Favorite Beatle?

Favorite Beatle?  Duhhh… John of course, which should tell you that my favorite Dead lyricist is Robert Hunter, and why not?  But picking favorites among the great and the really good is a fool’s pursuit.  All those years I stood near the front nursing a Jack Daniels and studying Garcia’s work on the Strat, the pedal steel, the banjo…  all that time spent wisely and so well…  you’d think that deep meditation on that level would have taught me that there is that of god in everyone and there is certainly no reason to scratch the itch of irascibility when it comes to Bobby Ace, yet…

Favorite member of the Grateful Dead?  Duhhh… Jerry of course, but just as you can’t fault George or Ringo, (or even Paul, I guess) it’s hard to find something bad to say about Bill or Mickey, Phil, Pigpen or Keith, or even Brent.  Or Donna "A chick singing with Grateful Dead?" Godchaux…   

But I just never felt any kind of affinity for Bob Weir.  I love his scratch throated "Me and My Uncle,"  and "Brown Eyed Women."   It has something to do with the performance.  The Dead wouldn’t have been the Dead without him, but I would trade every Bob Weir song ever recorded for a chance to hear Jerry Garcia live one time on the pedal steel behind Crosby, Stills and Nash as they croon "Teach Your Children…"

And if I was trading out every Bob Weir song ever recorded, I’d be dumping almost fifty Barlow lyrics, which doesn’t seem fair.  But Jerry’s dead, and Barlow isn’t and I don’t give a good goddamn about Bobby Weir.  But I can commend to you Barlow’s recent post, wherein he offers this as partial excuse for his nine month absence from the blogosphere:

It was certainly not that I beheld no phenomena worthy of comment. No,
indeed. Rather, I’ve had adventures that Baron von Munchausen would
have kept to himself. I beheld beauties so monstrous and horrors so
sublime that they exploded my attempted descriptions like Katrina
scattered seagulls. Moreover, they came upon me too quickly. (Or
perhaps I came upon them too quickly. I accumulated about 150,000
frequent flier miles in 2024, at one point circling the globe, with
significant stops in places like Kyoto, Geneva, and Charleston, in only
8 days.)

I began numerous BarlowSpams and blog entries only to have them
slam, half-written, into the next improbability, where, beached with
awe upon the present, I no longer felt like reporting yesterday’s
apocalypse.