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Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly 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 Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season eight of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast, we find ourselves smack dab in the middle of side two of Grateful Dead's 1973 studio album Wake of the Flood. And this time we have the distinct honor of diving into one of the band's most beloved tunes, Eyes of the World. It is the 50th anniversary of Grateful Dead's wake of the Flood and to celebrate this, rhino has a grand 50th anniversary release which includes the original album remastered. So some really cool early demos of songs from the album and six songs from a live show at Magaw Memorial hall at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois from November 1, 1973. There is special vinyl as well as standard black vinyl, a very cool Wake of the Flood picture disc on vinyl. CDs and digital versions are also available. More information and orders are happening now@dead.net speaking of dead.net head on over there and check out all of our past episodes. Go to dead.netdeadcast We've got the complete seasons one through seven. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Very kind of you. Thank you very, very much. We have transcripts of many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading enjoyment. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Thanks to everybody who's left their stories over@stories.dead.net we're always looking for an epic tale of Dead related craziness. The weirder the better. No story too big or too small. Share yours by recording those stories over@stories.dead.net and you just may hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead cast Hey, three of your fellow Deadheads are in this current episode. There's an option to write your story there, but if possible please record yourself telling the story. If you need longer than the time allotted, leave a second one or a third. Thank you very much. Is Eyes of the World the best use of a major seventh chord ever? Quite possibly, but it of course goes much deeper than that, as you're about to find out on this Eyes of the World deep dive, friends. Here's Jesse Giorno.
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So Critic no, there's.
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No other Grateful Dead song quite like Eyes of the World, A fan favorite at the heart of Wake of the Flood. Played every year between its debut in 1973 and the last shows in 1995. It has some of Robert Hunter's most open ended lyrics.
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Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning breaks. The heart has its seasons, its he means and songs of its own.
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Eyes of the World was one of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's most significant compositions, a cornerstone of the Grateful Dead's music, both a fixed song and a monument to lasting change. The Grateful Dead jammed, of course, and Eyes of the World was one of the band's most reliable jamming vehicles. But one of the ways that Eyes of the World was different from other Grateful Dead songs was how different it could be from itself. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David.
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Lemieux It's a perfect song also, and it has allowed the Dead to do so much with it in its various guises, whether it's 1973, 74 versions with the very distinct and unique jam at the end, which I love, and when they nail that thing, which they do most of the time, oh, it's so good.
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That was from the ending in 78 time that the band played throughout 1973 and 1974, which we'll get into a bit later. That version was from October 19, 1973 in Oklahoma City. Now Dix Picks 19 that was the version for March 29, 1990, featuring Branford Marsalis on saxophone, a favorite of many Deadheads. Released on Without a Net, the same year it was recorded, the song was a hit among heads from the moment it appeared. In September 1973, before wake of the Flood was even released, a pair of deadhead DJs at WAER in Syracuse grilled Bob Weir about Eyes of the World.
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The words are 100 millimeters per second.
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They even made him recite the lyrics.
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Wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world. The heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own Song that the morning brings the heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own.
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As we've learned from this season of the Dead cast, a lot of the lyrics on Wake of the Flood had been lurking in draft form for several years by the time Jerry Garcia set them to music from Grateful Dead records.
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Ron I sat at Jerry's feet when he wrote songs. I saw the process. I heard songs before his wife heard them. Songs that changed my life.
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Bracow got to witness some of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's creative process.
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I walked in on it a lot of times. Jerry had a pile of lyrics on single pages, and I would say the pages were between 9 and 13 inches high. Now, a ream of paper, when you get it from a box, is about 2 1/2 inches high. When you take it out of the paper wrap and start to use it, it starts to occupy more space. But I would say that that was between one and two thirds and two reams of paper.
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Eyes of the World was a set of lyrics that came out of the stash. The lyrics were written Sometime between early 1969 and mid-1971, the period in which Robert Hunter lived with Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl in Larkspur. Hunter told Blair Jackson about the origins of Eyes of the world in 1989. I'm pretty sure Eyes of the World was from Larkspur. I remember I'd practice trumpet out there in the shed all the time, blow my brains half out until I got psychedelic and then I'd go right. I finally had to quit it. I was afraid I'd blow a blood vessel in my brain if I didn't give it up. That was a dramatic reenactment in the Grateful dead archive at UC Santa Cruz. A few folders for ICE9 publishing contain early versions of songs. Eyes of the World is one of them. The lyrics are almost exactly as the Dead would sing them, with one at the top of the page. There are six additional lines. They're not in the same rhyme scheme as Eyes of the World or any rhyme scheme at all. Just below them is an extended ellipses, suggesting that either these lines are a separate prelude to what follows, or possibly they're the continuation of something from a previous page. But given that the Eyes of the World lyrics are fully formed, with capital letters clearly denoting what the chorus is, my thought is that the following words are the lost prelude to Eyes of the I sat with a Bag of white gold tied to my wrist by a silver silk ribbon and the night circled round like a curtain preparing to draw Till I couldn't remember the question I couldn't recall is that the lost prelude to Eyes of the World. It does sound like night falling on an outlaw. But is it the kind of sleep they might wake up to find out that they're the eyes of the world? Or perhaps disguised as a squirrel, as a friend used to sing? We're going to let Jerry Garcia's solo demo for Eyes of the World guide us through our first conversation here, recorded in January 1973 in Stinson Beach, California. We asked Ron Rackow if Garcia recorded a lot of home demos.
