I had a nice Twitter DM back and forth today with Andy LaCasse, who performed the “cheesy guitar solo” in episode 603- THE DEAD TALK BACK.
I am going to add an item about it to the episode 603 episode guide entry, but since we’re past that one and not many people might see it, I thought I would post an item about it.
LaCasse said “The director [that would have been Jim, he directed the host segments for that episode] kept laughing out loud and asking me if I could make it more grating and irritating. I said I could, and I did!”
He also recalls: “I brought my 1 year old daughter, Kayla, with me to the studio. The writers whisked her away for a while. Later, the video guys [that would have been Brad and Tim] let her play with the controls on the video editing machine. The scene had already been shot, so I followed Crow’s hands as he played.”
On the technical side, he notes: “I played a cheap copy of a Fender Stratocaster with EMG pickups through a Big Jam Spit Wah pedal straight into the MST3K video editor.”
“My daughter had a great time and the writers adored her,” he concluded. “I had a blast! Definitely a career highlight for me. It’s still on my résumé.”
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All this time I thought that was a synthesizer. There was no way anyone could make a guitar sound that irritating and awful. ;)
I’ve been a hardcore Deadhead for over thirty years — since my senior year of college, in 1978 — and that had to be one of the funniest bits they’ve ever done. Seeing Crow made up as Garcia circa 1993 was priceless.
I won’t speak for any of my fellow Deadheads, but I’ve never been one of those Deadheads who takes it so seriously that he couldn’t take a joke.
Oddly enough, I was turned on to MST3K in the early ’90s by a bootleg Dead tape-trading pal of mine on rec.music.gdead on Usenet, a guy who used to post under the pseudonym “Tom Servo”. I emailed him to ask how he came up with that awesome nickname, and he proceeded to tell me about this really cool TV show where they heckle bad old movies. The rest was history.
Btw, it’s also interesting to note that the Grateful Dead and MST3K both had the same ethic about sharing bootleg recordings: “Keep Circulating The Tapes”.
I too always thought that was probably Mike meandering away endlessly on a Yamaha. Hilarious!!
I finally got that sound out of my head and now it’s back! Thanks! It’s going to take another week to get rid of that earworm. ;-)
What fun! Makes me wish I’d have taken guitar lessons in order to annoy everyone I know!