American Beauty 50, Episode 10: Truckin’

Summary

GOOD OL’ GRATEFUL DEADCAST

American Beauty 50, Episode 10: Truckin’

Date: December 10, 2020
Hosts: Rich Mahan & Jesse Jarnow
Featured Voices: Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Robert Hunter, David Lemieux, Gary Lambert, Stephen Barncard, and others

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Overview

This episode of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast wraps up the podcast’s track-by-track exploration of the Grateful Dead’s legendary album American Beauty with “Truckin’,” exploring the song’s creation, stories from the road, studio sessions, lyrical deep dives, and its evolution into one of the Dead’s most iconic and culturally resonant tunes. The episode is rich with archival interviews, behind-the-scenes stories, musical analysis, cultural context, and candid Dead humor.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. “Truckin’” as a Grateful Dead Anthem

• [03:34] David Lemieux: The song became central to the Dead experience, a rare co-write among Garcia, Weir, Lesh, and Hunter, and was among the most recognized in their catalog.
• [04:06] Gary Lambert: “It had that tremendous locomotion to it… it could open a show, it could morph into the Other One, it could fulfill a lot of purposes… it remains just exhilarating to hear.”

2. Etymology & Cultural History of “Truckin’”

• [06:58–09:52] The word and concept of “truckin’” predates the Dead, tracing back to Harlem dance crazes, 1930s blues (“Keep on Truckin’”), and even comics (R. Crumb’s Zap Comix).
• Blind Boy Fuller’s 1936 “Truckin’ My Blues Away” and 1920s Duke Ellington orchestra are cited as forerunners.

3. Origins and Songwriting Process

• [10:46] Bob Weir: Hunter traveled with the band to absorb experiences for the lyrics, making “Truckin’” a mostly autobiographical road song.
• [11:33] Robert Hunter (WLIR 1978 Interview): “I wrote that verse to verse pretty much on the road. A few lines about Texas, I wrote down in Dallas and I wrote down the verses about Buffalo up in Buffalo.”
• [31:02] Bob Weir: The music was shaped poolside in Florida, collaboratively by Garcia, Weir, Lesh, with Hunter bringing finished lyrics.

4. Lyric & Musical Deep Dives

• Tongue Twisters & Delivery:
  • [14:21] Bob Weir: “Jerry wanted me to sing it… do a sort of a Chuck Berry delivery, because the words came fast. Try saying ‘arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street’ over and over real fast. It's all tongue twisters… Hunter’s way of having sport with us.”
• Lyrical References:
  • “Dallas got a soft machine” – likely a nod to William S. Burroughs, not the band.
  • “Busted down on Bourbon Street” – a direct recounting of the New Orleans drug bust (detailed at [26:06–29:54]).
  • “What a long, strange trip it’s been” – now part of the cultural lexicon.
    • [23:13] Gary Lambert: “Even from those of us whose job is to promote and protect the legacy, that line is out there… it's quite remarkable to know how ubiquitous that song is in popular culture.”

5. Recording the Studio Version

• [37:19] David Lemieux: The song came alive in the studio, with a powerful bassline (Phil Lesh) and driving rhythm. Alternate mixes reveal intriguing outtakes, overdubs (Howard Wales’s Hammond organ), and playful moments (possible use of cap guns in the studio).
• [43:47] David Lemieux & [43:50] Stephen Barncard: The original jam would dissolve into improv or another tune (“Frozen Logger”), which never made it to the final fade-out version.

6. Art & Visuals

• [56:04] The American Beauty cover art, crafted by Alton Kelly, incorporates intentional doubly readable lettering (“Beauty”/“Reality”), echoing the layered nature of the band’s music and mythos.
• Planned back cover photo of the band with guns was nixed by Hunter for its connotations.

7. Release, Chart Performance, and Aftermath

• [62:16] Gary Lambert: Reminisces about the anticipation and excitement for American Beauty in NYC as it dropped.
• [66:44] The process of tracking live shows at the Capitol Theatre for what would become the Skull & Roses live album began before American Beauty was even out.
• [73:13] David Lemieux: The single edit reached #64 on Billboard (“Truckin’ by the Grateful Dead is rising from the Dead’s American Beauty album on Warners…” – Billboard ad).

8. Evolution as a Live Jam

• [74:44] Jerry Garcia: Hunter intended “Truckin’” as a “continuing chronology,” adding verses as the band’s story unfolded — some new verses emerged but remained mostly in Hunter’s solo sets post-1978.
• The song’s jams, particularly in the Europe ‘72 and 1973/74 tours, launched into new territory and became a key moment for audience unity.
• [82:13] Gary Lambert: Describes the collective experience and euphoria of 17,000 fists in the air at MSG: “Truckin’ was the one guaranteed way to make that happen. And it wasn’t gimmicky at all.”

9. Cultural Impact and Cover Versions

• [83:04] “What a long, strange trip it’s been” becomes embedded in popular media far beyond the Dead, reportedly used even by Howard Cosell on ABC Sports.
• The song is covered in many genres — punk, country (Dwight Yoakam), lullaby, and by the Dead’s own later configurations (e.g., Fare Thee Well 2015).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jerry Garcia [03:43]: “Come on, man. Play Truckin. Play Truckin. We’ll play whatever we like.”
• Bob Weir [10:46]: “It was more or less an autobiographical account of nameless, faceless Grateful Dead band member in their travels and travails of life.”
• Robert Hunter [19:05]: “Sometimes the light’s all shining on me / Other times I can barely see.”
• Gary Lambert [23:13]: “At this point, that line (‘what a long, strange trip it’s been’) is in the public domain.”
• Jerry Garcia [29:36]: “[New Orleans bust] It was a trauma, but it was also when it happened, it was funny ... but never, never life threatening, you know what I mean?”
• Stephen Barncard [43:50]: “My outtake of Truckin’. It goes on and they go into some other tune and... it just ends up in a heap.”

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:14] – Lyrical introduction: “You’re sick of hanging around and you like to travel…”
• [04:41] – Explaining “Truckin’s” flexibility in live sets
• [10:46] – Bob Weir & Hunter on writing “Truckin’”
• [14:21] – Weir on “Chuck Berry delivery” & lyrical tongue-twisters
• [19:05] – “Sometimes the light’s all shining on me…”
• [23:32] – The enigma of “Sweet Jane”; influence of 1940s ad jingles
• [26:06–29:54] – The New Orleans bust: foundational to the “Truckin’” lore
• [31:02] – Poolside songwriting session: collaborative creation
• [34:25] – Early acoustic version with Pigpen
• [37:19] – Studio experimentation and Howard Wales’s organ
• [43:47] – Frozen Logger coda and goofing in the studio
• [56:04] – Creating the album artwork and scrapping the gun photo
• [66:44] – Birth of Skull & Roses live taping
• [73:13] – Single edit and chart performance
• [74:44] – Hunter’s notion of a “continuing chronology”
• [82:13] – Ultimate live audience experience (MSG, 1980s)
• [83:04] – “What a long, strange trip it’s been” entering pop culture

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The Enduring Legacy

• “Truckin’” grew from a specific, autobiographical road song into a communal anthem, a vehicle for improvisation and catharsis, and a phrase (“What a long, strange trip it’s been”) that has become uncoupled from the band to live in the world.
• Covers, adaptations, and references are legion, and the spirit of the track still brings Deadheads — and non-Deadheads — together for a shared moment.
• Gary Lambert [83:59]: “To this day you hear ‘what a long, strange trip it’s been’… It's applicable to good things and bad... It works... this year, 2020, is a year for reflection, if nothing else, but I think that this song, this album, will be able to have that relevance for 50 more years.”

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Conclusion

This episode not only chronicles the creation and cultural ascendance of “Truckin’” but also explores how a single song can encapsulate the ethos of a band, the shifting tides of American culture, and the enduring power of music as living, changing communal art. The spirit of the Grateful Dead, as captured in “Truckin’,” continues to inspire and bring people together across time and space.

Transcript

[Rich Mahan]

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[Robert Hunter]

Foreign.

[Rich Mahan]

The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful.

[Stephen Barncard]

Dead for the committed and the curious.

[Rich Mahan]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast. Thanks very much for tuning in. Thanks for taking this trip with us as we wrap up season two and our track by track exploration into the Dead's wonderfully fantastic American Beauty. It's been a long, strange trip. What a way to wrap it up. Going long on the last track on side two, Truckin. Want some cool visuals to go along with this auditory trip? Of course you do. Drop into our website dead.netdeadcast and check out the extras we have waiting for you to explore for this and each episode. While you're there, catch up on the episodes from season one, which goes track by track through Working Man's Dead. You can link from there to any and all of the podcasting platforms available, so you can listen where you like to listen. Please help us by subscribing hitting that like button. Leave us a review. Tell a friend, Call your mom. Thank you very much. It is the 50th anniversary of American Beauty and the Grateful Dead have prepared a 3 CD set reissue of this classic album, which includes a pristine remastering of the album's 10 tracks tracks as well as an unreleased live show from February 18, 1971 at the Capitol Theater was mixed from the original 16 track reel to reel multitracks and you'll hear more about that in this episode at Bob Weir's Tri Studios. Along with this impeccably remastered three disc set, there's also a new batch of Angel Share audio. It's out now and it not only includes the band's acoustic demos for American Beauty, but but it also has all these great outtakes from the American Beauty recording sessions at Wally Hider so you get to hear the band as they were laying it down developing the songs. Be sure to check out the Angel Share American Beauty at your favorite streaming service or download provider. Well, if there's one song in the Grateful Dead's vast repertoire that sums up their experience. It's gotta be Truckin'. Lyrically, it delivers and tells the story of the band on the road. But it also became a canvas for the boys to go off the deep end and really paint some incredible jams. Get ready to go inside the story of its creation, really find out where it came from and learn about the intricacies that shaped it into the classic that we all know and love. Can you dig it? I knew you could, Jesse.