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He did a lot of them in camera.
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That's an old filmmaking term for making your edits manually, with the stop, start and pause buttons of the equipment. In musical terms, that means a tape deck with on off functions and not much else.
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But then he got a studio. His studio was, oh, 25ft from the back door to his house, not even, and on a piece of land that was a little higher than the house. So the studio was a really nice one room building that was very, very nice. Very effective. I guess you could have an engineer and another person. It was very small. He could do it all by himself, and he did often, and he put things together. He played everything but the drums.
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While there are many phrases of Eyes of the World that are deeply resonant to me, and it conveys the powerful feeling of coming into oneself inside our bigger cosmology, I've never been able to grasp at a particular narrative inside the song, as I found out when researching this episode. There's a poetically logical reason for that. Once again, we have our friend David Ganz to thank, who I want to hug for sharing more of his wonderful conversations with Robert Hunter From 1977 to 1978, we've linked to David's fine books, including his latest, improvised lives@dead.net deadcast. David was and is a fine songwriter, and he questioned some of the mechanical ways Hunter constructed his lyrics. Hunter's answers, as always, provide surprises and wisdom. Hunter used the phrase eyes of the world in the conversation, and David asked what it meant to him.
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Haven't you had that flash of looking through everyone's eyes at once? Have you ever walked down the street and inhabited every. Like London is a good place to do that, where you walk down the street and you say, there are so many things going on behind those windows and the only way that you can possibly find out is to sort of inhabit them all for a while. But you can't be yourself when you're doing that. Everyone is there but you. That's a flash. That's open that people do. That's a regular flash.
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David asked about the song's perspective. Who is the you? And wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.
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Oh, maybe that's what's wrong with that tune, that I would even dare to address somebody else with that idea. Wake up, discover that you are the song that morning brings. But it is another one of those things, because it's basically wake up and discover I am the song is what I'm saying. But I'm not brave enough to say I. I have to say you. And if I wasn't even that brave, then I'd have to say he or she or all these pronouns lose their sense outside of the experience of yourself as a unit against everything else, as the other, the generalized other. There's me and then there's everybody and everything else. But when you take the context that Eyes of the World is supposed to be happening in, you lose that. So there's a problem about saying you, I, or he, she, or it. There's a problem in saying that. So I chose the you. I chose the second person. And then it even goes into the third person. There comes a redeemer and he slowly too fades away and there follows a wagon behind him that's loaded with clay and the seeds that were silent all burst into bloom and decay. And the night comes so quiet and it's close on the heels of the day. You have to put these things in a person. You have to, as you found in songs you were asking about. It comes to a point where you want to say something that isn't either I, you, or them, and you find that you can't do it, that you have to take a pronoun approach to it or you don't say anything.
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Imagine no pronouns. It isn't hard to do. And it's true, it's old lyricist wisdom that one unfailing way to make the singer of a song sound unbalanced is to not include any pronouns in the lyrics. But as Robert Hunter observed, it's rather hard to do that in practice. His solution was just to ignore the rules of pronouns entirely. Just like Crazy Cat, George Herriman's immortal cartoon anarchist invoked in China Cat Sunflower, a song that's also got pronouns in it.
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Sometimes I will switch back and forth because I have to use pronouns since I'm speaking in English, and I don't have a pronoun that I really desire to use there, either I or you. But I have to for convention's sake and to make any sense out of it that can be heard. So sometimes I will jump persons ordinarily only in that context.
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As a young songwriter, David Gans obviously wanted to know more.
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Lord only knows, Ben. You'll have to find out the same way I do by trying it. And when you don't do it right, being shot at for it, and when you've done it right, being applauded, it's a question of seeing Sometimes we live.
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No particular way but our own Sometimes we visit your country and live in your home Sometimes we ride our own stairs and sometimes we fall go Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own.
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You're never going to resolve the pronoun paradox. You just have to make your own solutions each time. And sometimes when you make that solution and decide which person to put it in, that's going to condition the next verse you write. It'd be a different verse than if you'd chosen a different person.
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Though the lyricist had no problem switching between pronouns at will, I'm willing to bet the singer didn't feel the same way. Changing the chorus of Eyes of the World or many Dead songs to the first person seems to taste messianic for Garcia. I think putting the chorus in the omniscient second person is part of what gives the songs their power. Underscored by the four part gang vocals the Dead arranged for the song, Here's a tiny bit of the band rehearsing it in January 1973. It's pretty low fidelity, but you can hear all four singers in the mix right from the start.
