Phish and The Dead Announce 09 Tour Dates

I’m counting to ten and keeping my hands away from my privates as some recent news in noodleland has given me a boner. Of course, one of the problems in noodleland is having your hands grope around your penis for constant wanking.
Phish has decided 2009 is a prime opportunity to reform, go back on the road and have thousands of Phisheads fork over $49.50 for tickets.
I would be one of those considering it.
Perhaps you don’t remember Trey Anastasio solo career…I sure don’t. In fact, I remember more about Trey’s run-ins with the cops than I do any of his recorded output.
But I do harbor fond memories of the band that was poised to jump right into the “king of the jam bands” title after Garcia died. They did, for a while, before a few band members figured out that being the king of the jam bands was kind of a buzzkill.
Anyway: “Fuck you!”…Billy Breathes is an awesome album and I’d dig another live shot of “Wilson” any day of the week.
I just finished reading Phil Lesh’s autobiography Searching For The Sound and performed a recent run-through of the Grateful Dead’s mid-70’s output. You know, before they signed to Arista and released their shitty late-70’s output. It (the book) gave me a better understanding of Garcia’s addiction and why he kept singing “Black Muddy River” and “Stella Blue” all the time towards the end.
The spins of Blues For Allah got me missing a live version of “Franklin’s Tower” and, whadya know, The Dead just announced a 09 tour. I’m sure “Franklin’s Tower” wouldn’t be on the set list since it is a Jerry tune, but it would be nice to see the four surviving members again.
I’m totally interested in Rocking The Cradle: Egypt, 1978 when the Dead secured the necessary US and Egyptian approvals to perform a concert in front of the pyramids. This is exactly the kind of pointless hippie idea that makes me love this band. It was a concert that ultimately lost money, created only because someone got high and thought, “You know what would be awesome? To do a show in front of the pyramids, man!”
In Lesh’s book, he talks about how a few nomadic desert dwellers stopped by to listen to the jams, but ultimately, the band wasn’t really firing on all cylinders. That’s another thing I love about the Dead: whenever they were faced with the big shows (Woodstock, Altamont, the Pyramids), they managed to fuck them up somehow. Yet even afterwards, they pushed on, allowing their stoned synapses to forget these failures before moving on to the next harebrained idea.
“You know what would be awesome? To do a show from the moon!”
Here’s a short clip of a silly hippie (actually, one of the original Merry Pranksters, George Walker) desecrating one of the seven wonders of the world with a Steal Your Face flag.