[Robert Hunter]

You're sick of hanging around and you like to travel. Get tired of traveling. You like to settle down.

[David Lemieux]

The Grateful Dead didn't have a genuine top 10 hit until Touch of Gray in 1987, but there were definitely songs people really, really wanted to hear.

[Jerry Garcia]

Come on, man. Come on, man. You gotta be a cop. Is that it? Play Truckin. Play Truckin. We'll play whatever we like.

[David Lemieux]

That was an unusually punchy Jerry Garcia On October 30, 1971, in Cincinnati, almost exactly a year after the release of American Beauty, where Truckin closed the classic album, Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager.

[Gary Lambert]

David Lemieux the ubiquitous Truckin. It's the song that my mom definitely not a Deadhead. She knows two Grateful Dead songs, and she knows Tennessee Jed. I don't know why, I don't know why. She likes it. I like it. And Truckin, it's right on the nose. It's like rock and roll. And it's a story of a band on the road, and anybody can hear it and love it.

[David Lemieux]

It was a song that everybody knew and maybe still knows, but it was also a song that remained central to Grateful Dead performances and the Dead experience, Shakedown Stream and Tales from the Golden Road co host Gary Lambert.

[Gary Lambert]

It had that tremendous locomotion to it, that power to it worked in just about every setting. You know, it could open a show, it could open a second set. You know, it could morph into the other one. It could fulfill a lot of purposes, you know. Of course, it becomes a launching pad for a great abstract jamming sequence on €72. It fulfilled just about every purpose, and it remains just exhilarating to hear when one of the extensions of the band played like the story is still ongoing.

[David Lemieux]

Of course, Truckin was sort of a hit, as Bob Weir reminded the London audience the following spring, before the band launched into the version that would go on to Europe. 72.

[Jerry Garcia]

Of course, by now, I need to tell you that this next number rose straight to the top of the charts in Sherlock, California.

[Robert Hunter]

Numero uno, and stayed.

[Jerry Garcia]

There for a week or two. They loved us in Turlock and we love them for them.

[David Lemieux]

Hey, who wouldn't want to hear trucking? Truckin was perhaps the Grateful Dead's biggest boogie, featuring some of Robert Hunter's most famous lyrics, a rare songwriting collaboration between Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir, and an autobiographical road song for the world's most famous road band. It made for huge fun, with huge peaks and the potential for an even huger jam. But there's a lotta road to truck before getting to versions that sounded anything like Europe. 72 before we go any further, a brief word from Phil Lesh from September 28, 1975 in Golden Gate Park. The correct pronunciation of this tassoon is truckin. The Grateful Dead didn't invent the term truckin', and in fact, truckin wasn't the first time the word appeared in a Grateful Bed song. That was Cosmic Charlie, recorded February 27, 1969 at the Fillmore west and released on the Fillmore West Complete Recordings box set. The term truckin had come into widespread countercultural usage the year before, in 1968, via the debut issue of the underground publication Zap Comics. That's comics with an X, distributed by cartoonist R. Crumb from a baby carriage in San Francisco's Haight Ashbury. In that first issue, Crumb drew a full page sequence under the title Keep On Truckin', depicting various men doing exaggerated high steps and set to the lyrics of this song.

[Jerry Garcia]

I got a gal she's little and.

[Robert Hunter]

Neat when she starts trucking man is.

[Jerry Garcia]

So sweet Keep on trucking my mama Trucking my bruise away Trucking my bruise.

[Robert Hunter]

Away Keep on trucking, baby Trucking my bruise away yeah keep on trucking baby.

[David Lemieux]

Chucking my blues away that was Blind Boy Fuller's 1936 recording Truckin My Blues Away, released as a 78 RPM record as the B side to Baby Got to Do Better by the Conqueror label. But that's not quite where trucking comes from either. Here's Ivy Anderson and the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

[Robert Hunter]

We had to have something new, a.

[Jerry Garcia]

Dance to do up here in Harlem.

[Robert Hunter]

So someone started trucking as soon as.

[Jerry Garcia]

The news got drowned. The folks downtown came up to Harlem, saw everybody trucking. It didn't take long before the hi hats were doing it. Hawk, Ava doing it all over town you'd see them scuffle and shuffling truck along. It spread like forest blaze, became a craze. And thanks to Harlem, now everybody's truckin.

[David Lemieux]

Truckin was a dance craze, a black dance craze that emerged in Harlem in the 1920s with complex roots that might stretch back as far as minstrel shows. If you're a Lindy Hopper and I admit I am not, it's a move that still gets used to the well annotated site swingstreet.com defines truckin as mainly a shuffle rhythm, slightly pigeon toned that is not really a dance but a variation. Truckin is mainly used in Lindy Hop today after separating from your partner to return back together again. The main feature of truckin is the shoulders, which rise and fall as the dancers move toward each other while the forefinger points up and wiggles back and forth like a windshield wiper. It signifies the strutting walk done when one is happy or joyful. The Dead weren't quite the first to go from the dance move to blues rocking down the highway though.

[Robert Hunter]

I'm truckin battery I gotta ride out of Santa Lucia A motorcycle on the rooftop it's full of rocks and Mexican gas, Mexican gas trucks.

[David Lemieux]

That was spirit with I'm truckin from 1969. No relation, but from the moment Arkron brought it back, it was in the air like Casey Jones and the Candyman. The Dead were updating an old meme, but Hunter, Garcia, Weir and Loesch were doing a lot more than that. After all, truckin is just the first word of the song. In early 1970, just as the Grateful Dead were finishing up the basic recording of Working Man's Dead, Robert Hunter announced that the band needed a road song and in order to write it, he would need to go on the road.

[Bob Weir]

Robert Hunter used to travel with us more often than not, just to hang with the guys and be part of the experience and get his nose right up in our business out there on the road. It was more or less autobiographical account of nameless, faceless Grateful Dead band member in their travels and travails of life.

[David Lemieux]

On the road in the 70s. An interviewer commented that his lyrics relate to topics deeper than the Grateful Dead. Hunter noted, some of it relates to the Dead, some of it only relates to me, some of it to horrible attitudes, good attitudes, whatever. It's not specifically Grateful Dead in the sense that Truckin is or something like that. That song is legitimately about the Dead. Here's Hunter Speaking with WLIR in 1978.

[Jerry Garcia]

I wrote that verse to verse pretty much on the road. And look, I wrote the verses, a few lines about Texas, I wrote down in Dallas and I wrote down the Verses about Buffalo up in Buffalo.

[David Lemieux]

It's not quite chronological, so let's go through Truckin with the American Beauty version, available in pristine remastered form at a physical or virtual purveyor of recorded music near you.

[Robert Hunter]

Trucking Got my chips cashed in Keep trucking like the Do Dah Man.

[David Lemieux]

First question who is the Do Dah Man? To answer that, we refer to the indispensable book Skeleton Key, A Dictionary for Deadheads by Steve Silberman and David Schenck, and specifically page 321 under the entry who is the Duda Man? Before I read the pertinent line, I'll note that the Doo dah man really is still whoever you want them to be, because this answer also adds some complications. Here's how Hunter answered the question. Oh, that's just from that song Camp Down Races. That goes doo dah doo dah. I wasn't thinking about anybody in particular, just that gambler on his way home from the game with a pocket full of tin. That song Camp Down Races is by Stephen Foster, originally written for use specifically in racist minstrel shows, and an enormous hit that resonated across culture. Here's Abner J singing the verse in question from Abner J sings and plays Stephen Foster's favorites.

[Robert Hunter]

Camptown Ladies sing this song Doo doo doo doo Camptown track is five mile long Doo doo day Come down here with my hat caving Doo doo doo doo whine back home with a pocket.

[Jerry Garcia]

Full of tins all through the day.

[Robert Hunter]

Wind around all night Wind to run all day I bet my money on the bob tail neck Somebody bet on.

[David Lemieux]

The bed do that indeed. I love that lyric a lot. Together, more or less in line. I think it sums up the entire Grateful Dead mission in six collective anti authoritarianism trucking together with something less than utter military precision, but still a unified sense of purpose.

[Robert Hunter]

Arrows of neon and flashing marquis out on Main Street Chicago, New York, Detroit and it's all in the same street. Your typical city involved in a typical daydream Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings.

[Bob Weir]

I ended up singing it and Jerry wanted me to sing it. Kind of like do a sort of a Chuck Berry delivery, because the words came fast. And the thing about, you know, Arizona, oh shit, I can't do it right now. Arizona and flashing marquis out on Main Street. Try saying that over and over real fast. It's all tongue twisters for some reason, I think it was. My guess is it was Hunter's way of having sport with us. But I got so I could spit it out.

