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You are here: Home / Open Threads / RIP, Jerry

RIP, Jerry

by | 76 Comments

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He’d have been 71 today.

Bon Jovi is still touring. Fuck me.

And here is one for the expat Yinzers:

daburgh

So funny. So true. And if you are like me, you’re negotiating all this with hands that are still greasy from an egg and sardine or a hot gabagool and cheese or hot Italian from Primanti’s because you were down in the strip at PennMac and Wholey’s and all the other awesome shops.

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  1. 1.

    JCT

    One of my favorite things when I was a student at Berkeley in the early 80s was catching him at the Keystone. My waitressing job was around the corner on Shattuck and with some regularity my boyfriend would pick me up after my shift and we would catch the show.

    Those were the days – oh my god that place was a dive.

  2. 2.

    Tom Levenson

    I got to see the Dead at Winterland.

    That Jerry is dead and so many I could list aren’t is proof that any notional deity ain’t got no taste.

  3. 3.

    Punchy

    I see you’re just keeping the faith. I mean, raise your hand if you think Jerry would have lasted this long. Just living on a prayer to think that. He’d woulda taken some bad “medicine” and stroked out mid-show….

  4. 4.

    chopper

    still greasy from an egg and sardine or a hot gabagool and cheese or hot Italian from Primanti’s because you were down in the strip at PennMac and Wholey’s

    what the fuck language is this? is this English?

  5. 5.

    Dead Ernest

    Jerry and the Dead followed me around for about 25 years.
    Since he’s been gone, and they stopped, well, its been a longer, stranger, and more lonely trip. Sigh.

  6. 6.

    dewzke

    Totally off topic, and i’m sorry… but Jimmy Kimmel lists ‘Ben Stein’ as an actor. No. No. No. Moron, yes. “Bueller” repeated and a shit show does not make one an ‘actor’. Thank you.

  8. 8.

    Poopyman

    @chopper: It reads much clearer than it sounds in Pittsburghese, which cannot be replicated by any keyboard.

    The graphic shows an egress from town that isn’t so obvious to folks on the North Side or those of us accustomed to using the Liberty Tubes, but the fact that there’s a ceiling is a dead giveaway.

  9. 9.

    BGinCHI

    First Cole post in Aramaic.

    Very cool but no idea what he’s talking about. And isn’t that the singer from Old and In the Way?

  11. 11.

    FlipYrWhig

    To put things in perspective, 71 years is almost enough time for two whole Grateful Dead concerts.

  12. 12.

    Eric U.

    I think I’ve been on that road a couple of times, but I also think I’ve been lost when I was there so I was messing up the crossover that everyone else was in the process of doing

  14. 14.

    dance around in your bones

    What the hell is a hot gabagool? It sounds nasty. Like a Penthouse letter.

    “Oh baby, give me a taste of your hot gabagool!”

  17. 17.

    Spaghetti Lee

    I do love the Dead. I like almost all their studio albums, even the slicker Mydland-era ones, which I know is a crime against taste and all that, but Built to Last in particular I’ve always thought features some great, underappreciated songwriting.

  20. 20.

    JCT

    @FlipYrWhig: Hah – no joke. They used to play the Greek theater on the UC Berkeley campus at least once a year. The shows were endless but a true event – I never missed one.

    The amusing thing was that the frat guys would always buy tons of tickets (they were incredibly cheap). Never saw any of them at the shows. Because they bought them to scalp to the waves of Dead Heads that would descend on the campus (yes, in their buses). Vividly remember walking up the hill to the Greek and hearing one of them shriek “that’s an insane amount of money!” at some frat boy before being convinced to fork it over by a friend because “we gotta see Jerry, man”. Hilarious. Apparently they would often pay for those tickets with weed – stock the whole frat for months.

    I’ve tried to get my college-age son to listen to some of the Dead, but he just can’t get into it. I think it really helped to see them live at least once..

  24. 24.

    ant

    I am a truck driver, so I know this bridge. It goes over the river and into the tunnel in Pittsburg. Fort Pitt I think it is called.

    People get too impatient about getting over. They should wait until traffic is moving, then blend.

    Too often, they fucking stop, then block each other from moving over.

    There was a dwarf that I gave 4 cigs to who was standing there right before the split where it always backs up on the bridge last time I went through there. He was very thankful judging from the look on his face when I gave them to him.

    Why do people fucking hit their brakes right at the bottom of the hill on the other side of that tunnel?

    People love to slow down big trucks for no reason. Do people not realize how hard it is to get going again with a big heavy truck?

  25. 25.

    burnspbesq

    It’s also the birthday of the guy I played with as a duo in college. He taught me the only Dead song I really like.

