GD's "Throwing Stones" about Dick Cheney

[Hux]

From a recent interview with lyricist John Barlow:

AD: What is the story behind “Throwing Stones”? You wrote that in Cora as well, right?

JPB: Yeah. That’s the only explicitly political song we ever wrote. And the story behind that was that I was having a serious argument with Dick Cheney at that point, who I’d help get elected and been a pretty good congressman for the stuff that I was interested in, which was environmental stuff. We’d helped stop acid rain in the Wind River Mountains and passed the Wyoming Wilderness Act together and worked out a lot of the necessary compromises. He fished on my ranch and…we were co-conspirators.

But then he got into this obsession with the Russians and this conviction that we had a clash of cultures that had to be resolved by whatever means, and so he helped base the MX Missile in Wyoming. The original idea of the MX Missile was that it was a second-strike, retaliatory weapon that could not be taken out by a first strike because it would be running around on a vast railroad system kind of like a gigantic shell game, so the Russians wouldn’t know where the MX’s were. And the MX itself is an extremely destructive instrument. It has ten warheads, each one of which delivers 550 kilotons of explosive energy. And just for purposes of comparison, the bomb that completely leveled Hiroshima and took out half a million people in a second had only seventeen kilotons to give you some idea. So you can to the math. That’s just one missile. And the plan was to base 100 of them. And Dick was instrumental in seeing to it that they were not based in the original basing formula, which made them explicitly second strike, but that they were basically first strike weapons. They were completely naked and stationary and they were all put on launch on warning. And had all of those missiles gone, because some cloud of geese flew over a radar in Greenland, that would’ve been the end of all like on the planet. And I got so freaked out that somebody was so determined to win a political battle that he was literally willing to endanger all the life on planet Earth, that I felt like I had to say something…so I wrote that song. And like I say, I owe Dick a lot for that song.

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

I'm still digesting "Dick Cheney... who I’d help get elected"....

[Hux]

The whole interview

[MoMack]

Barlow is a weird political guy.

Very Republican to my understanding - but the EFF is pretty left wing I thought?

[paisley]

cool, interesting stuff

did we ever hear more on if Bob and Mickey went to that seance-like political meeting in the woods that all the right wing big wigs go to?

Edited July 29, 2005 by Guest

[MoMack]

AD: Other bands that picked up where the Dead left off, like Phish and Widespread Panic and String Cheese, what do you think about the culture…?

JPB: It’s become a little culture and its very diverse and it’s exactly what we would want it to be, but for a while it was just Phish…and I never did get Phish I gotta be honest with you, except that it seemed like a good place for Deadheads that wouldn’t say die to go, and they wanted to go on getting stoned at a concert.

[M.O.B.E]

AD: What do you think is the psychology of people that like to travel around with bands?

JPB: In America, you don’t have a quest. Everybody needs a quest. Going off on the road with no more responsible purpose than a desire to dance a lot and have a good time with your friends and have no resources outside of a micro bus, its turns into a vision quest. It fills a very important role for a lot of people I think

America was the last quest...what did they expect us to do once we got here??...bound to cover just a little more ground!

Edited July 30, 2005 by Guest