[Stephen Barncard]

I'll bet you can't.

[David Lemieux]

One good reason for the Chuck Berry delivery was perhaps the song's subtle nod to the time honored Chuck Berry's strategy of name dropping the names of cities for big cheers and regional airplay. The Dead were well familiar with Chuck Berry's the Promised Land, having performed it in their early years.

[Robert Hunter]

Dallas got a Soft Machine, almost certainly.

[David Lemieux]

A reference to the 1961 William S. Burroughs novel the Soft Machine, in which Burroughs uses the soft machine as a metaphor for the human body. There's only one reference to Dallas in there, but this is a family podcast. There's an outside chance that it's a reference to Soft Machine, the great Weirdo Canterbury progressive rock band, but probably not. Seems they only played Dallas in 1968 and the dead didn't cross paths with them there. In his lyrics collection A Box of Rain, Hunter doesn't capitalize the phrase, so it might not be a reference to either Burroughs or the band. Others have tried to place the lyric in the continuum of frozen drinks Houston.

[Robert Hunter]

Too close to New Orleans we'll circle.

[David Lemieux]

Back to New Orleans, but here's what Robert Hunter wrote in his online journal about Houston in 1996 I remember playing Houston in 69 or 70. Cops in battle gear swarmed the stage to pull the plug. The college gig was supposed to end at 5pm and it was 5:01. Rex Jackson met them on the stairs to the stage, ready to fight. The band stopped playing to keep Rex from landing in jail on an assault charge. That's the incident which caused me to give short shift to Houston in Truckin, in case you wondered. Turns out that of the Dead's gigs in Houston in 69 and 70 both featured prominent appearances by the Houston Police Department. The October 69 show, in which the Dead played before the Jefferson Airplane, seemed to run on more usual rock hours. The February 1970 show, on the other hand, in which the Dead closed following Quicksilver. Messenger Service more closely follows Hunter's description. This is from the local underground newspaper the Megaphone. When Quicksilver finished and the lights were up, the police imposed their order on the thousands of people who sensed the lameness of that order. With a little pushing and shoving, everyone was put back in their proper place. When it looked like all was calm and quiet, out came the Dead. Those pioneers who just won't quit pushing for something new, something bigger than life, and to try and deliver their fantasy in a barn with 20 policemen in every aisle and any semblance of freedom completely lacking is impossible. Like all good outlaws they tried to get it on, but just couldn't find the spark. The Grateful Dead first played in New York in June 1967, and over the next three years especially, it became almost as much a second home as a Tour stop. In 1970, as the dead were making Working Man's Dead and American Beauty, the band played at least two shows in Manhattan or a very close drive in every month. But April, August and December, New York had a very particular energy and audience, and the Dead were there for it. New York is where the Dead found their most enthusiastic freaks. Very real ways and means to success. Gary Lambert if you were a Deadhead.

[Gary Lambert]

In New York, you were one lucky bastard. Because they played the New York area so many times in 1970. I'm a little vague on whether I saw every show in a given run, but my estimate is I saw between 34 and 37 shows in 1970 and. And I only had to go outside a 90 minute radius of New York twice. Once to Middletown, Connecticut, and the last day of the year, flying out to Winterland for the New Year's show. Other than that, it was all Fillmore east or Capitol or Stony Brook, you know, like things on the fringes of Town. The 46th Street Rock palace in Brooklyn and all that. So it was an absolute feast to be a Deadhead in the New York metropolitan area.

[David Lemieux]

We'll take this next section one part at a time.

[Robert Hunter]

Sometimes the light's all shining on me Other times I can barely see.

[David Lemieux]

Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, the Jix and other bands digs this section of Truckin'.

[Jerry Garcia]

I really like the chorus. Well, where it starts. Sometimes I feel that shining on me do this. They're back into the blues. Like those whole sections, I just think they're super clever. I don't know who came up with that, who made those.

[David Lemieux]

Hunter told David Brown. Sometimes the light's all shining on me I think that's. Phil Garcia discussed that lyric in 1971 in the Long Rolling Stone interview that became the book A signpost to new space. He said, you can see it happen if you hang around backstage. If you go to a concert, you see there's the onstage part with the bright lights, the show, loud music, people screaming, all that stuff happening. And then you're backstage between sets and there's all kinds of milling crowds and people going, hey, man, hey man. Stuff coming at you and weird shit, and you're having to duck and get out of the way and lie and talk fast, all these things. To just be able to preserve a little Composure just so you don't have to be constantly putting out. That's just a way of saying that thing. I mean, it's a beautiful way of saying it. Okay, everybody get ready to cheer.

[Jerry Garcia]

And then it goes up a couple steps and just the whole way that's done. I mean, it just shows me that this is a, like, serious band or something, you know, I like Simple Credence blues rock, but to me, that is, like, so clever the way that goes. Just as a music fan, I just like, could be any band playing it and I'd be like, that part. I wish I had a part like that.

[Robert Hunter]

Strange ship, it's me.

[David Lemieux]

Is it Robert Hunter's most famous lyric? Possibly. Plenty of people have pointed out that the Dead had only been a band for about five years when they sang this line, though Hunter has clarified this didn't only refer to the GD, but to the 10 years of bluegrass, old timey and jug band configurations leading up to the rock and roll departure. I have no issue with any of the math, and I think if this year has taught us anything, it's that Robert Hunter's conception of time was highly advanced. Robert Hunter was once offended when somebody suggested that his use of the phrase was a cliche. Aren't you putting the cart before the horse? He wrote. Trotun was the originating vehicle of the phrase, which had, not to my knowledge, been coined before. The fact that it has entered the catchphrase banks of the language in a ubiquitous way may render subsequent usage cliched. But surely not the invention itself, unless all widely adopted phrases are deemed trite by the virtue of their durability. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux we get.

[Gary Lambert]

A lot of merchandise submissions from licensees that will have lyrics, and we don't allow that. It's just. It's part of. I mean, we just. It's not even allow. It's a legal thing, too, and getting permission's hard, so we've never allowed it. And I remember calling Alan Trist once because it wasn't anything offensive or anything it might have even been. We were using it as a headline for a Grateful Dead news story or something like that. It wasn't anything commercially crass or anything, but we wanted to use the term, what a long, strange trip it's been. And I called Alan about a decade ago and I said, and Alan Trist, for those who don't know, has been with the dead since 1965. He's known Jerry and Hunter and those guys since 1960. 61. He's been around a long time, and he's a wonderful human being. And he ran the Grateful Dead Publishing Company for a long time, Ice 9 Publishing. So he'd be my go to because he would be kind of the direct line for a question that would ultimately be Hunter's question. And I said, hey, can we use this? What a long strength trip it's been. I know that we don't usually use lyrics for things. And he said, man, he said, at this point, that line is in the public domain. And he goes, go ahead and use it. And now, certainly that was not a legal opinion and that's not a blanket statement, but it just goes to show that even from those of us whose job is to not only promote the Grateful Dead, but also protect the legacy that line is out there. What a long, strange trip it's been. We've all seen it a thousand and one times. It's quite remarkable to know how ubiquitous that song is in popular culture.

[David Lemieux]

For more about Alan Trist, you can listen to our episode about Broke down palace, which features a long conversation with Alan. It escaped into popular culture quickly. We won't even try to trace out all the variations that have appeared over the years. But from a line about pop culture impending, we move swiftly to a line sourcing from pop culture almost entirely forgotten.

[Robert Hunter]

What in the world ever became a Sweet Jane she lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same Living on reds Vitamin C and cocaine All a friend can say is any the shame.

[Jerry Garcia]

The thing about Sweet Jane I don't know what those lyrics are about or if, you know, they're not about the Velvet Underground, I imagine, or it's not the actual Sweet Jane from New York Trans Velvet. It's just a woman that Like a all American girl that got messed up. Or is it a person that they know? Or is it just an archetype?

[David Lemieux]

It's fascinating that in the summer of 1970, almost exactly at the same time that the Dead were recording American Beauty, Lou Reed was making his swan song with the Velvet Underground. Also formerly the Warlocks and Loaded would feature their own classic Sweet Jane. Hunter wrote that the intention was a parody of the 40s warning style of singing commercial specifically, poor Millicent, Poor Millicent she never used Pepsodent her smile grew dim and she lost her vim so folks, don't be like Millicent, use Pepsodent. I found some print versions of the Millicent campaign. Poor Millicent, Poor Millicent, Poor. No film removing Pepsodent. Her teeth don't rate, she has no date. The audio version doesn't seem to be out there, though. If anybody has a copy of the My Friend Erma Christmas Special aired 1225, 1950 and sponsored by Pepsodent. Get in touch and we can trade tapes. Here's as close as we could get.

[Robert Hunter]

Hey, hey, Susie Q.

[Gary Lambert]

What's cooking with you?

[Jerry Garcia]

Your teeth look whiter than no, no, no, my teeth are new, but my toothpaste is new. Pepsodent.

