to download sources and interesting commentary.
• The Live Music Archive on archive.org.
• Email me. If you give me a USB drive, I’ll give you all the shows I have in mp3 format (about 600), and it’s all noncommercial and it’s all perfectly legal.

The images in this post are from the Grateful Dead Tickets, Passes, & Laminates site.

BlogChelsea published a directory of the “Best of Chelsea.” I agree with a lot of the choices (I love that he included Pier 63, Manhattan Kayak Company, and RUB). (Yesterday, the Best of Chelsea included websites, but not mine; today, mysteriously, the best websites are gone.)

I’ve been busy, settling in to the new job and the new apartment, cooking dinner every night with Brian, etc. I feel like I’m finally developing a new routine, so the details of life will become a little more automatic and I will hopefully have some more time to post. After all the insanity of the last month, Brian and I spent a quiet, unstressed evening at home. It felt like we’re finally starting to relax again. We’ve been bickering a lot less (it was getting pretty dicey for a while when we first moved in to the apartment). I’m remembering my cooking skills, so the whole process of cooking and cleaning up is taking a lot less time than it did three weeks ago. (Well, last night might be an exception. We cooked chicken on the stove. Brian got home before me and marinated it. I cooked it. Grease splattered all over the kitchen. It took an hour to clean it up.)

When Brian finally moves his stuff over, we’ll have two computers, and I won’t have to share, so that will also give me more time for blogging.

I’ve been posting so little, in fact, that friends have been emailing me asking what’s going on, since they’re not getting updates here. (It looks like Bonnie is making excuses, too.)

Tonight, Brian and I are going to the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America’s film series to see two films about city planning:

1. A Fantasy of Forgotten Corners
2. Cities of the Future
Nina Rappaport, co-chair of DOCOMOMO New York/Tri-State, architectural and urban critic, and editor of publications Yale School of Architecture, will offer insight towards the topic of these two films, which deal with then current and future city planning.

It appears that Pier 64’s days are numbered. Bonnie reports:

Well, from the barge parked alongside, and the orange netting festooning the upper levels, it looks as though they’re getting ready to tear down the old piershed at Pier 64.

Random Pier 64 Links:

• Harry Spitz’ pictures.
• Wired New York’s page.
• The Hudson River Park Trust’s plans.

Bonnie and my affection for Pier 64 probably results from the fact its neighbor, Pier 63, is our kayaking home base (although kayaking is highly theoretical for me at this point).

I stole the picture from Bonnie’s blog. It’s one of the fabulous pictures she’s been taking and posting lately, such as the pre-Lunar New Year pictures in this post.

• Last Saturday, when I picked up my car, the guys at the garage at which I park my car informed me that the garage would close at the end of the month. It is becoming an art gallery. (What a Chelsea cliche, huh?) When I returned the car Sunday night, they informed me the garage is closing on the 27th, not the end of the month. This has created the need for me to make other arrangements for my car, pretty much by the end of the coming weekend.
• Another thing I’m going to have to do this weekend is return the cable hardware (converter box and cable modem) from my old apartment. Time Warner won’t shut off the service until I return the equipment. They wanted to make an appointment to come pick it up, but they would only pick it up from me, at the old address, not the doorman at the new address.
• On the other hand, we got the first bill from our new cable provider, RCN. Although the service is supposed to be costing us $70 a month (an introductory rate for the first 6 months), the bill was over $140, and the itemization include a bunch of things that were complete mysteries to me.
• My iPod is frozen at 0:00 of a particular song (which happens to be Saint Stephen from 7/16/76) and the hard reset sequence won’t work. The backlight remains on. I’m hoping that if I just let the battery run down, when I plug it in to charge it, it will reset then.
• Brian and I have two pieces of furniture (a small couch and a full-size futon) in our 2-bedroom apartment. My computer is on an overturned moving box. We won’t have more furniture until he moves in, probably on March 1, and in the interim, the apartment isn’t all that comfortable. Unfortunately, before he moves in (i.e., this weekend), we have to install shelves or something in our two huge closets (my stuff is just piled into the extra bedroom), and at the moment, that’s occurring for me as an unspeakably complex task, and something else I’m
  going to have to deal with this weekend.
• The “Bin Laden” tape. The Bush administration authenticated it? And we should believe them, why? What could they want us not to pay attention to? The Abramoff scandals? Domestic spying?
• WordPress post-by-email is flaky, or maybe I just don’t understand it well enough. It’s adding an equal sign at the end of every line.

A few days ago, I pointed out that deadlists.com lists a Grateful Dead performance at the Chelsea Hotel on 8/10/67. [Check out the comments on my original post.]

In Searching for the Sound, Phil Lesh shared his recollection of that gig at the Chelsea:

The Diggers had decided to export their trip to swinging London but didn’t have the wherewithal to get there. Their chief honcho, Emmett Grogan, knew some people in New York and set up a sort of benefit on the roof of the Chelsea attended by such luminaries as Shirley Clarke, the theatrical director, and artist Andy Warhol, who entered looking like an ambulatory black hole. The idea was to hustle ticket money for Grogan and a couple of the other Diggers; hence the name “Trip Without A Ticket.” We played a few tunes, and even did a little vocal rap — “it’s the money, honey” — and to this day I don’t know if they ever got their tickets covered, or even got to London at all. It was kind of cool, playing on a rooftop in New York, but whatever energy we could muster fell flat on the floor, oozing over to Warhol’s feet where it disappeared into the singularity. Not a fun event; the New York vibe was asserting its darker side that night.

In Box of Rain, Robert Hunter said the song “Stella Blue” (which was part of the Grateful Dead repertoire) was “written at the Chelsea Hotel in 1970.” A copy of the handwritten lyrics for Stella Blue appears to the right. Click the picture to see the full-size image on Hunter’s website.

David Dodd cited Hunter’s comment on The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site, and then went on to elaborate about other works created at there:

Written, according to Box of Rain at the Chelsea Hotel in 1970. This places “Stella Blue” in distinguished company. It’s where Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: a Space Odyssey; Bob Dylan wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”; and Arthur Miller wrote After the Fall. It’s been home, in its hundred-year plus history (built in 1883), to Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, O. Henry, Hart Crane, Nelson Algren, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Vladimir Nabokov (see note under “Stella Blue”, below, for more on Nabokov), Jane Fonda, Charles Jackson, Milos Forman, Edie Sedgwick, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, Edgar Lee Masters, and a slew of others. For a good article on the Chelsea, see Helen Dudar’s article “It’s Home Sweet Home For Geniuses, Real Or Would-Be,” in The Smithsonian, December 1983, p. 94.

Living With Legends: Hotel Chelsea Blog referred to The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics.

According to deadlists.com, the Grateful Dead played on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel on 8/10/67. However, deadlists offers no setlist and no further information. I have no idea if this is true.

Since I walk past the Chelsea Hotel every day, I often fantasize about having been up on the roof that day when the Dead played.

If you have any information about the Dead’s performance on 8/10/67, or better yet, a recording of it, please contact me.

(Chelsea Hotel picture from mtkr on flickr.)

My name is Larry Person.

Larry Person.