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The heart as it reaches its home and parts of its soul. We now discover that you are the song that the morning.
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In its original demo form, the song was pretty close to how the Dead would do it, with a few notable differences which highlight some of the ways Eyes of the World grew into something even more special. Fair warning, we're going to get into some music theory about the different pigments of Eyes of the World. Think about this conversation like the song itself all pointed towards that outro jam from the City College of New York Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Arts, please welcome back to the Deadcast Sean o'. Donnell.
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He kind of robotically goes back and forth between E major 7 and A for bar each. Compared to the sort of bouncy quick motion of the fully formed intro which really sets the tone for it. The sort of bounce that the tune always has.
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I don't remember writing Eyes of the World, garcia told Blair Jackson in 1989, but I do remember that it basically wanted a samba feel, which it still sort of has. It was kind of a Brazilian thing on the demo. The phrasing on the song is slightly different, a little woozier. One thing to note, the bird that Hunter references is a nuthatch. This is what the vibratory call of a red breasted Californian nuthatch sounds like, thanks to the Cornell Guide to Bird Sound. But right from the first demo, Garcia sang it nut thatch, and I bet you do too. It was a broad chorus, feeling almost exactly like the Dead would do it. Almost.
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Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world. The heart has its speeches, its home and thoughts of its own Wake up, discover that you are the song that the morning brings but the heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of.
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Its own in the tags that get stuck after the choruses. This original version has E minor to A seven. It just sounds really different. Normally it's B minor to A. Funnily enough, it's the second chord that sounds really different to my ears. The A, even though it's more similar, less big of a change. But somehow the e minor to a 7, it's suddenly like a 2, 5 progression that doesn't land where it would normally land. So it sounds surprisingly different, even though it's basically one chord different and a chord extension different.
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The song would change in some small ways between Garcia's demo in January and the Dead's debut in February, but also one big way, at least for people who love 1973. 1974 dead Sean O' Donnell the other.
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Big change in the demo is for the parts where the solo is going to go and he just kind of vocalizes. He just sits on an E major 7 and then sticks a tag at the end.
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That's gorgeous, though.
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Very different than the later alternation between E major 7 and B minor. And that change is the most important in my mind in terms of what he can play over it, because you have to be very conscious of the D sharp and the E major seventh changing to the D natural in the B minor. And that's why it feels like such a directed place to play when he does it in the real version, the final version.
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Here's what that section sounds like on Wake of the Flood, with Jerry Garcia's guitar solo removed so you can hear the change More clearly, though, it's not included on Wake of the Flood. The song had a two part jam in 1973 and 1974 that developed in the first months they started playing it before they made it to the Record Plant. None of the jam would even be attempted at the studio sessions, but it's such a significant piece of music that it would almost constitute a lost composition if not for the fact that so many Deadheads know it so well from the scores of live tapes and now official releases. It begins with more special effects or effects.
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The chord changes at the end there is part of this new language, even though it didn't make it onto the record version. The move from the E major seventh to the B flat minor, where you're using common tones to make a shift that sounds really dramatic but shares something with the prior chord, is. It's a really effective music move because you can change the mood extremely, but it can fall into the hands nicely and can be smooth in another sense.
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They use this move several times in the jam with different chords. Early they'd move to G sharp minor. These examples are how that section sounded at the end of the song's first tour. Recorded February 26, 1973 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Now Dix picks 28. To me, it sounds like a gorgeous blue sky suddenly filling with dark clouds, and then the clouds blow away. What's just as powerful as that outro jam is what it became almost instantly. A wonderful example of what seems to be collective writing by the band. Later in the jam, another shift went to E flat minor, or perhaps D minor, depending on your perspective, setting up the next and most dramatic phase of the ending. It's hard to know for certain if what you can Hear on the February 15, 1973 tour opener in Wisconsin is an example of instant composition or the execution of a musical move that had been discussed previously. Listening closely, I think it was planned ahead. Jerry Garcia's guitar tone has a lot of low end metallic bite, making it sound more like the upper register of a bass. But you can hear him signal a riff in 7, 8 with the whole band coming in behind on the second pass. But then everybody gradually locks in around the riff. If it was spontaneous, it's amazing. If it was planned to feel spontaneous, it's also amazing, which it did for pretty much all the versions the band played for the next two years. Maybe in part because it was never executed in quite the same way. Here's a tight ish version from Springfield on March 28th. Now Dave's pick 16 with extra dissonance from Weir. The collectively written ending in 78 time became a template for a new kind of Grateful Dead music, an early sign of a developing group writing process that would manifest over the next years, culminating with the collaborative Blues for Allah in 1975. Eyes of the World would prove to be a major show highlight for many Deadheads over the next two years. A powerful new song melding with a powerful new jam. Brian Schiff heard it for the first time that spring at Nassau Coliseum. Halfway through the second set, Truckin morphed into the other one. And then something mystical and magical happened.
