...the other day I really gave some thought to the deceptively cheery "Casey Jones" by the Grateful Dead. It's roughly the old story of Casey Jones reimagined as a cocaine ballad, and there's foreshadowing:

Switchman's sleeping, train hundred and two is
On the wrong track and headed for you

And then what is, really, a pretty terrifying image:

Trouble with you is the trouble with me,
Got two good eyes but you still don't see.
Come round the bend, you know it's the end,
The fireman screams and the engine just gleams...

I was listening to the song the other day and I suddenly got a mental image of what that would look like--rounding a bend and there's the other train coming at you, and not one damn thing you can do about it. Brr.

And, as I say, it sounds so cheerful.

Reading over the piece of silliness I just wrote... man, it doesn't matter what I'm writing about, my first drafts are always too wordy! That was just a dashed-off bit of a goof and I still had to restrain myself from over-explaining and adding in extra words that dragged down whatever humour there was. And the posted version is still too wordy with too many characters.

In my own defense I thought it was a good idea to have the whole band present for the vampire revelation. But as you can see, it doesn't really work--the extra characters are distracting. If this was a real story it would work better to only have Jerry, Bobby, and Phil onstage, and there would be another scene in which the housemates gather and vote on the bloodsucking signup sheet, then discuss what to do about the afternoon show Jerry can't possibly play. And come to think of it, that second scene would work best if Phil ran the meeting with interjections from Jerry, plus at least one line for one other housemate to represent everyone else who's there. (And possibly one more "He bit me!" refrain from Bobby, before he's reconciled to the new plan.)

And this reminds me: the vampire Lestat apparently became a rock star in one of the Anne Rice books I haven't read. And the vampire in The Making Of A Monster was a rock musician as well. (The woman who wrote the second book was active on the LA club scene for years as a musician so her portrayal rings true. Lestat--I dunno.)

Vampire rock stars are an obvious choice, but that choice implies something not only about vampires, but also about rock stars. Which is not always a safe or fair assumption, as is demonstrated by this video from the outtakes of Festival Express, showing Phil Lesh's favourite kind of show: outdoors, in the sunshine. And we'll let Pigpen sing it:

Just to assure libraryman's mother that I have not ping-ponged wildly from the Grateful Dead to Richard III (well, I have but not irretrievably)--

Over the weekend, whilst reading about Richard (and more on that in a minute!) I got thinking about his supposed crimes and the glossed-over ones committed by Henry VII to shore up his own rule.

And I got thinking about crimes that are taken seriously, or possibly overly-seriously. And that led me right back to the famous bust at 710 Ashbury Street in 1967.

710 Ashbury was the "Grateful Dead house," where the band and a number of its friends and family lived at the time. As you can imagine, there was a certain amount of, ahem, drug activity going on. And the San Francisco police were in a mood to make some high-profile busts. So they made a deal with this guy who was part of the Merry Prankster scene, who they had on child molesting charges, and offered to give him a break on that if he helped them with some pot busts.

Let me repeat that: the police made a deal with a child molester to bust a few potheads.

Got that? Thinking about who you would prefer to live next door to? Me too, and I don't even have children!

So the guy dropped in, made sure there was in fact dope in the house, waited until Jerry and Mountain Girl left (he had a crush on Mountain Girl--as far as I can tell everyone did) and then the police arrived and arrested everyone present. This would not be the last time Pigpen was arrested because someone else was holding (Pigpen wasn't a pot smoker, nor at the time was Weir) and apparently he was pretty pissed about it.

When Jerry and Mountain Girl got home the police were still there, but they were rescued by the neighbour across the street who called to them to come over to her place. Jerry and Mountain Girl didn't go into their house and weren't arrested. The neighbour, apparently, had reasons of her own for looking out for the folks across the street: apparently she had spent the previous couple of weeks so sick she couldn't get out of bed, and the "Dead family" had been looking after her. According to Dennis McNally's book, they had a signup sheet and everything, with all the chores listed, from meals to bedpans, to make sure nothing got missed. Pigpen used to come by last thing in the evening to say goodnight and switch off the lights.

Anyone out there want to change their votes regarding who you would rather have living next door? Me, neither.