[David Lemieux]

Get with it, kid, concluded Hunter. It's perhaps an in joke, but not one meant for private consumption, just a bit of black humor that fails to fire and emerges instead as an enigma. The Dead made their Buffalo debut on March 17, 1970, most likely the first night of Robert Hunter's research tour for Truckin and one of the most infamous unrecorded shows in Grateful Dead history, in which the Dead jammed with the Buffalo Philharmonic, conducted by Lucas Voss. There are lots of newspaper reports and first person accounts of the show, though we've posted a [e-mail] deadcast and of.

[Robert Hunter]

Course, busted down on Bourbon Street Sit up like a falling pen Knock down It gets to where it ends it just won't let you be.

[David Lemieux]

The ancient city of New Orleans, always young in.

[Rich Mahan]

Spirit, hoops it up for Mardi Gras, the annual bash that precedes the austere days of Lent. Carnival is king.

[David Lemieux]

The Grateful Dead arrived in New Orleans in late January 1970, right during the heart of carnival season. Local heads were opening a new club, the Warehouse, and like the underground ambassadors they were the Dead were tapped to play opening weekend along with the up and coming British blues band Fleetwood Mac. As Alison Fensterstock explains in her well reported piece Bust Fun Babies, which we've linked to on this episode's page, the it was the first carnival season following the wild success of the 1969 film Easy Rider, and the city was overrun by hippies. As guests of honor in the town's new hippie venue, the Dead made an easy target, and so after warning the hotel, the cops came for the band after their first night at the Royal Sonesta Hotel, 300 Bourbon St. Bob Weir and John McIntyre were the party hosts in room 2186 when the door lock clicked and and at least 10 detective agents started rounding up the partiers, which included local friends of the band plus Weir, Bill Kreutzman, Mickey Hart, Phil Lesh, Owsley, Stanley Ramrod, Rex Jackson and more. Thanks to Allison Fensterstock and the vigilance of a local librarian, we can now see the full 45 page police report of the Dead's bust. We've linked to [e-mail] deadcast. Jerry Garcia was out raving with some locals, as he put it, in 1988 and missed the initial raid.

[Jerry Garcia]

About 4 in the morning, or 5, maybe, went back to the hotel. And I'm walking down the corridor to the hotel with my guitar. I noticed that on our floor, about every other door is open, the lights are turned on, and nobody's around. You know, this is peculiar in the middle of night. So I come, I'm coming up to my room and I notice the door to my room is open. Hey, you know, and I go walking past my room and I look in and there's a couple of guys going through my suitcase case in my room. Oh, God. I knew right away. Oh. So I continue walking, you know, hold.

[David Lemieux]

On to that image for a moment. Jerry Garcia In 1970, looking very close to what Thoughts on the Dead calls full Muppet, trying to nonchalantly walk past the cops and down the hall with his guitar at four in the morning. Down at the station, somehow Bob Weir managed to handcuff a police officer to a desk with his own handcuffs. And for reasons that we're not totally sure about, and perhaps we'll ask Mickey about in the future, once he shed his army coat, Mickey's only form of identification was a card that named him as Summer Wind Spiritual Advisor. So that's who was booked.

[Jerry Garcia]

This guy comes out of my room and comes. I look back down the hall and here's this guy leaning out of the room, beckoning. Hey, you come back here. So they took me down to where everybody else was, which was in jail. And there's everybody. I come walk into the screen squadron and there's everybody in the. Everybody in our scene sitting on the floor, you know, hey, Garcia. Hey, man, join the crowd. You know, that was it. You know, we were all busted. We were all nailed. They had great fun with us, too, I might say, I might add, too. The Southern cops, you know, they had a lot of fun with us. They had just what they wanted. Hippies, you know. Oh, boy.

[David Lemieux]

Here's how Jerry remembered it. To former Warner Brothers executive Joe Smith, also in 1988.

[Jerry Garcia]

It was a trauma, but it was also when it happened, it was funny when dealing with it in the aftermath was unpleasant, but never, never life threatening, you know what I mean? As Louis we played one of the best shows of our lives that night. Boy, we had a great time.

[David Lemieux]

The Dead didn't play New Orleans again for a Decade. The only real trauma still felt now is that the arrest violated the terms of Owsley Stanley's parole, and he was subsequently confined to California. Unable to make tapes of the Grateful Dead on the road. Robert Hunter wasn't around for the bust, but for obvious reasons, it became an instant part of the Grateful Dead's lore, a celebration rather than a setback, which is an important point. Instead of feeling shamed, it became a point of pride, one more rock and roll rite of passage. It helped that Warner Brothers assisted in getting the band out of jail, allegedly with a donation to the reelection campaign of New Orleans DA Jim Back into the left, Garrison. Which brings us up to the writing of Truckin. Almost exactly two months later to the day. It was the end of Robert Hunter's first tour with the Dead, a one and a half week jaunt down the east coast that began in Buffalo, hit the Capitol Theater in Portchester and then headed south.

[Bob Weir]

I remember we sat down, Jerry and I and Phil, on the diving board in a motel that we were staying at somewhere in South Florida for some festival. We were playing there and we had a day off.

[David Lemieux]

The band had a pair of shows at a pirate themed amusement park and then a few days off before what would have been presumably the money gig, the infamous Winter's End festival in Miami. It had a pretty stacked lineup. A few bands played, but not the Dead. They did get some poolside time, though. Hunter told relics in 1986, when we were in Florida, I went outside and everybody was sitting around the swimming pool. I had finally finished the lyrics, so I brought them down and the boys picked up their guitars and sat down and wrote some rock and roll changes behind it.

[Bob Weir]

We had an afternoon off, I guess. I think we were playing that evening. We were all out by the pool. So, you know, Jerry had this page of lyrics and let's, let's kick this around. Let's make a song out of it. And so we kicked it back and.

[David Lemieux]

Forth, Garcia said in 1988. Truckin was one of those songs that was fun to write, and it was because it kind of wrote itself. You know, we all wrote this song, really. We all took part in the writing of this song, just in terms of bits and pieces and hunks of it. It's really a joint grateful led effort. Another time, though, in the 1971 interview, published in book form as a signpost to new space, Garcia had a different and almost opposite perspective. Truckin is a song that we assembled, he said, the year after the song's composition. It wasn't natural and it didn't flow and it wasn't easy and we really labored over the bastard, all of us together in the band's archives at UC Santa Cruz is a page of typewritten lyrics for Truckin on yellow lined paper. It shows some signs of laboring. The verses that begin with the song's title or another two syllable word are all there and in order with the words mostly exactly as we know them. But then the fast spitting in between verses that Weir sings are all handwritten with circles and arrows and numbers indicating where they go. It does look complicated. We've posted an image dead.net deadcast Like.

[Bob Weir]

I say, I got so I could spit it out. It took a lot of pract. I think Jerry and Phil might have tried it and that's how I ended up singing it, because I could somehow sing it.

[David Lemieux]

There's one extra verse on the original sheet too, crossed out in what looks like pencil Lightly Truckin like the doo dah man once said, got to get your head together more or less in line and just keep trucking on. As we've seen on Friend of the Devil in Ripple, Jerry Garcia's editorial hand was sometimes to Nick's Hunter's final verse. There are a few alternate lines in the lyric sheet too, alongside arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main street, it's arrows in me and flashing my keys out on Main Street. Funnily enough, in Skeleton Key, flashing my keys out on Main street is on their list of commonly misheard Dead lyrics under the entry for where's the Dark Star? I imagine the version in which the song is a little more labored is probably closer to correct. The poolside songwriting session was in the last days of March 1970, but truckin doesn't appear on tape until the summer. In fact, the version of Truckin on the Angel Share American Beauty is the earliest version on tape, recorded in early August 1970, almost certainly at Pacific High in San Francisco. The tape is missing a tiny bit, as you'll hear. It's not quite how it sounded around the pool. There are drums and Pigpen is playing piano, but it's got its own acoustic powered groove. Let's listen to a bit of this version of Truckin. It's got its own feel. Bob Weir definitely doesn't seem to be stumbling over the tongue twisting words here.

[Jerry Garcia]

Truckin'.

[Robert Hunter]

New York needs New York got the way to be Just won't let you be Most of the cats that.

[Stephen Barncard]

You meet on the street Be for.

[Robert Hunter]

True love Most of the time they're sitting and trying to One of these days sometime got sometime the lights are shining on me Other times I can never see they leave a cares to me what a living Long strange trip it's been what in the world ever became a sweet Jane she lost all her spir you know she isn't the same Living on reds and vitamin C and cocaine Working up above the lo Been thinking you got the mellow smoke.

[David Lemieux]

It'S definitely not the big choogling crowd pleaser it would become, but a bit more intimate. Probably still a crowd pleaser, though. I'd like to call attention one more time to Pigpen's piano playing here. He'd play an upright piano at both the Fillmores east and west in August and September, respectively. It's an unadorned but very real feeling piano style, just like Pig, and it fits in perfectly.

[Robert Hunter]

Get Back Trucking on.