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The first chords of a new song.
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Began, and again, it was absolutely perfect to my ear.
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I knew I was hearing it for.
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The first time, but it made me feel like it was a song I had been listening to my entire life.
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And when they sang the chorus, wake.
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Up to find out that you are the eyes of the world. What could be more perfect and frankly, more Grateful Dead? Then, after some of the most beautiful jamming I'd ever heard, the song evolved into this jazzy, dissonant riff which totally.
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Blew me and everyone else in the.
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Crowd away and made me realize the Dead were taking their collective history and musical experimentation to a whole other level. There are various species of storytelling music goers you might meet in New York. For example, there are those that heard Hot Tuna at the Palladium in the late 70s and heard less forever thereafter. Another subspecies, and one I'm definitely jealous of, is Deadheads who saw Eyes of the World with the original ending, which we'll now present as a brief montage.
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The whole seven jam really just grabbed me by the collar and shook me around for a while. That is a particularly good extended. Eyes of the World, they did that seven pattern. The original version of Eyes of the World had this break in the middle that was quite a bit of sonic sculpture. That was something. We all took note of that. Oh, look at. Oh, listen to this. What they're doing here. That's pretty cool.
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What we're trying to say is.
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Remember that. I love that. And that was a big fucking deal in concert.
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Thanks again, Jay Curley, Mike Dalgushkin and Dan o'. Hanklin. From its first performance, Eyes of the World set up a drop into the D minor introduction of one of Garcia's other new songs. This is from Kezar Stadium in San Francisco on May 26, 1973. Now on the Here Comes Sunshine box set. This is the super quick version of the transition. China Doll was recorded on the original batch of Wake of the Flood demos that Jerry Garcia made in January 1973 and became a delicate part of the live sets very quickly.
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The Bells of Heaven ring.
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It followed Eyes of the World frequently enough throughout early 1973 that it makes me wonder if it was originally considered as a song. Sweep the Way Ripple and Broke down palace are linked on American Beauty. China Doll was recorded during the Record Plant sessions in August, but ultimately left off for the band's next album from the Mars Hotel in 1974. You can hear a few takes of China Doll on the Angel Share and They're All Beautiful. Recorded on August 8, 1973, the third full day of sessions, just after catching a few takes of Eyes of the World. Perhaps to get in the mood, Tell.
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Me what you done it for. No, I won't tell you a thing.
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As Garcia notes after the first version, they've gotten it from the start. Well, let's do that one one more time. Although that last one was as good as any during a break in the action. Some other action breaks out during this noodling. There's a small exchange between Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh that reveals one way that Jerry Garcia was thinking about their album in progress. Somebody notes that Garcia has dropped a verse from China Doll, the one that begins, if you can't abide it, let the hurdy gurdy play. Yes, as a matter of fact, yes, I am. In the interest of time more than anything else. Everything else is shaping out to be real long.
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Well, and what the hell, may as well use another.
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Another verse of this, which is what.
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15 seconds, 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds? I just said have this one be short. It's all the same to you, man. As a co owner of a record company, Jerry Garcia was clearly aware that the band had to fit their songs onto two sides of an LP that could plausibly hold up to about 18 minutes of music before they started losing precious bass frequencies. That was it. And so the early musical partner of Eyes of the World got jettisoned for another year, at least in the studio. And we'll save our full exploration until then too. At the Record Plant, the Dead started work on Eyes of the World on August 8, but paused to work on Shinedoll and picked up Eyes again on the 10th. As always, there was some groove setting to do.
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You're Russian.
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Garcia was raring to go, already counting off the song when Dan Healy announces the first proper take.
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1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 4.
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There's a little bit of chord correction.
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Just get away.
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It's not an E major seventh on that last E and some fuel correction knobs pushing Bobby with those little offbeats they're pushing. A little bit later, Garcia explains what he's hoping for Weir's part to accomplish. It's cool to accent that beat. Just play it right on. So that what you're hearing as the pattern is going through your head is.
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The.
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So it's really fallen boom boom.
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Boom.
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So they're really the 2 and 4 is really hanging in there. But by then they'd actually already gotten it. The album version is take four, the first complete pass on August 10, though they kept going after that.
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Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world the heart has its features, its homeland and thoughts of its own. They now discover that you are the song that the morning the heart has its sensitive.
