Crazy Fingers

I had a great time last night. (The only downside was that four guys showed up with tickets for the exact same seats that my four tickets were for. I sold three of my tickets outside before the show. Either my tickets were counterfeit, or those other tickets were counterfeit. I moved down to the orchestra, so I don’t know the eventual outcome of that conflict.)

Here’s what I heard:

Set 1:
Hot’lanta
Can’t Lose What You Never Had
Trouble No More
Woman Across The River
Revival
Egypt
Midnight Rider
Stand Back
The Weight

Set 2:
^Smokestack Lightning (with Hubert Sumlin)
^Shake For Me (with Hubert Sumlin)
^Sitting On Top Of The World (with Hubert Sumlin)
Rocking Horse>
Liz Reed (w/drum and bass solo)
Statesboro Blues
One Way Out

Encore:
No One To Run With

Brian is coming tonight!

I finally got my ass in gear this morning and I started looking for tickets for the upcoming Allman Brothers run at the Beacon Theater. (Some day I’ll order tickets when they go on sale. I’m not sure how I missed the on-sale date this time around.)

So far, I found four tickets below face value for Thursday, 3/9 and two for a total of $25 over face value for Friday, 3/10. Brian said he’d go one night, which will be his introduction to this sort of thing (they’d better do a good show that night — I think we’ve got one shot for him to get it).

(Brian and I will figure out together how many additional nights I am going to attend without him, and what kind of refreshments I will consume. Better yet, maybe he’ll want to go back for more after his first show!) I’m going to invite his brother and his uncle to one of the shows, I think, probably Thursday. (His uncle, who’s only about 10 years older than me, saw all kinds of good music in the early 70s, including at the Fillmore East, and he produced light shows. There’s a lot of interesting history there to hear about at some point.)

Brian is amazed at my ability to get tickets below, at, or slightly above face value. I guess I have a set of skills that enabled me to see the Grateful Dead so many times. I say I have good ticket karma. Some might say it has something to do with my intentionality.

I happened to be listening to 6/10/73 in the gym today, a show which includes a set with the Grateful Dead and members of the Allman Brothers (including Dickie Betts, who was fired by the current incarnation of the Allman Brothers in 2000 — a fact less troubling to me than to others). Check out this Promised Land from that show. Dickie’s guitar is unmistakeable; I love the way he and Jerry trade licks.

Let me know if you’ll be at the Beacon. We can meet up.

A while back, I wrote about a billboard a bunch of us put up in Denver when the Dead played there in 1992, after the voters in Colorado approved an anti-gay ballot initiative. (Check out some recent comment activity on that post about the billboard.) The billboard was sort of based on stickers that some of us had printed. This is what I wrote about the stickers:

We printed tens-of-thousands of the stickers, and I personally handed out thousands. It was amazing to walk around the parking lot of a show, or circulate inside a venue, just giving something away. I got to meet and talk to many cool people. Almost everybody accepted the sticker with a smile and I can’t recall any negative reaction because of what the stickers stood for. People would slap the stickers on their shirts or jackets, and after a while it seemed like everyone who passed by was wearing one. I imagine many intermission or post-show conversations about “what does this mean” and kids putting it together that it’s ok to be gay or that it’s in keeping with the deadhead community to welcome brothers and sisters with all kinds of sexual orientations. (Being a deadhead used to mean being part of a big, welcoming community, which is what attracted me in the first place, I think. Giving stuff away, randomly, was a community-building activity. It was not uncommon for someone to affix supermarket produce stickers on random strangers, for example. Our Ain’t No Time To Hate stickers fit perfect into that tradition.)

Anyway, I was happy to discover that Jimi posted an image of one of the stickers on =Coffee House Studio=, and I included it here. (I’m too lazy to actually scan one.)

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.

I just added Lee’s blog to my blogroll. Check out his post with pictures from the Dead shows in 1985 (4/27 and 4/28) at the Frost Amphitheater, at Stanford University. (The second set of 4/27/85 is amazing. Check out the Scarlet>Eyes>GDTRFB. Maybe I’ll post mp3s.)

Lee has been commenting on my blog recently. Turns out, we may know some of the same people.

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.

As he puts it:

we are everywhere

He maintains a list of every show he’s ever seen.

• Grateful Dead News does a blog roundup, such as this most recent one. They always seem to catch my most innane posts, and miss the stuff I post about the Grateful Dead.
• David Dodd has a blog! He’s the guy who wrote the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics book and maintains the website.
• My newer iPod is completely busted. It’s going back to Apple, for warranty repair. In the meantime, I’ve been using my older iPod, which has 40 megabytes of Grateful Dead music on it. However, for some reason, changing iPods has shaken up my listening patterns, causing me to listen to things I haven’t been listening to, such as a sweet Jerry band show from 1/24/80. The “Masterpiece” is stellar.

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.