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Monday, June 05, 2006
Death of a Grateful Dead I just read that Vince Welnick died over the weekend. He was the keyboard player for the Grateful Dead. In honor of that, I thought I'd reprint the Grateful Dead section from the heartwarming bestseller The Know-It-All. By the way, as of yesterday, I'm feeling better, eyelids and all. Grateful Dead I'm no Deadhead--I attended one Dead show, which I found about as interesting as the diagram charting the life cycle of bread mold in the Fungi section. Still, I know enough about the classic stoner band to hold my own. I know about Jerry Garcia, LSD-laced punches, Terrapin Station, etc. And I certainly know more than my mom, who called me the day Garcia died to ask me if I knew who "Jerry" was. She came home to a barely coherent 10 minute message on her answering machine from a deadhead at a gas station. He had just heard the news about Jerry, and was apparently too bummed out to dial the phone correctly. In any case, I probably already know everything the Britannica has to say about the Grateful Dead. I start to read: "In folktales of many cultures, the spirit of the deceased person..." Well, I'm not even through the first sentence and I feel like quite the moron. I had always figured Jerry and co. had come up with the name The Grateful Dead out of their acid-addled heads. But no, it's a sly allusion. Just so you know, the grateful dead folktale goes like this: A traveler finds a corpse of a man who was denied a burial because he had too many unpaid debts. The nice traveler pays for a burial, and goes on his way. Sometime later, the spirit of the corpse appears to the traveler in the form of an animal and saves him from some danger. Finally, the animal reveals himself to be the grateful spirit of the dead man and offers the traveler two free tickets to Red Rock and some really awesome hash brownies. Well, I embellished there at the end. But you get the idea. The Grateful Dead bait and switch is not unusual. I have a similar forehead-slapping revelation every few pages, and they always make me feel dumb as a box of extrusive igneous rocks. It's making me paranoid. I'm realizing there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of allusions I'm missing every day. They're hiding everywhere--in my medicine cabinet, on my bookshelf, on my TV screen--just waiting to make me look stupid. I'm not talking about Finnegans Wake. I wouldn't feel too bad about missing a couple Joycean allusions to Druidic runes. I'm talking about everyday things like Lorna Doone, which I thought was a Nabisco cookie, but turns out to be a famous swashbuckling novel by English novelist Richard Blackmore. Or corvette, which isn't just a car, but a small naval vessel. Sadly, the Grateful Dead isn't even the first band name I learned about in the Britannica. I got the same feeling when I read about Eurythmics--which isn't just Annie Lennox's 80s band, but was originally an early 20th century method of teaching music involving the tapping of feet and clapping of hands. Or about Supertramp, which came from the title of a William Davies book called "The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp." I'm not up to N yet, but I figure 'N Sync is a revolutionary faction in the Ottoman empire or something. |
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2 Comments:
What are some of your favorite bands? Please dont say like, james mcmurtry. I like heavy metal....Later.
Keyboard player for the dead is a job no musician should want. It's like playing drums for Spinal Tap.
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