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For a while. There's two more complete takes, including that one Garcia poo pooed. Take four would go to the album like I said, but session logs indicate they possibly tried to record it one more time on the final day at the record plant August 30th. What's clear from the Angel Share takes though, is that they didn't intend to record the two part fireworks show of the ending jam on the album version. Maybe there's an alternate universe where the Dead took their time and the full Eyes of the World China Doll suite made up a chunk of the album, though as thrilling as it was and given time considerations, I could see it being hard to nail that transition from jam to ending riff in the studio, which was hard to do even live, and perhaps more easily accomplished now in the age of click tracks. With all this in mind or totally forgotten, it doesn't really matter which. Let's focus in on the multitracks. For Eyes of the World, we'll start with an overdub that's mixed almost ambiently on the album, which I can pick at pretty much only if I listen to the LP and stand right between the speakers. What they decided they needed was less cowbell. The timbales part was played by local band leader Benny Velardi, who we'll focus on a little bit more next time for his contribution to Let It Grow, but here's how his timbales sound during his mostly faded percussion track on Eyes of the World, Keith Godchau is playing organ according to the track sheets, though it doesn't specify which kind of, I think Probably a Hammond B3 in addition to the guitar part he played live on the basic track. Jerry Garcia also overdubbed an additional lead. It's also the only tracking sheet on the album that indicates that Phil Lesh's quad bass was in use, though somewhat paradoxically, only given tracks 11 and 12. We'll hear all of those and more in this highlights mix for the first half of the song.
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This lazy summer home Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world the heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its.
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Own.
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B
Wake now discover that you are the song that the morning brings.
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But.
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The heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own Sa Sam.
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That pretty much covers everything in the mix. I love those lush background vocals. Bob Weir broke it down for the WAER DJs in mid September 1973.
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E
On the record, it's relatively short. It's about six minutes and it's edited 5:30. It's edited down to just the head of the song, a couple bars in between, each verse up, riffing, and then at the end, a sort of extended bass solo.
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Certainly there are countless fantastic live versions of Eyes of the World, and we're about to visit some of them. But we got this lovely story from listener Lippy in Mill Valley about the original studio take and that bass outro, which he discovered after becoming a deadhead in 1980. A nice reminder of how the impact of albums doesn't always happen. On their first release, I was just.
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Immersed, listening to album after album, but the one that spoke to me heartiest and deepest in those first tender months of getting to know this band was definitely Wake of the Flood. It was the first album that I really felt was kind of my own. I loved everything about it. I loved every song. I loved the mood and the attitude. And I also loved the way it sounded. It had a particular sound, almost like a very close sound. Is the best way I can put was it was just beautiful. It all sounded of a piece, as was the Rick Griffin artwork on the COVID So what really spoke to me immediately off the album was Eyes of the World. That song just touched me in so many ways, from its beautiful and complex melodies to the jamming possibilities that I could see that it presented through its harmonic structure. And the. Just the. The beautiful, complex beat of it.
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The.
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The way that it just keeps running forward and forward in such a positive way, like, kind of like running through, you know. Can I say a field of daisies? Can I say a field of poppies? I think I'm going to say that. And you know, I still hum along to those beautiful bass lines, fills, popping bass lines on the outro. You know, it's like a little mini symphony. So I took my first college girlfriend to my Venice apartment for the first time. This is in the early 80s, and we fell in love over Eyes of the World. Wake of the Flood became our special album, and she always said that it reminded her of my little Venice apartment and our wonderful, magical nights there. You know, watching the sunset over the beach in this kind of ratty little beach apartment. But just being fully immersed and warmed to our souls while listening to Wake of the Flood. And of course, listening to Eyes of the World in particular. So Fast forward to 2023 and we're now a 29 years together married couple, and we still listen to Eyes of the World at every opportunity, and it still reminds us how we fell in love while listening to Wake of the Flood. As a matter of fact, I can guarantee you that we're holding hands on the couch in our Marin county home right now as we listen to this podcast Snuggling up same as ever. Listening to those high popping bass notes lead us out of Eyes of the World and into the world beyond.
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C
We don't often do dedications on the Dead cast, but let's listen to that isolated quad bass solo and send it out to Lippy and his partner in Marin county. When the waer DJs spoke with Weiner and the God shows before the album came out, they asked what every Deadhead tape freak in their place would ask.
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E
Does it get into the 74 jam? No, it does not. And if you like 7 4, we got more material coming. Oh, you're gonna like the music. Evans 4 Too hard now. This one's real easy. I got an easy 74 up my sleeve.
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C
Hey, no spoilers, Weir. The DJs definitely like the further out parts of the Dead, like say, the jams on Europe 72. Donna and Keith provide a count pointer Count on the state of space music in the Dead. Donna there's not really any of that type of material in our mouth when.
- [46:54]
E
We play it live. The music's all there on a single album. It doesn't seem altogether appropriate right now to put a lot of space music and stuff like that, especially in as much as our space music hasn't really molted quite that much further into into something that we want to really showcase yet. We're working on that, and that'll probably come up in one of our future albums.