[David Lemieux]

Which is how the song sounded when they got to Wally Hiders to record the final version with Steven Barncard and Acoustic Blues Boogie, Brian Kehue built an alternate mix of Truckin that you can hear on the new edition of the Angel Share American Beauty the tapes reveal a few curious surprises. Unfortunately, Brian's locked down in LA this week and can't be here to go through Truckin track by track, but I'll try to substitute to start Brian's rewound the tape a few seconds. What we hear are the few seconds preceding the master live take of the song, in which Phil is discussing how Weiter's gonna count it off. But we also hear a few seconds preceding one of the vocal overdubs, in which I think we hear Phil also addressing Weir with a little cackle from Jerry just as they're about to begin singing. Unless you weird Was Weir pointing a gun at Phil Lesh? It's hard to say from this remove. Stephen Barnard doesn't remember, but as Mickey Hart reminded us when we spoke to him for our bonus episode, there were definitely firearms around.

[Jerry Garcia]

You know, there's a lot of guns around, let us say in those days, those wild days, and people wanted to get to use their guns. So there was a big giant creek bed and we just started setting up, you know. Well, actually with symbols. Yeah, me and Billy set up some cymbals. That was the first targets and inside this little crater of a stream it was. You could really hear it just ring. So it was beautiful. But it also sounded like we were using, you know, giant weapons, but we were just using hunting rifles and shotguns and pistols and so forth.

[David Lemieux]

So it's not outside the question that the vocal overdub for Truckin began with a gun, or maybe just a toy cap gun getting cocked. Truckin is really a track that came alive in the studio. In some ways. It almost rocks way harder than you'd imagine in terms of what's on the basic tracks. Below the acoustic and electric boogie is a really rock steady bass line by Phil Lesh, especially by Phil Lesch standards. In all its full Steve Barncard enhanced double track fatness. And on top of it is lightning guitar by Jerry Garcia.

[Robert Hunter]

What in the world ever become? She lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same Living on reds Vitamin C and cocaine All a friend can.

[David Lemieux]

Say is any the shame the other element that makes Truckin sound huge is Howard Wales's overdubbed Hammond organ. Brian Kehue isolated some of Howard's organ track for us. Check out how cool it sounds. One great thing about the alternate mix of Truckin on the new edition of the angel share, you can hear Howard through the complete take. What Howard Wales adds to Truckin isn't volume, but freedom. In the same way that Jerry Garcia could solo conversationally, so could Howard Wales.

[Robert Hunter]

What in the world ever became a sweet J? She lost her spotlight, you know she wouldn't have seen Living on reds Vitamin C and cocaine. All a friend can say is anything shame Cooking up the buffer looking, thinking you got to mellow slow it takes time. You pick a place to go and just keep chucking on.

[Jerry Garcia]

I like trucking. There were certain aspects of it that if I were to do it again, it would have been a little different, but I thought the part was okay. It was just the fact I really didn't like was the. The technical aspect of this. I didn't like the sound of. I'm very picky about that. And that's. I mean, it is what it is, you know, and you know how it works, man. I could tell everybody that's not good tone. It wasn't unrivaled. You talk to people that listen to it and they say it's great, man. What are you talking about?

[David Lemieux]

But as Nigel Tufnell says, that's nitpicking, isn't it? Sorry. Howard, your organ sounds great. What are you talking about, man? On Candyman, both Howard Wales and Ned Lagin folded their unique instrumental voices into a restrained and beautiful song. On Truckin, Howard Wales is at pretty full flight. A cartoon organ for a cartoon song. He sounds especially great during the song's outro.

[Robert Hunter]

Sit down and patch my bones and get back Trucking.

[David Lemieux]

American Beauty engineer and co producer Stephen Barnard.

[Stephen Barncard]

My outtake of Trucking. It goes on and they go into some other tune and we're singing off key and his voice is cracking and everybody's kind of cracking up and it just ends up in a heap. And, you know, of course on the record it's a fade, but that's why it never didn't have an ending, so we just had to skip all that. And it goes on. The jam goes on for like another minute or something. It's kind of cool, actually.

[David Lemieux]

Brian Kehue's new alternate mix of Truckin preserves the Outro jam. You can hear that on the Angel Share American Beauty. Here's that, plus a little bit extra for the first time, the complete ending to Truckin' Truckin.

[Robert Hunter]

I'm going home Whoa, whoa, baby Back where I belong Sam.

[David Lemieux]

That song that Weir goes into there is the Frozen Lager. Weir and Lesh seem to enjoy playing it during tuning breaks. Here's a bit from October 22, 1971, on Dave's picks three.

[Jerry Garcia]

I see you are a logger and not know common bum but who else but a logger Would stir his coffee with his thumb?

[David Lemieux]

It's cute that they were goofing around with it in the studio, too, but listen to that ending again. There's another new instrument in the mix that we haven't heard elsewhere in Truckin. It comes in just as Weir starts singing and it lingers just after the song ends. There's no piano elsewhere in Truckin, and Steven Barnard was positive that they didn't have a piano in the live room to play with the band. So, like Howard Wales, that piano would have had to have been an overdub. Perhaps at one point they were actually thinking of ending American Beauty with the Frozen Lager. So let's talk about the Frozen Lager for a minute. It's a folk song, but not an ancient one. Written in the 20s, it was popularized by the Weavers, early pioneers of the live LP. This is from the Weavers on Tour from 1957. If you only know the Dead version, you don't know the ending. Take it away, Pete Seeger and Freddy Hellerman.

[Robert Hunter]

It froze clean through to China it froze to the stars above At a thousand degrees below zero it froze my lager, love and so I lost my lover and to this cafe I come and here I wait Till someone stirs his coffee with his thumb.

[David Lemieux]

Steve Silberman.

[Rich Mahan]

It's also no accident that both Crosby.

[David Lemieux]

And Kantner had fallen in love with.

[Rich Mahan]

The Weavers who presented this model of socially aware, socially active, politically aware music. Stuff like Blows against the Empire was.

[David Lemieux]

Like Robert Heinlein meets the Weavers. And though the Frozen Lager might not be the best example of the Weavers socially active, politically aware of music, the Weavers were early folk favorites of Jerry Garcia, David Crosby and Paul Kantner, among others. A formative influence on the planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra. I also wrote a book about them. Wasn't that a Time? Available from a bookseller near you.

[Jerry Garcia]

Don't encourage it. Don't encourage it.

[David Lemieux]

You know, probably the Dead started mixing American Beauty in the later part of September 1970, either just before or just after their four gigs at the Fillmore East. By then, work had begun on the album that would become David Crosby's if I Could Only Remember My Name, which we covered pretty deeply in our last episode about addicts of my life, here's engineer Steven Barncard.

[Stephen Barncard]

We started on the nights with David because he wanted to work nights. Phil came to me and said, we want to work with you. Whenever you can, we'll wait for you. We want you to mix this record. Cool. And I think by this time Bob and Betty had already come back from the caravan. And so that impressed me, you know, because I figured they would just go back to their people and do whatever. So I arranged for the afternoons from 11 to 6 to mix American Beauty and then I would work with David from 7 till 11 or 12.

[David Lemieux]

The good vibes continued into the later part of the mixing sessions.

[Stephen Barncard]

Everybody was hanging out. It was very much like an event. It wasn't like later times in there, you know, while you're doing your overdubs, I'll go do something else, right? It was. There was focus. It was, you know, I remember we were sitting on the meter bridge cross legged. I wasn't sure about the strength of that, but I, you know, we were mixing trucking. There was some. A little bit of switching verses there. I think we had to fix something. And so Weir was up there throwing one switch and then we were throwing some other switches. And then, because it's actually an ideal place to listen because everyone else was on the other side and there's not a way to get to the sweet spot. But if you're sitting on the meter bridge right in the middle and you're the only one there, it's perfect. He's like, you know, very close to the speakers and he could reach down to one of the switches, you know, and he would flip between. I think it was one of the verses, and he would switch between vocal takes on his lead vocal. He did have a fix on that, and I don't think we ever combined that to make it do it. And, you know, usually if we didn't have enough tracks, we had to combine things to give us more on the tracks to finish. But we didn't have that many extra pieces on there. And so we had an extra lead vocal. It was just a few words, never the same or something like that. And there's a lot of lyrics in that tune. Holy crap.

[David Lemieux]

Bob Weir remembered the song as a tongue twister in 1980. Robert Hunter remembered that it was a chore to record as well, telling Jeff Tamarkin, it was fed to Bobby a line at a time. When we got to the studio with me telling him how to pronounce it, he'd go in and put a line down, then go back in and work out how to pronounce the next line. That's the one and only time such a thing has happened. Stephen Barncard was involved with the album's mastering and made sure the band was as well.

[Stephen Barncard]

I was very much into inclusion because the people I was working with were including me in the process and. And decision making. And so I felt that. That it was my duty to. To involve him in the final stages. Jerry was delighted. I don't know if he. He'd ever attended a mastering session before. I don't think he had. It was disc mastering. So that was a big deal in San Francisco. You could go to CBS and it was a Gray Rack and a Scully run by George Horn. It wasn't the kind of thing where you could. The producers would show up. I'm not even sure who I put the request into. I never had a record company executive of any kind contact me, you know. And I told Jerry personally, I said, you should be with. You know, because I. I was already in the habit with all the other projects I was working on that I wanted to be present for the mastering session. It was a hassle because we had to go to la. The appointments and the. And the tickets were set up by the Grateful Dead office. I was waiting for Jerry down at the airport. I had parked in the usual, you know, citizen parking down below. And he showed up in a. I think he had a Beamer and. And drove up at the valet parking and, you know, drove right, right up to the. You know, just in time to get the flight. And we got on and delightful flight. You know, it was psa. It was every hour. So it was Like a bus. So it wouldn't have been a big deal if he'd missed the flight. But he was there just in time and we flew to Burbank and then we immediately got some kind of. I imagine it was a taxi. We went to the Artisan mastering place. It was a turnkey Neumann mastering system. As opposed to the Scully systems that they had at A and M. He had a Bushnell console. There's two sets of controls. You have the A and the B. With a complete signal chain and preview.