What was funny was, the police apparently missed a big block of Acapulco Gold sitting in a cupboard in the kitchen. In the end the smokers got fined a couple of hundred dollars each, and Weir and Pigpen got fined a hundred dollars just for being there, and I have no idea what became of the child molester although I hope whatever it was, it was what he deserved.

Anyway. Speaking of crimes that may be taken more or less seriously depending on the times.

( Sooner or later, there was going to be a great collision of topics on this thing. )

It's all good fun as long as nobody doses the horses...

(Photos snagged from the band's official Web site. I'm sorry, they were too great to pass up!)

I just got a message that one of my holds is in: Gimme Shelter, which I placed on hold even though one copy was damaged and one seemed to be lost. It's been found. God knows whether it'll play, but I'll soon find out.

In case anyone isn't aware, this movie was filmed during the Stones tour that ended at Altamont. I believe I've seen short clips of it over the years, mostly featuring other bands on the bill nervously discussing just how out of control the Angels are. (According to one of the Dead books I've read lately, the Angels involved were actually candidates for full status and were definitely motivated to prove their own bad-assery. Among other things, they used their bikes to form a barrier in front of the stage. And then took violent offense to any concert-goers who actually, you know, touched them. I've heard of looking for a fight but that's a bit much.) That was pretty much when the Dead bailed on the whole thing--Phil Lesh expressed regret in his book and called it "not our finest hour," especially since that left a long empty period before the Stones came on at sundown. The Dead's thinking seemed to be that they didn't want to be involved in something that scary, and they expected the Stones (since it was their show) to come on early so everyone could get out of there. What the other bands didn't realize was that, for purposes of the film, the Stones were definitely waiting until sundown to come onstage. Certainly the long wait between bands had to have made things worse, but it's hard to see how the mood could have been turned around regardless of whether there was anyone playing or not.

There are times when trying to make the best of things leads to you going along with something you know you shouldn't. I sort of back the Dead on this one.

Anyway. We'll see if the DVD is playable, and what it's like.

A couple of weeks ago the question was posed at a Gloryhound show, "Who wrote 'Long Black Veil," anyway?" At the time, I was convinced it was a traditional song. My only reason for thinking so was the fact that a line from the song was used as the title of the Sharyn McCrumb novel She Walks These Hills. It's one of her Ballad Novels and I assumed the titles were all taken from traditional ballads.

Incorrect! Long Black Veil was written in 1959, by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin, the latter being credited with, among other things, discovering Kris Kristofferson.

Wow.

So: always check your facts, even if you think you know the answer. Especially if you answer questions for a living!

And to make up for my initial incautious response--here's a video that ends up with a performance of "The Long Black Veil":

(Okay, yes, you have to sit through "King Harvest" first. Such hardship.)

Incidentally, one of the Ballad Novels whose title was taken from a genuine folksong: If Ever I Return, Pretty Peggy-O is named for a line in the song Pretty Peggy-O.

There's a video for that one, too:

Oh, don't pretend to be surprised!

Nope, not ranting. I've just been thinking this since I saw the original post yesterday and I had to say it somewhere.

So this person posted that the part-time stable help decided to clean the poster's horse's water trough. And did so by pouring a bunch of bleach into the water and... walking away.

Poster's Horse came into the stall, took a sip, spat it out. Poster went to investigate, smelled bleach, freaked.

I can totally sympathize with this reaction.

In the course of the discussion a couple of people pointed out that bleach, in tiny quantities, is no big deal so the freakout was unwarranted, if understandable. A tiny amount of bleach can render iffy water potable.

However, everyone agreed you're not supposed to be able to smell it.

I heroically restrained myself from sharing the story about the time someone dosed the apple juice at an event in San Francisco attended by, among others, the Grateful Dead. (I don't think they were the culprits this time.) Phil Lesh described taking a drink of what he knew darned well was juice with LSD in it, and noticing a strange and unfamiliar flavour.

And then he realized, holy crap, there was so much acid in the apple juice that he could taste it! You're not supposed to be able to taste the acid!

Apparently it was the trip to end all trips, but although a number of people got "profoundly disoriented," as Bob Weir would say, nobody got hurt and everyone who wandered off eventually turned up safely.

You can see why I was tempted to relate this story, and also why it's probably just as well that I didn't. Even so.