- [47:18]
C
Peter Egart left us this message@stories.dead.net I was lucky enough to catch the Grateful Dead for the first time as a college freshman at The University of Illinois. 2:22:73 was my first show. Later in the fall, I was working for our college radio station, which was actually two stations in one dormitory broadcasting service and an over the air FM station, which was the mother ship. I was music director for DBS and my friend Pat was music director for fm. And in those days, as a music director, we would rate the songs that came in off every album that was sent to us from the record companies and rate them for their. For what would fit our format and maybe which songs might be a single that would be off that album. And oftentimes the record companies would suggest a single. And in this case, when we got Wake of the Flood into the station, there was a. A letter along with it that said, here comes sunshine. Let's make it happen. Essentially that's what it was in those words, sunshine. And one day I was walking down the hallway of the station, my friend Pat was coming towards me with the Wake of the Flood album under his arm and he said, Pete, what do you think about the single off Wake of the Flood? And I looked at him and said, I don't know, I don't think it's Here Comes Sunshine. And without missing a beat, we both said at the same time, Eyes of the World. Maybe the suits at Grateful Dead Records had the same idea. In early November, the band returned to the record plan to chop an even shorter version of Eyes of the World to be released on a single, cutting almost 2 minutes from the 5 minutes 19 seconds on the LP to a 3 minute 26 second edit, cutting out the verse with There Comes a Redeemer plus a chorus and a solo on the single. It was back with the first few parts of Weather Report Suite. It didn't fare much better than Let Me Sing youg Blues Away.
- [49:48]
B
Sometimes we visit your country and live in your home Sometimes we ride on a horse Sometimes we won't know Sometimes the songs that we hear are songs of our.
- [50:13]
C
And if you're still bummed they didn't include the 78 ending on the album. There have now been something like three dozen official releases of the song from 1973 and 1974, around half of the times they performed it. One version that heads love was recorded June 18, 1974 at Freedom hall in Louisville. Now on road trips, volume two three, with some especially aggro Keith Godshow playing.
- [50:42]
B
Sam.
- [51:08]
C
As far as I know, it's the only time that Keith hit that high harmony part. The pianist Holly Boling did a transcription of the Louisville 74 version of Eyes of the World for her 2020 album Better Left Unsung. We spoke with her for our Plain Dead episodes.
- [51:23]
H
The first time that I ever arranged any Grateful Dead music for the piano was I did a version of the Freedom Eyes of the World. And I did it for the project that jam bass was doing before the Fare Thee well shows, where a bunch of different musicians did their own spin on a different Dead song, counting down to the shows, which was kind of a crazy one to dive into. I did it as a jam transcription, which the idea was to approach it more like a classical interpretation where I'm not improvising in it. I'm taking this thing that was a much bigger sound and rearranging it for one instrument. The Louisville Freedom Hall Eyes. I did a bunch of Phil's bass lines on that thing because he's really the melody for some of the sections of the jam. I did them and put him in my left hand. And I even experimented with. Maybe I should try to play it with my right hand because it's so melodic and it's so all over the place on the piano. And I ended up keeping it in my left to keep the challenge. And I swear, man, learning that guy's bass lines on my left hand while holding down Bob's rhythm guitar on the right is like, what built my hand independence.
- [52:55]
B
Sam.
- [53:45]
H
You know, if you're looking at. At a scene and you have five different painters that are all lined up, and everyone's gonna paint what they see, but everyone's gonna do it in a different way. And someone's gonna really focus in on, like, the colors that are over here in the contrast. And someone else is really gonna be all about the light and the dark. And someone else is gonna be all about the little gritty angles. It's about the rhythm and the fact that everyone is super tight together after it's been all over the place. Because that thing goes from, like, expansive melody lines that are chromatic and all over the place, and then it sucks back in. And everyone says, right. It's about the whole thing right there, and about the rhythm and. And the space that's left between that rhythmic pattern. That's the thing there.
- [55:05]
C
One of my own favorite versions comes from the song's original 1973, 1974 window as well. Specifically September 11, 1974, in London, both for the recording itself, which I've loved for years, and the story behind it. Ned Lagin was on the Europe 74 tour performing Seastone sets many nights through the Wall of Sound with Phil Lesh and often Jerry Garcia, which would then transition into Dead Sets. You can hear the longer version of this story in our special Nedcast from Season two. The first two nights were really fucked up because of power supplies and London and coke and stuff.
- [55:40]
E
So on the afternoon of the third day, we had a band meeting and.
- [55:45]
C
A crew meeting and everybody decided to flush all their stashes and take LSD that night to get away from cocaine and get back to the Brotherhood or Sisterhood or, you know, the family from the Seastones set. One by one, the members of the Dead joined, with Ned staying on electric piano, playing a 70 minute sequence that went from Seastones into Eyes of the World into Warfrap. Eyes is around 31 minutes or longer if you count the start time as the moment in the Prelude jam when it becomes obvious they're headed there. This is Ned taking a gorgeous early lead on Rhodes. You can hear Keith Gotcha's grand piano just behind him. Askataper I love how when the Dead decided to reconnect themselves to a larger consciousness, they used Eyes of the World, a function the song has almost certainly served for plenty of Deadheads, almost as if lyricist Robert Hunter was doing something intentional when he wrote the words. It was a song that could channel powerful forces both musically and internally. To discuss that, please welcome back our very good friend Eric Davis. Eric writes a great newsletter called the Burning Shore, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast I recently worked as an assistant editor on Eric's forthcoming anthology of art from Mark McLeod's LSD blotter collection, coming out in 2024 from MIT Press. We've also linked@dead.net deadcast welcome back, Eric.