[David Lemieux]

State of the art for 1970 Artisan Sound featured variable pitch mastering. Sending two signals to the cutting machine so the machine could adjust in advance for loud or quiet passages.

[Stephen Barncard]

So the variable pitch thing was really good for records with real dynamics. Most of rock records didn't have that much in dynamics anyway. But this record did. And it's one of the nice features. There's soft and loud and there's a transients and, you know, acoustic guitars. And the mastering session was very successful. We got done really quickly. And I can't remember if it's with Jerry or with David later. It may have been Jerry. And we went to United Western after the session and Paul Kantner and company were. It was either the Starship or the Airplane. And they were in this cavernous room at United Western and people were there. So many people there, it was like they were lining the walls. But I was so glad that we didn't have any extra people with this at the mastering or for that matter for the sessions, which is kind of interesting. And I think that's a thing that enabled the record to be so good, was that there wasn't a lot of voices heard from. There was a single point of reference. There was a single technical voice that was there somewhere.

[David Lemieux]

During the final part of the process, the Dead told Stephen Barncard that he would be receiving a co producer credit on American Beauty.

[Stephen Barncard]

I didn't ask for it because I was a staff engineer at Heiders. I had no right to ask for it. And I had no right to take pictures, which I wish I should taken more of. You know, when I became producer of the new writers, I did take pictures. There was nobody taking pictures at all. There's really no pictures of the session. And also to their credit, I don't remember Conflict because I never worked with a bunch of guys so in sync for a common purpose. It wasn't like there was a leader. Although Phil really. Phil was really the arbiter of a lot of things. And he was by my side and I would do something, I'd go look at it, Phil raise an eyebrow. And then I knew what to do. I was, I think Phil was quoted on that saying that, you know, that I was easy to work with because I could figure out what they wanted without words. And we were on the Definitely all on the same page. And I think a single point of view is really what it was all about. It could have been anybody else on the staff, really.

[David Lemieux]

I'll go ahead and say that Stephen Barkhardt is being modest. His brilliant work resulted in a Grateful Dead album that sounded like no other, before or after. For the COVID art, the band turned to their trusted visual collaborators, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelly. In addition to being friends, Mouse and Kelly were close collaborators and their tasks and jobs blurred enormously. Here's Alton Kelly speaking to Video west in the 80s.

[Jerry Garcia]

There's no regular way, it varies back and forth. He's right handed, I'm left handed.

[David Lemieux]

We a lot of times just work across the board. We've posted the link to Video West's studio [e-mail] deadcast it was Maus who'd overseen the sepia toned cover of Working Man's Dead. But American Beauty was Kelly's task. The band had more to do with some album covers than others.

[Jerry Garcia]

It changes each thing. You know, it's like Mars Hotel. They had a lot to do with.

[David Lemieux]

Other ones they hadn't said anything about.

[Jerry Garcia]

You know, like American Beauty and things like that.

[Robert Hunter]

It's just.

[David Lemieux]

Robert Hunter's girlfriend Christy had suggested the name of the album Big Fat Full American Beauty Rose, but they edited it down. When Kelly heard it, he thought of the rose immediately. It was the perfect subject for a new technique he was trying out. The rose is actually etched into a mirror, he told Blair Jackson in 1984. I etched it into the glass from behind with a sandblaster. So I had to do it all backwards. I had to put in the shadows and highlights first and work it inside out. Fellow artist Wes Wilson was working with glass and had a sandblaster. So I went out to his place and used his sandblaster and then set up my airbrush and painted it in a chair in his kitchen. The frame is an actual piece of mahogany that has a mirror laid into it. Then we photographed the whole thing, which was kind of hard because it reflected so much. Finally we ended up putting up a gray sheet and standing the camera at a little angle so you couldn't see the camera in it. If you spent any time staring at the COVID of American Beauty and I mean really staring at it. You may have seen the name of the album change before your eyes from American Beauty to American Reality. It wasn't planned, says Kelly, but it was done with some intention. As I was doing it, it just sort of appeared as a freak accident. Kelly told Blair in 1984, when I did the U, I had dropped the side off and made a dot like an I. And then it just read that way. Reality. It was just perfect. The back cover was to be a photo of the band posed with guns, perhaps taken at Mickey Hart's ranch in Nevada. But Robert Hunter nixed it. He said when American Beauty came out, there was a photograph to go on the back, which showed the band with pistols. They were getting into guns at that time, going over to Mickey's ranch, target shooting. They were just enjoying shooting pistols, for example. We got a gold record and went and shot it up. I saw that photo and that was one of the few times I ever really asserted myself with a band and said, no, no picture of the band with guns on the back cover. These were incendiary and revolutionary times, and I did not want this band to be making that statement. I wanted us to counter the rising violence of that time.

[Stephen Barncard]

I had not had experience.

[Jerry Garcia]

Now Trisha loved the Turtles and feared long hair. Trisha wasn't schizophrenic, just senile. At 23, she had no fun. She didn't neck. Only short, kinky haired boys called her. They were ashamed of their bodies. Now I'd like to tell you that Trisha heard the Grateful Dead and left home and joined Fanny and now can be seen skinny dipping at the Tropicana Motor Hotel pool in your town. But you're no fool. You'd complain. We'd get in trouble. Jerry Garcia probably would get busted again. So? So if you don't have the Dead's American Beauty album, we can say you're missing 42 minutes of pleasure in a world that's owned by thousands of little Trishes. American Beauty on Warner Brothers. Make your duck a grateful duck.

[David Lemieux]

Unpacking that ad would take its own episode. For the Dead, life went on as usual as they geared up for the release of American Beauty. Which is to say that Jerry Garcia continued to show up for work at Wally Heiders in San Francisco. In October, just before the Dead headed to the East Coast, Garcia recorded with the band Lamb, released the next year on the album Cross Between. This is Flotation.

[Robert Hunter]

But I seem to be floating.

[Gary Lambert]

You seem to be flying.

[David Lemieux]

Sometime later in October, Garcia recorded the Hooterol album Wally Heiders with Howard Wales, which is funky and cartoonish, but also filled with beautifully unclassifiable moments like the Berg song. It's remarkable the speed at which the Grateful Dead worked, especially compared to the major music business of 2020. But in any era, really these days, a band might put out an album, spend a few years touring behind it, then start to think about the material for their next release. This isn't how the Grateful Dead worked, of course. It's impossible to pin a specific date on the end of the American Beauty era. One date for that is perhaps November 1, 1970, which is listed as the official release date for the album. As with other release dates in that era, take it with a lump of salt. November 1st was a Sunday, a day many stores probably weren't open. But that week it made it out to fans, and you better believe our buddy Gary Lambert was on it.

[Gary Lambert]

Oh, the day it came out, at that point, I was haunting the record stores in New York with phone calls saying, I don't think we used the word drop at that point, but, you know, it's like, you know, when's the Dead record coming in? There were a few record stores in midtown Manhattan that were likely to be the first. I think I got that one at King Carol on 42nd Street.

[David Lemieux]

The dead hit the road that month to play shows east of the Mississippi to promote the album, largely in the New York area. Another possible end to the American Beauty period might be the early November shows at the Capitol in Portchester featuring the Dead's last proper acoustic sets for a decade. Sometime that month, Herbie Green staged a photo session at Mickey Hart's barn in Nevada with the Dead, the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and their extended family. One shot can be seen on an infamous promotional poster for American Beauty, Banned, recalled and destroyed due to the joint in Garcia's hand. Jerry Garcia had already finished up one new full length project at Heiters before American Beauty was even out with Howard Wales. And within days of getting back from the Dead's last November shows in the Midwest, he was back at Heiders to start another project. It was time for a new the Purple Sage album.

[Stephen Barncard]

So we're going to do the New Riders. And I said, okay. And I think I'd heard them. And I thought, well, these guys are pretty funky. But I said, well, okay. I have experience with country music. I was a country DJ in several different radio stations in Kansas City before everything happened in San Francisco. And of course, with Jerry, it's like more Jerry time. So you know I'm on for that. We do tracks for the most of those tunes, definitely knowing that we have some time problems and and so forth. And I did not give my opinion, yay or nay. But I, I was definitely struggling to get a drum sound. I was struggling to like think I don't know if I'm gonna, you know, this isn't really happening and we're not getting a groove here with this stuff. And then the next thing I know, Mickey's out and Spencer is in.

