Got Dead If You Want It

Yesterday in my post on Teenage Fanclub, I included a link to a newspaper article in which the band complained about playing a gig at a radio show in San Francisco in 1991 where everything went wrong. To my surprise, after I published it, my brother told me we – he and I – had been at that gig, and he had the notes to prove it:

12/10/93: Concourse Exhibition Center, San Francisco: Porno for Pyros/The Wonderstuff/General Public/Cracker/Evan Dando/They Might Be Giants/TeenageFanclub/Tony Bennett/Mazzy Star/Nick Heyward/Redd Kross. KITS Green Christmas Benefit.

At that time in my life, I went to so many shows I can’t remember 80 percent of them. Fortunately my brother went to many of them with me, and he has a hard drive instead of a brain. This isn’t exactly news to me -- one time I was in his apartment in Jersey City and he showed me an excel spread sheet of every show we’d been to since 1975 and it weirded me out so bad I promptly forgot about it. Besides, at the time I couldn’t really think of a use for that information. But it shows the difference between my brother and I. My brother writes an incredibly well-researched, fact checked and evidence-based blog called Lost Live Dead that catalogs every single Grateful Dead show ever played, including things that happened on beaches and at public libraries in 1965 and stuff. My blog just tells you how I feel about shit.

And therein lies the difference between us. In my day, we didn’t have diseases like Aspergers, ADD, ADHD, or even autism, we just called people ‘hyper’ or ‘nerdy.’ And I honestly don’t think my brother has any of those things; he’s very personable. But he does have an obsession with lists that is truly phenomenal. When he was really little the lists took the form of baseball statistics for the Oakland As. (He still keeps those, too.) Then rock came into our world and it started to be more about the different lineups of Santana, what tracks Ginger Baker played on, albums produced by Al Kooper, etc. etc. He is the kind of person who's favorite band is Can.

kraut rock

My brother is older than me, and we have VERY different taste in music. In the late 1970s, I had to listen to the Grateful Dead bleeding through the adjoining wall of our bedrooms every night, and it made me crazy; I probably became a punk rocker just to retaliate. Or maybe not, because the Grateful Dead’s music made me mad on so many other levels as well. I hated the instrumentation, for one thing – all that noodling through unbearable doodah nonsense. And I hated the subject matter of their songs, the ye old Americana stuff, it seemed to me like it glorified eras that were steeped in prejudice and machismo. They and their ilk called women ‘old lady’ and ‘mamma,’ and that infuriated me. You couldn’t imagine the Damned, say, or the Buzzcocks, calling a girl ‘mamma.’ That terminology still makes me want to punch someone.

I grew to have better reasons for hating the Dead, but I never grew to like them, even a single little bit. On the day Jerry Garcia died a news crew came to interview at my home two blocks from Haight Street and I said something so unsympathetic to the community’s loss that they packed up their equipment and left without taping. (Then, or so my friend Michele tells me, I went and played ping pong in the basement of the Chatterbox and the bartender played “Truckin’ by the Pop-o-Pies” as a tribute.)

My brother, however, did learn to like some of what I listened to. What’s more, his list-obsession worked in my favor, because his favorite thing in the world was to add to it. That meant that, unlike my friends, who always claimed they wanted to come with me to the shows that I was reviewing, only he actually did so. When push came to shove, my friends really only wanted to come when the assignment was Lou Reed, the Kinks, or REM, but my brother could be counted on to attend shows by Chicago, Motley Crue, Iron Maiden, or Rick Derringer, i.e., most of my assignments. Because he views listening to music as a purely intellectual activity, he’s up for anything. Indeed, a few years ago when I was visiting him in NYC, I dragged him out to see the AfghanWhigs the Beacon Theater. That band is completely outside of his musical wheelhouse, but he’s used to going to see stuff with me and then, I suppose, just spacing out. You can totally picture that scene: I’m headbanging my brains out to  “Matomoros” or “Fountain andFairfax”  and he’s staring at that  lovely thing on the ceiling, planning out a blog post on the Allman Brothers annual Beacon Theater stand which is the thing that he considers this venue famous for. 

But, twas ever thus. He is eternally looking backward, at music from a historical perspective, and I like to think I am looking forward: or at least that I am in the present. We live on different coasts now, so we never get to go to shows together, but you’ll probably see him weigh in here from time to time. And if you care about the Dead at all, definitely go visit his blog. You won’t believe that he and I live on the same planet, much less grew up in the same household, but DNA is weird that way – as is music fandom.