- [57:39]
E
Once in a while you get shown the light in stranger places. If you look at it right like that particular line has triggered aha moments in thousands or tens of thousands of dancing fools because it's particularly geared for a certain kind of aha moment. You know, I think the chorus of the Wheel is one that is definitely found many cosmic dancers churning through a kind of grok about the nature of time and repetition. And there's these moments in the lyrics where there's sort of like an extra sort of pressure on that, like psychedelic knowing. And Eyes is like, for me, the great example. That's the best example. That's the one that's hit me the most.
- [58:25]
C
Eric's got some heady places to bring us, so we're going to thread them with one of his favorite versions of Eyes of the World. Recorded at Winterland on November 11, 1973.
- [59:03]
E
Because it's just this extraordinary possibility that's available in all of our minds, that just right now, this mind, these eyes, seeing this scene in front of me with this cup, this cup of tea, this computer is. It is awake. Is the world. Whatever. There's a famous bit from the German mystic Eckhart where he talks about, like, the. The eyes that are looking for God. That idea that, like, the one that what's actually looking out for God or realization is God itself in you. So it's this kind of weird loop. And Hunter gestures towards that loop. But instead of saying, like, it's not like, wake up and find out that you're the eyes of God, or, wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the universe. That's cool. But there's something particular about it being the world. Not the far out, not the ultimate reality, but the world, this world, the world of birth and death, the world of mortality, of animals, of weather, of frustration, of love affairs. And, you know, that whole sense of the kind of cosmic nature of materiality and particularly the natural world is really throughout that whole song and in a lot of dead. It's like in Rick Griffin's artwork, even the artwork for this record has a sense of this kind of cyclicity of natural cycles and this sort of desire to both embrace it, but also maybe get out of it. Because you got to die, which kind of sucks. But, like, maybe there's a way to kind of see the whole thing. And so it's the eyes of that.
- [61:27]
C
We'll let Eric loose on Rick Griffin's cover art another day. But Eric found something deep in Eyes of the World, which he notes will be an upcoming essay from his Burning Shore newsletter.
- [61:36]
E
I've been interested in Buddhism for a long time, and I read sort of scattershot across all varieties of Buddhism. And I'm really interested in the teachings that are called Dzogchen or Mahamudra, which are in some ways considered like, the highest teachings of, and even secret teachings in Tibet and Vajrayana. They tend to emphasize the kind of simple, pure clarity of mind without any particular content. And they're not really about, like, doing elaborate visualizations or elaborate rituals or elaborate this and that. It's really pointing directly to the empty and radiant nature of mind. It's kind of a trippy sort of genre of Buddhist theorizing. And so I've been kind of into that for a while. And then, lo and behold, I discovered that there was a book translated A book of a text from Long Chenpa, who's this spiritual genius in 13th or 14th century Tibet, you know, real master, like one of the all time greats. And the title of this volume, which was a short text that was translated and had some commentary by Tibetan and American scholars, is, you are the Eyes of the World. Wait a second, how did, how did that get there? Because it's not the title of the actual, the text that they're doing. So it was clearly like the translator's choice to pick this title. And I'm like, what? What's going on there? And it was weird for me, not just that, oh, here's the Dead lyric as the title of an obscure Tibetan Dzogchen text. That's an interesting question in itself, but it was also that it res. For me, it resonated with something truly profound about that song, and particularly the chorus and that and that lyric and how it functions in the phenomenology of experiencing the Dead, particularly on psychedelics. I know a Tibetan translator who's a cool guy. He informed me that of the great translators of Tibetan in America, a number of them are Deadheads. And there's one guy named Craig Preston who wrote a foundational text called how to Read Classical Tibetan. And in the acknowledgments of this book, he not only thanks the Grateful Dead, but he thanks them for particular sets, for particular shows.
- [64:49]
C
In the 90s, the American Buddhist journal Tricycle would conduct a reader survey and discover that 83% of their respondents came to Buddhism via psychedelics, which might not be a perfect sample, but still instructive.
- [65:02]
E
There's clearly some sort of organic connection there between psychedelics and American Buddhism. And for me, in particular, Eyes of the World is the song that kind of condenses or crystallizes that connection. Whether or not that was in, you know, Hunter's Head is not really as interesting to me as just the fact that this phrase emerges.
- [65:30]
B
Sam.
