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The 1974 song is pastiche Americana.

I'm affected by the lyric "chicken shack" buried deep-in towards the end. It's highly personal. Around 1964 or so -- before I went to school -- my older brother and I "ran away" together one summer morning. I was just following him -- being led astray -- but fully complicit. Our destination was a local bar/restaurant which we knew as "The Chicken Shack." Other locals knew it as The Unicorn Tavern in Middleton, Wisconsin. At the time, the place had a rustic, log cabin look -- rather like the rural taverns/restaurants you'd find Up North. Maybe we had eaten a fish fry there once with our parents and were enthralled by the fish ponds (people would call them koi ponds these days). Anyways, I need to ask my 80-year mother about what happened. We did get punished. The Chicken Shack was on a very busy street, but in those days we only had to cross one relatively quite street and then trek through an old farm field to get there. There used to be an old barn in that field and we'd climb up to the second story and pee out one of the barn doors. That was fun too. That barn is long gone now along with the Chicken Shack.

Another family lived behind us in those days. They were the quintessential large Catholic family with one kid in every other grade spanning a decade or two. One of their middle kids (about 10 years older than me) ran away to San Francisco during the Summer Of Love. He came home five or so years later. I always avoided him. He had hair down his back, didn't drive, and went shoeless in summers. I did talk at length with him on the bus one day. The last time I saw him was 1977; he was dancing by himself at a Grateful Dead show in Madison. He's gone now too.

U.S. Blues was a Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter collaboration. I think the phrase "shake the hand that shook that hand" is a clever temporal sleight of hand. Full lyrics after the jump.

Always Daddy Issues Driving Things...

I was looking for an iconic photograph of Ron "Pigpen" McKernan holding his rifle aloft on the steps of the Grateful Dead communal house in Haight-Ashbury and mis-remembered publishing it in an old KLEM FM post.
Pigpen, top center, wasn't holding his gun aloft. The guy in white though -- the one who appears to be zieg-heiling and goosestepping may be holding a handgun. Looking anew at that post, I decided to republish it on Father's Day.
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Bob Weir,  standing top right

Netflix has an apparent exclusive called "The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir"

Weir--in case you didn't know--was the teenaged founding member of what became the Grateful Dead. This is a pretty well-made documentary and tells a complete story of the band's history using interviews and personal photos and film. Even if you’re not a fan of their music, you might appreciate their musicianship a little more.

Highlights: Weir revisits his childhood home in the tony suburb of Atherton CA. He shows us the music shop and the exact spot in Palo Alto where he first met Jerry Garcia. He revisits 710 Ashbury St., the more or less famous house which the Dead all shared (pictured above). The story is mostly told from Weir's Marin Co. house with plenty of rolling fog.

Other Highlights: There is archival footage of the Merry Prankster days—some of which I’d never seen. And I learned more about the effect that the early beats -- especially Neal Cassidy -- had on Weir.

I was less impressed by Weir’s personal quest to find his own birth father. Especially since we learn that Weir was the go-to groupie magnet in the band. It’s just inconceivable that after so many countless couplings there aren’t a lot of little Weirs in the gene pool, potentially perpetuating the "problem." But that all goes unsaid.  We’re supposed to be touched that Weir found his real dad in the end after losing Jerry. I was reminded somewhat of Lemmy and his own father problem which I mentioned here.  Always daddy issues driving things, aren't there?

I could say more but it’d be a spoiler.

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Bob Weir,  standing top right

Netflix has an apparent exclusive called "The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir"

Weir--in case you didn't know--was the teenaged founding member of what became the Grateful Dead. This is a pretty well-made documentary and tells a complete story of the band's history using interviews and personal photos and film. Even if you’re not a fan of their music, you might appreciate their musicianship a little more.

Highlights: Weir revisits his childhood home in the tony suburb of Atherton CA. He shows us the music shop and the exact spot in Palo Alto where he first met Jerry Garcia. He revisits 710 Ashbury St., the more or less famous house which the Dead all shared (pictured above). The story is mostly told from Weir's Marin Co. house with plenty of rolling fog.