And the horse was fine, too. I hope his owner had a chat with the barn owners about the staff, you know, rinsing out water buckets after treating them with chemicals, but hey. (And I also picked up the tip that Listerine is pretty good for cleaning dirty buckets, which is handy to know since there's a lot of iron in the water at our barn and the plastic water buckets do get stained.)

( Here are videos of Marty singing both El Paso and El Paso City. )

( And, guess what--the Grateful Dead also covered El Paso! )

In the original draft of my festival-murders story, Kowalski made friends with a Texas band called El Paso. Because, they explained, they were from El Paso, and they couldn't think of a better name. Jordy, who has never been to Texas before and knows nothing about the state, asks,

"El Paso... that's in west Texas, right? Because I think I heard something somewhere about the west Texas town of El Paso."

And then he wonders why everyone looks at him like they think he's making fun of them.

El Paso morphed into Button Constituency in the current draft, but I actually do think El Paso would be a good name for a band. Which is why I changed it--I figure someone else must have thought the same thing already!

I haven't yet listened to the Libertines' CD (which, dachelle, is Up the Bracket) because I spent last night reading Searching For the Sound, Phil Lesh's account of his life playing bass in the Grateful Dead.

I did mention that I have an unusually long attention span sometimes, didn't I?

Anyway, this is the same book we gave to my out-west brother for Christmas and on reading it myself it was probably a good choice. The first thing I should note up front is, it's Lesh's autobiography, and in fact Lesh actually wrote it. I checked the cataloguing-in-progress information inside the cover as well as the Library of Congress, and there are no other authors listed. So: a celebrity author who actually authored his own book!

Lesh starts off by scoring some points there.

( And he scores one or two more along the way. )

Not everybody gets a second --or third--chance, and there's a strong sense that what we have here is someone who knows that and doesn't plan to blow it this time.

Even if I had no interest in music, I think I'd like this book just for that sense. And have good feelings about the guy who wrote it.

This entry is mostly for makoiyi:

Jerry Garcia interviewing Bob Weir about a children's book he wrote with his sister, Wendy.

Pullout quote--Weir discusses the sounds on the cassette (it was a while ago) that accompanies the book:

BW: We had a ball when we were over there recording all the atmospherics, all the ambience, going into the jungle and sitting down at sunrise and sunset, because the jungle goes nuts at sunrise and sunset. It gets pretty loud in there. The bugs go off, the birds go off, and stuff runs around. So the story more or less came together while we were over there recording sounds. The fruit bats were good - they sound demonic, but they're actually wonderful. We ran across this one guy who has three pet fruit bats. They're about a foot long, and the wingspread can be up to six feet, and they're bats! But they can be cuddly, affectionate pets, too. You scratch them on their belly, and their eyes get all glassy. [JG laughs] They crawl around on you, and they like to play and frisk and stuff like that. You know, this guy would be anywhere in his house, and he just whistles for 'em, and whewp, whewp, whewp!

Also, at the time of writing neither Weir nor his sister had any kids. Garcia, obviously, did, and had the concerns noted below:

JG: I'm wondering about the girl [Tamara] in the story. Now, this is extremely not cool. First of all, her mom sends her off to play by herself in the part of Australia that has, what, the highest concentration of poisonous snakes in the world? [BW laughs] She's just a little hippie, and she's sent off into the rain forest all by herself, where there are insects big enough to eat your head! So that's my main complaint about the story.

Yeah, everyone loves Jerry for stuff like that...

Oh, and also, here's an interview transcript that describes one of the truly great Dead stories about their trip to Egypt. The best part (from Weir, again):

Moe - When my friends and my listeners learned that I was going to be speaking with you… They wanted to know one thing. They wanted to know what are some of your craziest memories of your whole music experience… not just Grateful Dead, but your whole music experience. Anything stand out particularly?