    Have a great one, Jon. We can share what we’ve got of yours, cuz we done shared all of mine.

    Also too: listening to “Bakersfield,” the new album of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard covers by Vince Gill and pedal-steel ace Paul Franklin. Un-fucking-believable. Run, do not walk, to your nearest record store. You can thank me later.

  26. 26.

    Older

    I am not from Pittsburgh, in fact I don’t think I’ve ever been there, but my home town has one of those.

  27. 27.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    @JCT: I never saw the Dead play live, I did hear them. They played at Pauley@UCLA in 82. I had to work at one of the on campus restaurants, an odd crowd that day. I walked by Pauley on the way home and could hear them as I walked down Bruin Walk.

    @JohnCole@top: There is much, much worse than Bon Jovi.

  28. 28.

    the Conster

    Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.

  31. 31.

    MikeBoyScout

    *sigh*
    I don’t know whether I regret not having met you at a show Cole
    or if you were one of the out of town SOBs who always FKed up my commute south that should have been shot by the PPD to make my commute pleasant.

  33. 33.

    NotMax

    @dewzke

    Not a skilled actor but a one trick pony actor. Regardless. being a paid-up, card carrying member of SAG (or Equity, for that matter) allows for the professional designation actor. It’s a broad umbrella. As it should be.

  36. 36.

    Jebediah

    @Keith P.:

    Bon Jovi is still touring. Fuck me.

    And Bret Michaels is a big star.

    The Brett Michaels part bothers me a lot more.

  37. 37.

    Jebediah

    @burnspbesq:

    Also too: listening to “Bakersfield,” the new album of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard covers by Vince Gill and pedal-steel ace Paul Franklin. Un-fucking-believable. Run, do not walk, to your nearest record store. You can thank me later.

    Thanking you in advance.

  39. 39.

    Suzanne

    Good Lord, there are bands waaaay worse than Bon Jovi. The fact that Avril Lavigne and Chad Kroeger got married is responsible for the Event Horizon of Crap emanating from Canuckistan right now.

  45. 45.

    dewzke

    I like music when it is from a real voice and a bunch of real instruments live. The rest is…not good.

  46. 46.

    cain

    I saw Rush in concert last weekend. oh ma what an awesome show. so many kids there as well. probably 3 generations of people all enjoying the old and new stuff. new stuff is killer!

  47. 47.

    Origuy

    I saw the Dead a few times: in 1978 the week I moved to California at Spartan Stadium, in 1982 at the Moscone Center, and a couple of times at Stanford. The Moscone concert was the first big rock concert there, and one of the few ever. It was a benefit for Vietnam Veterans Project, with Jefferson Starship, Boz Scaggs, and Country Joe. Still have the tshirt.
    Edit: Someone posted a video of it youtube.com/watch?v=KPEz2xdphTA

  48. 48.

    NotMax

    @dewzke

    Just for grins, a cut from a novelty album from way back when.

    Both the pianist and singer are seasoned music professionals (and married), and used to do their ‘pianist has two left hands and she sings consistently a half tone off’ shtick at parties.

  49. 49.

    johnny aquitard

    I saw the Dead a year before Jerry died. In the U of O stadium in Eugene, OR. Never been a Dead fan before or after. But a friend had tickets and we went. I was prolly the only person in the whole stadium who wasn’t in an altered state of consciousness.

    However, because of the constant wafting banks of ganja smoke (so dense I at times couldn’t see the band) that statement was probably not 100% accurate.

    But it was fun. Damn good fun. Although I didn’t know what to do during the ‘space music’ set. Everybody laid down and I was the only guy standing in the stadium, feeling like a protestant at a catholic mass when they get down on their knees.

  51. 51.

    Jess Sane

    Well, John Bongiovi is 20 years younger and doesn’t shoot up heroin (as far as i know).
    Things like that do make a difference.

    I like music when it is from a real voice and a bunch of real instruments live. The rest is…not good
    That’s funny, because my band is (was?) mostly instrumental, and was constructed in a studio because it could not really be played live.
    Oh, and one of our studio guest musicians was a (now deceased) member of…the Grateful Dead. Go figure.

  53. 53.

    Just One More Canuck

    A couple of years ago I was driving my daughter somewhere. It was a beautiful fall afternoon, and Ripple came on the radio. My then 6-year old said, “I love this song. It sounds like they’re singing about today”

  54. 54.

    BruceFromOhio

    Holy shit, I know that deck. Used to walk the Ft Pitt mornings to get to school, then run it after work to get to the incline before it closed at midnight.

    Roommates were ardent Deadheads. The graphic artist would buy a bale of 500 large white t-shirts for a couple of hundred dollars, then spend weeks tie-dying and airbrushing them up. He’d haul what he could carry to the shows when the Dead were in the region, and sell them for $5 apiece. He’d sell every single one.