Other Highlights: There is archival footage of the Merry Prankster days—some of which I’d never seen. And I learned more about the effect that the early beats -- especially Neal Cassidy -- had on Weir.

I was less impressed by Weir’s personal quest to find his own birth father. Especially since we learn that Weir was the go-to groupie magnet in the band. It’s just inconceivable that after so many countless couplings there aren’t a lot of little Weirs in the gene pool, potentially perpetuating the "problem." But that all goes unsaid.  We’re supposed to be touched that Weir found his real dad in the end after losing Jerry. I was reminded somewhat of Lemmy and his own father problem which I mentioned here.  Always daddy issues driving things, aren't there?

I could say more but it’d be a spoiler.

No Hippie Punching In The Comments, Please!

Dogfish Head Brewing is issuing a special 50th Anniversary commemorative label for their "American Beauty" beer. The Grateful Dead are celebrating 50 years together this summer. The beer is brewed using almond honey granola and hops. The beer haz 9% ABV which is enough to whack a polyp. The new label is supposed to look like this:

Link to original

I've always liked the iconography associated with the band, along with some of their music. I've only seen them twice though--not enough to qualify as a Deadhead. The Dead (the ones who aren't dead-dead) have been together 50 years, since the halcyon days of the San Francisco hippie scene.

According to the late Hunter S. Thompson, 1965 was the best year to be a hippie:

The best year to be a hippie was 1965, but then there was not much to write about, because not much was happening in public and most of what was happening in private was illegal. The real year of the hippie was 1966, despite the lack of publicity, which in 1967 gave way to a nationwide avalanche in Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Saturday Evening Post, and even the Aspen Illustrated News, which did a special issue on hippies in August of 1967 and made a record sale of all but 6 copies of a 3,500-copy press run. But 1967 was not really a good year to be a hippie. It was a good year for salesmen and exhibitionists who called themselves hippies and gave colorful interviews for the benefit of the mass media, but serious hippies, with nothing to sell, found that they had little to gain and a lot to lose by becoming public figures. Many were harassed and arrested for no other reason than their sudden identification with a so-called cult of sex and drugs. The publicity rumble, which seemed like a joke at first, turned into a menacing landslide. So quite a few people who might have been called the original hippies in 1965 had dropped out of sight by the time hippies became a national fad in 1967.  Link

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link in case the video doesn't load

I'm so tired of people getting the subjunctive mood wrong (triggered elsewhere).

Say what you will about the "Woodstock Generation" -- at least Robert Hunter knew his subjunctive mood. I count at least four instances of correct usage in his lyrics for "Ripple."

Lyrics after the break

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I see you've got your fist out 

Say your piece and get out 

Yes I get the gist of it but it's alright

Sorry that you feel that way 

The only thing there is to say 

Every silver lining's got a touch of grey

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The number of people who saw Steely Dan play live in the 1970's must be small; they stopped touring a year after this video recording, still years away from some of their best material. They may be the most famous band who never toured. That's quite an achievement by itself - right up there with Robert Hunter getting into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for being the Boo Radley of The Grateful Dead.

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Song lyrics after the jump

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R Crumb's "Keep On Truckin'" (1968):

The Grateful Dead's "Truckin'" (1970):

In the 1920s and 1930s, black jazz musicians used the verb "to truck" in the Robert Crumb sense of "Keep On Truckin'." You can see an example of it in Disney's 1941 "Dumbo," where one of the crows says "And they tell me that a man made a vegetable truck," and all the others crows assume the Keep on Truckin' position. link

Here's the scene from "Dumbo;" the line occurs at around 58 sec:

The crows do a lot of stereotypical strut and swagger, and I wonder if R Crumb was influenced by this in creating his iconic cartoon? Terry Zwigoff's documentary "Crumb" recorded how the young Crumb brothers were obsessed with at least one Disney movie, "Treasure Island" (1950), and Crumb probably saw Dumbo too as a kid (what boomer didn't?). Also, Crumb showed an early fascination with -- ahem -- African American caricature.

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