Bobby - Uhhh… Let’s see. The musical experience. The one that stands out the most is the time that we uh… the first night that we played… I guess it was actually the third night that we played… well it was a blend of all three nights that we played in Egypt back in ‘78, I think it was. It was with The Grateful Dead, and we had done our sound check… It had taken us a week to rig the Son Et Lumiere over there which is you know, thousands and thousands of year old ampitheatre built back in ancient times at the foot of the Sphinx which is at the foot of the Great Pyramid, and it’s all lit up real pretty these days. Word had sort of filtered out that there was going to be a rock and roll band playing there… It was a first time happening. Like I said, we spent a week setting it up and getting electricity out there, getting it reasonably reliable. We went on stage to play and it was just at dusk, and we started playing, and the lights came on and we were the brightest and warmest thing around…

Moe - (Laughs)

Bobby - This was down by the river… The Nile. So the mosquitoes came right for us. This is something we hadn’t planned for!

Moe - Oh jeez… (Laughs)

Bobby - I look at this cloud of mosquitoes around us and I saw them landing on me right and left, and I figured, ‘Welcome to hell, this is going to be throughly un-enjoyable!’ (Smiles) And then something flashed before my eyes… Some dark form… And then another… And then another… And then I looked around and I saw that these great big bats were flying around the stage and they were gulping down the mosquitoes…

Moe - (Laughs)

Bobby - You know… (Laughs) They knew a good thing when they saw it! You know… It was a good thing for them! And then I realized that there were like hundreds, if not thousands of them… there were of course thousands of mosquitoes, but these bats were just… They were saving the day!

Moe - (Laughs)

Bobby - And so, you know… In my mind’s eye, I sort of backed off from this… So here’s this rock and roll band, just hitting the groove, just starting to hit the groove… And they’re on this ancient stage… at the foot of the Sphinx… at the foot of The Great Pyramids… And the dunes on either side were lined with Bedouins on their camels, with guns over their shoulders… They’d heard about this, and they’d come in to check it out… Full moon was rising… and all this surrounded by a cloud of bats… BIG cloud of bats! And I was thinking to myself, ‘Take me now Lord, I want to remember it just like this!’

That does sound cool. And I'd love to have a pet bat as big as Coney!

How I love Youtube. Here's a fairly lengthy television report from right around the time of the Monterey Pop Festival. I highly recommend you watch the first two minutes or so, just because Voiceover Man is so awesome, all doomy and adenoidal.



Also, CleanShaven! Jerry Garcia is just all kinds of wrong.

And here's the Dead playing "Viola Lee Blues." I understand they thought they sucked and refused to sign releases for the Monterey Pops film, so I have no idea where this came from.



Still. Cool.

Too bad I cannot steal this story, but I'm sure I can think of one with a similar vibe.

Okay. While residing in the pink house, the Dead's neighbours included a house of ill repute on one side (brothel, gambling hell, whatever) and an old lady on the other.

It is not clear which neighbour hated their nocturnal practices more, but there were complaints.

Eventually, the old lady decided to give the band a taste of its own medicine. She gathered up every noise-making device in her home (radio, record player, television) and placed them in windows facing the pink house, undoubtedly at some ungodly hour of the morning. Then she turned them up as high as they would go and switched them on.

The resulting cacophany was enough to wake... well, the Dead, as a matter of fact.

However, since all the machines were making different noises, the racket struck the band as more entertaining than annoying. As Bob Weir remarked later, perhaps if they'd been serenaded by the stock market report they'd have been bummed out, but as it was they apparently came outside to investigate, laughed a lot...

And then went next door and made friends with the old dear.

Honestly, fictitious characters could not be more cooperative, in terms of likable goofiness. At least, not my fictitious characters, alas.

I mentioned over the weekend that I was looking for a new copy of American Beauty because the one I have skips in my car stereo. (My car stereo also does not play CDs I've burned myself, at least not ones I burned on my last workstation, so making myself another copy isn't a solution.) Oh, and incidentally, guess which song skips so badly it's unplayable? That's correct: "Friend of the Devil." So obviously I had to do something.

Anyway, the only copy of American Beauty I could find was an expensive special edition, but I did find Skeletons From the Attic, a greatest hits compilation that includes "Friend," "Truckin'," and "Casey Jones," as well as a live R&B song I assume is being sung by Pigpen. Score!

And American Beauty plays just fine in the house CD player, which I cannot explain but will go with. I guess the laser is heavier in that machine.

(Yeah, the first two lines are missing. I would imagine timing is everything on a song like this.)

...but I make no promises.