[David Lemieux]

Sometime in December, a few weeks after American Beauty came out, former Jefferson Airplane drummer Spencer Dryden replaced Mickey Hart as drummer for the New Riders of the Purple Sage. We're not going to go into a full history of the New Rider's self titled debut today. Maybe some other time. But chalk up Steven Barncard's early session with Mickey Hart to the last months of 1970, probably early December. Flowing right from the momentum of American Beauty, only two tracks from those initial sessions with Mickey would surface on the band's debut for Columbia, the next Lonely Eagle and this one, Dirty Business, which was Jerry Garcia's first outlet for getting really weird with a pedal steel. The New Riders of the Purple stage sessions would pick up in January 1971 with new drummer Spencer Dryden. That's just outside our spelunking range for now. And a passage to the next era in Dead history. This is yet another line you could draw after American Beauty in November when the band was on tour out East, Jerry Garcia told the Boston Herald, we're really into songs now. We all have gotten into singing, so we look for songs. We can't find them, so I write them. Then we have all these songs so it's natural to put them on a record. We're really in a good period and have just been putting out albums. We expect to be back in the studio again by March with a new release in the spring. From the perspective of history, this sounds like wishful thinking. But though the Dead didn't get back to the studio in March 1971 and their next proper studio album didn't come out until 1973, looked at another way, their next album project actually began ahead of Garcia's predicted schedule.

[Robert Hunter]

They gotta get going out of the door and down to the street all alone.

[David Lemieux]

That was truckin', recorded February 18, 1971 at the Capitol Theater in Portchester on the new expanded edition of American Beauty remixed from the original 16 track recordings. This might sound obvious at first, but the reason there are 16 track recordings to Remix is because the Grateful Dead brought a 16 track recorder with them to the Capitol Theater in February 1971, along with engineers Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor Jackson. While they were a successful rock and roll band in early 1971, this was still a costly proposition and not likely undertaken unless they were planning to actually record a new live album. And why not? Early in October, when the Dead were stuck at another bad sounding college gig, Garcia raved about the Capitol to journalist Jay Itkowicz. There's only two theaters, man. They're the only two places that are set up pretty groovy all around for music and smooth stage changes, good lighting and all that. The Fillmore and the Capitol Theater. And those are the only two in the whole country. The rest of the places we play are sort of anonymous halls and auditoriums and gymnasiums and all those kinds of places. Well, the thing is that we do our best show in that sense, show sense here in New York, because here it's the show world. That was one reason to record a new live album at the Capitol. Another reason is that by February 1971, the dead had another new album's worth of original songs. In some ways, it's hard to believe that the Dead would plan to make a live album with songs they'd never performed. And maybe they didn't. But they'd also just released a successful new album, more than half of which was songs they'd virtually never performed live, including Truckin. Who's to say, though they had six nights booked at the Capitol in which perhaps they could get good takes of all of them. That was the debut of loser, also recorded February 18, 1971 at the Capitol in Port Chester. The live album project would become Skull and Roses. Recorded later that spring, mostly at other New York shows, the multi track Capitol Recordings wouldn't see the light of day for many more years. That opening night, included on the new expanded American Beauty, featured a seven piece band with keyboardist Ned Lagin, who's somewhere in this mix or not. We discussed Ned's contributions to this show extensively in our last bonus episode, the Nedcast. When the band returned to the stage the next night, they were a quintet. Mickey Hart would sit out the rest of the run and when they got back to California, part ways with the Dead. For the next few years, it was complicated. If nothing else, a new batch of songs and the departure of a band member was an undeniable sign that the band had entered their next period. At the first show without Mickey Hart Since 1967, the band opened with Truckin here's what that same part sounded like with only Bill Kreutzman released as three from the vault in 2007. But as the Dead were moving into their next period, the rest of the world was taking their time to catch up with the Dead. Rolling Stone reviewed American Beauty in their Christmas eve issue in 1970, and Andy's whirling once again raved, for once, a truly beautiful album cover is more than matched by the record inside. The Dead just refused to keep within any normal limits and I hope that it stays that way for a long time, he began. And he concluded, the Dead are getting pretty big commercially now, and if ever a band deserved it, it's them. They have given us all something to treasure with this album. It's one for now and one for the kids in 20 years, too. American Beauty is like that, you know. We do know, though amend that number to 50 years. A few weeks before that, a reviewer at the SUNY Binghamton newspaper observed that Truckin seems to have become the cut associated most with the album. Just as Uncle John's band was on Working Mans. In late January, American Beauty peaked at number 30 on the billboard charts. And just after that, the same week as the Capitol shows in mid February, Warner Bros. Finally released the first single for American Beauty, Truckin' in an edit that cut nearly two minutes from the song, erasing the New Orleans bust but leaving in the reference to cocaine. Howard Wales's cartoon organ is also gone from the mix, but there's more lead guitar here. You can hear where the first verse and chorus were lopped out.

[Robert Hunter]

Let you be what in the world ever became a sweet Jane she lost her spotlight, you know she isn't in the same.

[David Lemieux]

Billboard featured the single under the category Spotlights, expected to reach the top 60 of the Hot 100 chart. Summing up the thrills of one of the Dead's most iconic songs is only a trade publication. Could blues rock or gold from their successful American Beauty Chart LP has it to climb to the top 100 in short order. Unlike the edit of Uncle John's band, though, this time the band had a little more control.

[Stephen Barncard]

I did make a stereo and mono version of Truckin while we were still working on the rest of the record. And I remember that when that edit came up, as you well know, when cut out part of the solo Jerry was playing. Da da da da da da da da da. You know, it was like this octave thing that he's. I couldn't play that live. So, you know, kind of a funny thing.

[David Lemieux]

I think this is the moment he's talking about featuring a guitar part that's not there on the album version. Billboard was just exactly right about the single making the top 60, maybe a little too right on Christmas 1971, it peaked at number 64 on the Billboard chart, right between Turn youn Radio on by Ray Stevens and Everybody Knows About My Good Thing Part 1 by Little Johnny Taylor. The song's brief run on the chart began in November 1971, perhaps spurred by the success of the Skull and Roses live album in December, just before the single peaked, Warner Brothers took out an ad on the front page of Billboard featuring a skeleton high stepping in the R. Crumb style with an LP in one hand and twirling a hat with his other. To the unnamed artist's credit, the skeleton actually is doing something resembling the original Truckin dance, the ad reads. Trucking by the Grateful Dead is rising from the Dead's American Beauty album on Warners. Keep on the correct pronunciation of this Tassoon is Truckin. But Truckin wasn't intended to be a single, not even your typical jam in your typical Grateful Dead song. Here's how Robert Hunter remembered it in 1978 to WLIR, and it was intended.

[Jerry Garcia]

To be a continuing chronology, that is.

[David Lemieux]

Hunter was gonna keep adding verses as time went on. It didn't quite happen like that, as we'll hear. But even if the Dead didn't update the song, it remained a vessel for their ongoing history, continuing to tell new stories and accumulate new meanings as the song and the band evolved. The Dead released another version of truckin almost exactly two years later, taking up the entire fifth side of the triple disc Europe 72. It had turned into a powerful groove for the band, especially once they'd added Keith Godshow in the fall with his impeccable boogie woogie piano chops, and it began to gallop off into jams. Here's a little bit of that Europe 72 version. The song continued to tell the story of the band's place in the larger culture as well. Even if it wasn't quite a hit, it jumped the fence from the Dead into the world at large, far beyond the counterculture with which they were usually associated. Archivist David Lemieux There's a version of.

[Gary Lambert]

Truckin from 1973 in Utica, New York. They sing what a long, strange trip it's been. And Phil, in the middle of the song, right after they sing that, he says Howard Cosell said that Howard Cosell had been telling a little anecdote, as he would do 1973. And he must have said, I'd love to hear the tape of it, but he must have said, what a long, strange trip it's been in that Howard Cosell voice. And it shows that even then it was ABC Sports on a Monday night would have had Howard Cosell saying it.

[David Lemieux]

That would have been March 1973. Probably the show was Howard Cosell, Sports Magazine Check your local listings if anyone knows where to find a stash from spring 73 slide into our DMs. The construction long, strange trip begins to turn up in magazines and newspaper articles during this period, having absolutely nothing to do with the dead, drugs, counterculture or music. Here's one usage from the White Plains Journal News in 1974 under the headline Everyday Housewife. It's been a long, strange trip, but Chris Derchahagian is back home again, married to a suffering cop and very much the everyday housewife. Over the course of 1973, Truckin evolved one of its big moments. Here's a draft in development, recorded June 26 of that year in Seattle on the Pacific Northwest box set. It's that moment when Jerry Garcia plays a version of the song's intro lick. The band moves with it and peaks together, and soon so would the crowd. By the fall they developed a version that goes off like a multi stage flare, a new part of the song. Here's what it sounded like with full dynamics. Recorded in Denver in the fall, November 21, 1973, from Road Trips, Volume 4, Number 3, Truckin would become the only major jam vehicle of American Beauty, often launching with that peak and then heading off into the unknown. In 1974 especially, it would be a consistent springboard into enormous thematic improvisation, sometimes bending into the Mine, Left Body or Spanish jams. Here's a little bit of the version from Dijon, France, September 18, 1974, released on the 30 trips around the Sunbox set, which I quite love. This is titled Caution Jam on the cd and maybe, but there's a lot more going on than just that. After a version in golden gate Park in September 1975, in which Phil Lesht reminded the crowd of the song's correct pronunciation, Truckin didn't come back again until the band's massive show at Raceway park in Englishtown, New Jersey, in September 1977. Though Phil Lesh had stopped singing with the Dead after their touring hiatus due to throat issues. Perhaps because he had a hand in writing Truckin, it was one song where he kept taking to the mic. Here's a little bit from English Town With Mickey Hart back in the mix on second Drum Kit.