    If you haven’t walked the Strip on a Saturday morning, yinz ain’t been dahntahn in the burg.

  55. 55.

    Neddie Jingo

    @Mnemosyne:

    Meh. It’s like I said when G and I saw these guys open for TMBG — what people with neurotypical brains find hypnotic, my ADHD brain quickly gets bored with.

    Don’t blame your brain. That’s two — count ’em, two (2) — monophonic instruments attempting music. (Baritone sax? Why not just fart into the microphone? It’d be more musical.) We call chords triads for a very good reason. That missing third note makes the difference between musicianship and mere novelty.

    And since I’m particularly cranky this morning, fuck the Grateful Dead. That band couldn’t rock to save its leadfooted life. I hung with a lot of Deadheads in the earlies, and if I never again hear another lazy-assed, sludgy, drunken rendition of “One More Saturday Night” it’ll be too soon. (Sixteenth-generation cassette copy, Rochester, ’78!) Blech. Ptoo.

    Here’s how “Tennessee Jed” actually should be played: Elvis Costello, Richard Thompson, Pete Thomas, Levon Helm, Nick Lowe. Whoah. Dynamics. Silences between notes (as in, STFU when the music tells you to). Intelligible lyrics, sung by somebody actually thinking about their meaning. This stuff I can admire.

  56. 56.

    Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937

    I saw the ’72 Oregon benefit concert movie last night. The movie is amateurish and meh for half of it. The performance and sound was superb. One of the bestest Dark Stars from that period and they showed all 20-ish minutes of it.

  60. 60.

    shell

    What the hell is a hot gabagool? It sounds nasty. Like a Penthouse letter.

    You’ve obviously never watched the ‘Sopranos”

  61. 61.

    Karounie

    Long ago I dated a sort a of pseudo-goomba New Jersey guy who like to play up the Calabria/Sicily background thing. One year he invited me to his family’s Christmas and his Mom served an absolutely delicious dish that she called “brazhools” (beef filets wrapped around a pine nut filling with tomato based sauce.)

    Years later, in a sidewalk eatery in Trastevere, I asked if they served brazhools. The waiter had no idea what that was, so I described the ingredients as I remembered them. His face lit up and he said “Ahhhhh, bracciola!”

  62. 62.

    Harold Samson

    @Neddie Jingo:

    Love the musicians, but that interpretation of Jed is like a hammer on the head, continual noise and no grace at all.

    I guess some folk don’t get the Dead and never will.

  64. 64.

    Mnemosyne

    @Karounie:

    Sicilian is actually considered a separate language from standard Italian, so it’s not surprising that your waiter had no idea what you were talking about. It was like asking a Spanish waiter about the name of a Catalan dish.

  67. 67.

    Epicurus

    @Punchy: A native of Pittsburgh, my friend! Where “you (all)” becomes “Yinz!” Methinks the Balloon Juice Lexicon needs a new entry. Also, too, any references to “Primanti’s” refer to a legendary sandwich shop, famous for “one-handed” Italian creations. They put the french fries IN the sandwich! Wonderful stuff…

  68. 68.

    flukebucket

    I saw The Dead at The Fox Theater in Atlanta, GA. back in 1977.

    Great venue and the damn crowd was as interesting as the band. Good times.

  69. 69.

    Karounie

    @Mnemosyne: The Roman cafe did in fact serve bracciola. Gabagool/capicola and brazhool/bracciola seem like pretty close cognates between the two languages. I was trying to say that a lot of America’s media-supported ideas about the Italian American experience (Sopranos) are really pointing at SIcily.

  70. 70.

    burnspbesq

    I saw the Dead a couple of times. The show that is memorable was at Laguna SECAM, c. 1987. Bruce Hornsby sat in, and as someone who could actually play his chosen instrument, he was completely out of place.

  71. 71.

    Neddie Jingo

    @EdTheRed: You’re joking, right?

    At 4:05: “We’re doing another chorus of guitar solo, right? I don’t have to sing now, right? [looks around] Oh, yeah. Good. Another chorus. I’m on it.” [bottom drops out of entire song for 3 bars…]

  72. 72.

    EdTheRed

    @Neddie Jingo: Yes, because in order for a song to rock, it must be technically perfect. There is no room for improvisation or mistakes in rock and roll. Rock and roll is about setting boundaries, and then never crossing them.

  76. 76.

    keestadoll

    I’m so glad I caught them at the Oakland Coliseum when I did. Couldn’t stand the music (to be clear) but no one should graduate college without having a Dead show under their belt. Thanks for the really fun and slightly gross memory Jerry.

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