So apparently Jerry Garcia used to teach guitar lessons. In his book Searching For the Sound, bassist Phil Lesh relates that years later he encountered one of Jerry's former students (who was at that point teaching Phil's son in grade five.) Anyway, apparently Jerry became so frustrated with this student that halfway through a lesson he excused himself to go to the bathroom...

...and then he climbed out the window and ran away.

"Patience," wrote Lesh, "was not Jerry's strong suit."

Okay, this may not be the last Dead anecdote I come out with, but I'm fairly sure it'll be the last one involving anybody escaping through a window.

As the subject line indicates, one side effect of all this reading I've been doing about the Grateful Dead is... oh boy, am I having earworms. It's not so bad when it's "Friend Of the Devil" or "Casey Jones," but I was just scanning a document for the conference we're working on and it was only when the student at the next computer over looked at me funny that I realized I was sort of humming "Truckin'" under my breath. And I really don't know "Truckin'."

Dammit, get out of my head, you hippies!

The mystery writing group had a meeting last night, which was pleasant. We normally just read bits of what we're working on and shoot the breeze a little--it's not a critique group by any means. Last night one of the members asked for some input on a new and improved opening scene (verdict: it is indeed new and improved) and the hostess gave us a writing exercise that turned out to be quite a lark. She made up a series of lines that must be included in the piece of writing (we all used them as our opening lines) and then we had ten minutes to write something. If you didn't like your first pick you could take another, but since mine featured the detective's sister-in-law, a stuffy Anglican bishop, coming into the agency to ask for help with... [sentence ends]

Well, I kept it. By the end of my excerpt the stuffy sister-in-law was drinking vodka (it really should have been gin) with the detective and telling her in fits and starts about a long-lost out-of-wedlock son. If I was going to do anything with it, the detective would be a smartass and the early part of the story would be sort of irreverent and light-hearted, and then the whole thing would get progressively more serious. I figured the kid's father, a career petty criminal the sister-in-law should have been smart enough to stay away from, is threatening to sabotage her career by Revealing All about the kid.

I'm almost certainly not going to do anything about this but it interested me, given that I have never really decided who Jordy's biological parents are, or anything much about them. So it was kind of an interesting exercise, if only in spotting how I can twist almost anything to serve the story I am currently working on.

Likewise those books about the Grateful Dead. I'm afraid the post over the weekend may have been a dead (heh) loss for any fans of the band who wanted to know whether the books are worth checking out. They are. A Long Strange Trip tries to be more of a history, while Living With the Dead reads like the writers are still high. The second book kind of reminds me of Up and Down With the Rolling Stones, only less muck-raking and a great deal more affectionate. And pretty damn funny. Although really, Long Strange Trip is also hilarious because it researches the same stories Living does, and presents them in far greater detail.

Although no matter how you slice it, even for someone with no particular attachment to the band, reading about Jerry Garcia slowly killing himself is pretty hard sledding.

( And then I just go on and on about character kidnapping, so nothing to see here. )

I actually have a pretty good grip on reality, honest. I know the difference between real people and the ones in my head. It's just always a cause for some rejoicing when the two collide a little bit. Which, I guess, may well happen here. I mean, the material is too good not to use!

I got a couple of books about the Grateful Dead out of the library this week--I'm not a big Dead fan or anything but I have to admit, Festival Express is enough to make anyone fond of them. (Seriously: check out that movie.)

Anyway, Long Strange Trip is wonderfully detailed, and in the course of reading through it I've discovered the cop-defending Bob Weir of Festival Express would make an ideal story character, if I was in need of a perpetual innocent who couldn't seem to stay out of trouble. I have no time to get into it right now, but I'm familiar with the complimentary term "old soul." Which is a cool image and everything, but I have to confess that, as someone who was much too mature and in fact uptight for my own good as a kid (I have begun to loosen up in recent years, thank God) I have a pronounced soft spot for those who see the world as perpetually new and surprising. It's endearing, and it makes me look at things differently as well.

My personal experience with this type of person is pretty much limited to actual children, mind you, and I think a character of this sort (Jordy, really, has a touch of it) would almost have to be young or he'd be very difficult to write. But if you pulled it off it'd be worth it.

Anyway. To the barn, and then I'll do some of my own writing and see what happens.