[Robert Hunter]

If you don't lay em down.

[David Lemieux]

It was around the time of Englishtown that the band finally took up Robert Hunter on the initial plan to write additional lyrics for Truckin. Here's a bit more from his 1978 interview with WLIR Pack Boys asked me.

[Jerry Garcia]

A couple of months ago if I would update it. I said, oh, no, I let sleeping dogs live at the. They insisted. And so I did. And I don't know if they're going to do new verses or not. Hard to say, but I wrote about half a dozen more, and they were very easy to write. It's a groove that I can fall into so easily. It reminds me that I wrote that song when I sit down and write more to it, because I can get right into the same flow.

[David Lemieux]

Here's how Hunter remembered one of those verses in 1998.

[Jerry Garcia]

Once in a while the music gets.

[David Lemieux]

Into the street 50 old ladies bug every cop on the beat they're putting.

[Jerry Garcia]

A lock on Lindley Meadow and keys are beginning to look like we can't play in the park.

[David Lemieux]

And here's Hunter doing a full version of that section. May 9, 1979, in Providence with Larry Klein on bass.

[Robert Hunter]

Once in a while the music gets into the street 50 old ladies bug every cop in the beat they're putting the lock on lily metal with keys.

[David Lemieux]

If you poke into Robert Hunter's live tapes, I'm pretty sure there are other versions to be found as well. But as Hunter acknowledged, other times it wasn't really their song to change anymore. It belonged to the Grateful Dead and to the Deadheads archivist David Lemieux.

[Gary Lambert]

It took me until my sixth show before I saw it live, and I'd always wanted to see it live. I mean, I'm a deadhead. I'm 16 years old. Of course I want to see Truckin live. My sixth show, I got to see them play it live. And I remember the feeling of unison. It was Madison Square Garden and it was 16, 17, 18,000 people. And I remember 17,000 fists in the air, you know, what a long, strange trip it's been. Sometimes the lights all shine on me the lights turn and it fel. It felt at that point in my young Deadhead going career show going career, it felt as much a part as the one song that could really bring us together as one very easily. And I saw that a million times with the Grateful Dead, where that collective, the unity, everybody in unison with the fist in the air. That frenzy point. I saw it lots of times. But Truckin was the one guaranteed way to make that happen. And it wasn't gimmicky at all.

[David Lemieux]

Here's the Dead, plus a giant stadium full of Deadheads in 1989 from the giant stadium box set. By the 80s, the most famous Dead lyric had its own abbreviation on the Usenet Group Rec Music G Dead wallstib what a long, strange trip it's been. And it really has. Every time the phrase gets used in some new situation, bizarre or banal, far from the Dead, far from music, the trip has found some new destination. One destination further down the line than anybody ever could have dreamed.

[Gary Lambert]

To this day you hear what a long, strange trip it's been. And it's applicable. I mean, 2020, 2016-2020. What a long, strange trip it's been. It's applicable to good things and bad. You know, I've been with the dead 21 years. What a long, strange trip. It's just. It works. And when they wrote it, they weren't trying to. You know, they don't even a band for four or five years at the time. And they were saying, well, here it's five, 55 years. I remember seeing the Fare Thee well shows and they played it. And I remember feeling that that was the 50th anniversary, that this song right now, 74,000 plus in soldier field, we were all feeling it. We were all the collective. What a long, strange trip it's been. And nobody wants to ever see it end. But they ended it on their terms. They announced that we're going to play one more time together. Come and see us, please, because you're not gonna get a chance. And in singing that, it was not a gimmick at all. It was legitimately what everybody on that stage and what all 74,000 of us were feeling was what a long, strange trip this has been. And here we are now at 55 years. And I've been thinking a lot about this, the dad's legacy, this year in particular. I don't know. 2020 is a year for reflection, if nothing else. But I've been thinking about the Dead's legacy for 50 more years. And I think that this song, this album, will be able to have that relevance.

[David Lemieux]

Let's pull back from the long, strange and ongoing trip for a moment. Back to the early 60s, when Robert Hunter was living at the Chateau, a bohemian crash pad in Palo Alto, and had his first experiences with psychedelics, earning $140 to try them from the local Menlo Park VA Hospital. It was hard to tell about it, he wrote in his online journal in the 90s. No mutual frame of reference When I returned from the first experiment, I tried to explain to jazz drummer Dan Barnett, the first person I met upon returning home to the chateau, about what had happened. He listened with a smile and then pronounced, you're crazy, Bob Hunter. Many years later, Jerry ran into Dan and invited him over to the house to hear the acetate of our new record. He sat through American Beauty with a smile on his face and and when it was over, asked, do you call this music? Some people will never care for licorice.

[Jerry Garcia]

What about all those people that might not like truckin?

[David Lemieux]

If you've gotten this far, I suspect you're one of those people who does like truckin and probably the other kind of herbal jazz licorice we've been celebrating for the past 10 episodes of the good ol Grateful Dead cast. I'll note also that one song later, the dad did actually play Truckin. American Beauty has given me a new appreciation of what it means for an album to be truly timeless. Truckin is an autobiographical song that has come to mean many things to many other people besides its writers. It was big enough to earn a knockoff version with fake crowd noise from the King's Road play the heavy sounds of Watkins Glen. Truckin might also be the earliest ever recorded Dead cover in 1971 an All Women's group from Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

[Robert Hunter]

Called the whims McLaren and me flashing her keys out on Main Street Chicago, New York, Detroit they're all on the street same street A typical city involved in a typical daydream Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings Dallas got a soft machine Houston too close to New Orleans New York got the ways and means just won't let you be.

[David Lemieux]

There are punk versions by the pop popes from 1982 what in the world.

[Robert Hunter]

Ever became Sweet Jane she lost a spot but you know she was in the same Living a bit wet Brit cooking Sometimes the sun's all shining on me Other times it's raining out Other times I can barely see it makes me want to scream and chill country.

[David Lemieux]

And western Dwight Yocum from the dedicated tribute in 1991 sitting and staring out.

[Robert Hunter]

Of the hotel window Gosh, if they're kicking the door in again like to get some sleep before I travel but if you got a warrant I guess.

[David Lemieux]

You'Re gonna come in and lullabies the cuddliest ever evocation of having police bust down the door for a few joints by Rockabye baby, and even by members of the Grateful Dead Hear from the Fare thee well, celebrating 50 years of the Grateful Dead, recorded in July 2015 at Soldier Field in Chicago.

[Robert Hunter]

Other times I Can Barely See.

[David Lemieux]

And all of the songs and recordings exist everywhere at once and continue to iterate into newer versions. But Truckin also continues to exist in its original time space in Studio C at Wally Heiders in San Francisco.

[Robert Hunter]

Sit down and patch my bones and get back Truckin.

[David Lemieux]

If you've trucked all the way to the credits of the final episode of this season of the Dead cast, thank you. Sincerely. Got a bunch of people to thank, so fix yourself a cool drink. Enormous thanks to everybody we interviewed over the course of this season or who contributed their voice to this season of the good old Grateful Dead cast Bob Weir, Mickey Hoy, Stephen Barnard, David Crosby, Donna Jean GodShow McKay, David Grisman, Ned Lagin, Howard Wales, Michael Brewer, Alan Trist, Sam Cutler, David Nelson, Graham Nash, Ronnie Stanley, Jim Sullivan, David Lemieux, Gary Lambert, Brian Kehue, Mike Johnson, Steve Silberman, Nick Palmgarten, Ira Kaplan, Paul Feig, Eric Davis, Steven Malfoy, Amir Bar Lev, Billy Strings, Nicholas Merriweather, Mike Hamed, Jake Cohn, Rebecca Adams, Andrew Peerless and Mr. Completely. I'd also like to shout out some love to some off camera colleagues who've helped fact check this podcast and help with various sources. Cory Arnold of Lost Live Dead and Hooterolan Joe Jupiel of Jerry Bass and Jerry Garcia's Middle Finger and Light into Ashes of Dead Sources and Dead Essays. We'll be back in a little bit, so everybody hang loose.

[Rich Mahan]

What a long, strange trip it's been. Indeed. If you want to catch a visual on Lamb, who we referenced in this episode and see what they were like on stage, check out the concert film the Last Days of the Film War, which also has many other characters we've discussed in the Dead cast, including the Dead, the Airplane and the New Riders, as well as Santana, Quicksilver Messenger Service and a bunch of others. It's a very cool time capsule movie of this period shot in summer 71. Thanks very much for coming on this journey with us through American Beauty. It's been a beautiful experience and while I'm a little misty eyed that it's wrapping up, I'm also really excited for what we have for you all in the future. Take a little time and poke around on dead.netdeadcast to check out the visuals for this season. There's some really cool things to investigate. Take care out there. Be good humans. See you at the next show. Executive producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson. Produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All right, rights reserved.