Watch: Bill Walton Gave Three Minutes to Bob Dylan & Grateful Dead During a College Basketball Game

[Esau.]

http://www.relix.com/blogs/detail/watch_bill_walton_gave_three_minutes_to_bob_dylan_and_grateful_dead_during_a_college_basketball_game

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last night during the Oregon-USC college basketball game, Bill Walton took a moment to reach something now known as Peak Bill Walton, as the former NBAer and Grateful Dead fan dished for three minutes on Bob Dylan and the Dead. It got so in-depth, in fact, that the ESPN producers whipped up a graphic on Dylan as Walton recounted his speech at the MusiCares Person of the Year Award and reciting lyrics from Dylan's latest record,Shadows of the Night.

 

The beauty of all of this is that during the rant, Walton would occasionally try to call the game, which lead to hilariously out-of-context quotes like, "This is about Nelson Mandela, Bob Dylan, Bill Russell, Thomas Edison, the light is on. Throw it down, Snoop Dogg!" Snoop Dogg refers to Oregon's Dwayne Benjamin, who he dubbed Snoop Dogg earlier in the game.

 

And of course, the conversation landed on the band we all associate Walton with--Grateful Dead. He reminisced about a 1989 show at the Great Western Forum in Los Angeles where Dylan took over vocals for Bob Weir after the guitarist forgot the words to "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again."

 

Walton's play-by-play announcer, Dave Pasch, provided a comical counterpoint to the ranting superfan. At one point Pasch says, "This is how bad it's gotten. We're building full-page graphics on musicians." To which Walton responds, "You've got the equation wrong, that's how good it's gotten." Again: Peak Walton. Poor Dave Pasch just wanted to call a basketball game.