- [65:56]
E
So I asked my friend, well, does the term eyes of the world appear in Tibetan at all? Like, since it's not the name of this particular text? He said, yeah, actually it does. It's. It's one of the words for a translator. So that he. And there's this whole kind of lore about this word and how it kind of works, but the idea of, like, eyes of the world or eyes of a, of a physical place, a loca, is a phrase that's used and particularly around translation. And that really interests me because translation is this whole thing of, like, what do you do if you get that experience. You've had that experience where you. You. You've woken up, like, waking up like. It's a great ancient metaphor, mystical understanding. They talk about today a Buddhist awakening. You awaken to what? That you are it. That the mind is you. That the mind is. The Buddha is your mind. And whatever you want to say it is. Of course, then the problem is, how do you. How do you communicate that? How do you. Can you use that to show other people? Because you start using language, it gets complicated. You. Well, how do you do it? How do you translate these extraordinary experiences?
- [67:05]
B
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world as it features its own and thoughts on its own.
- [67:22]
E
And that's sort of what I love about this kind of cluster of connections, because just the injunction wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world is such a beautiful and strange condensation of a certain kind of, like, mystical GRA.
- [67:43]
B
Song.
- [67:57]
E
It's an injunction. Even though it's very lovely and kind of hippie trippy and it's nice natural imagery and you're. Oh, it's so beautiful. And homelands or whatever, but it's still. Wake up and find out. Like, do it, do it, do it now, right now. Why are you stopping? Don't forget the DMT flash. Like, it's right there right now, you know, and there's so. There's kind of a punch in that chorus that I think is also part of its power.
- [68:46]
C
It's a powerful chorus, no question. Maybe like a higher consciousness version of Workers of the World Unite. It was almost the only part of the song that didn't change. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
- [68:57]
D
There's that scene during the Grateful Dead movie where a woman is dancing to Eyes of the World to that jam at the end, and she's just freaking out because it's just so intense. And every time I hear it, that's the feeling I get. And I'm not at Winterland in 1974. I'm in my car, I'm at home listening. I just love what they do with it. I love the space within it.
- [69:48]
C
That was the version that introduced me to the 73. 74 and in. They took 1975 off the road, though, played a few local gigs, including an album release show for Blues for Allah at the Great American Music hall on August 13, which involved some intense rehearsals. Eyes of the World made its return. There's no 7, 8 ending, but there is a cool bass solo over a dramatically alternating outro jam before giving way to a drum break. For many, this Eyes of the World became just as defining as the Wake of the Flood version when it was released on one from the vault in 1991. Davis Schneiderman left us this message at stories.dead.net this is more or less how I first experienced Eyes of the World as well. The first time I heard Eyes of the World would have been April 1991. I was 16, young for 11th grade, and I had just purchased one from the Vault from the local CD store. Oversized cardboard sleeve and likely it cost $16.99, a small fortune I had to accumulate as a line cook at the local Golden Corral. I didn't know enough about the Grateful Dead to understand anything about their chronology. In my small suburb outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, both Touch of Grey and Casey Jones could have all been released in the same year, and that year could have been anywhere from yesterday back to Woodstock. And so I bought one from the Vault in that record store, and I told my friend the next day at school that the Grateful Dead have a new album. I was excited, as if it had been recorded at a live show just a few months before. I was enthralled immediately, and it was Eyes of the World in particular that carried me somewhere I had never been. There was something about the way the song passed through the air in my room that reminded me of Dark Star, the only other long track I really knew. But Eyes felt like it was opening up a different piece of my brain and pressing it against a different part of the sky. Whereas the Dark Star on Live Dead helped me travel the spaceways, I Eyes was for me, endlessly rooted. It was the breaking of the soil under my feet into a field bursting with possibility. David Lemieux when they brought it back.
- [72:44]
D
In 76 so there's some great versions on that June tour in particular, right.
- [72:50]
B
Outside the laser gate of Winning. Wondering whether or not that's winning Wings a mile long Just wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.
- [73:20]
C
That was from June 11, 1976 in Boston on the June 1976 box set one of the first shows back. It might sound like the same old Eyes of the World, but for this particular version, the extended jam with the ominous alternating chords was moved to the song's introduction, though that didn't last long either. Over the course of the so called Comeback tour and the next decades, the song changed in ways that could be subtle but also quite radical. We're not going to run through every single variation in subspecies, but enough to get a sense of the song's wild and unceasing evolution. More like slow motion, instant composition. So let's do a little eyes watching.
- [74:05]
D
In the Dead's 30 years of performing, frankly there there aren't a lot of songs that did this that not only had monumental changes year to year, but even within a year can have a slower, a 70s version rendition kind of tempo. And it can also have that super speedy version. And there's very few songs like this. Most songs had a tempo and that's what they stuck with. Eyes of the World was a song. I almost feel that it was their own way on stage to keep things interesting for themselves. And I love that about Eyes of.
- [74:38]
C
The World, the studio version and live version. So 1973 through 1975 all hovered between 106 and 110 beats per minute. With the return in 1976, the song sped up slightly, clocking usually a bit over 120bpm during the June 1976 tour. Thanks to my friend, musicologist Brian Felix for pointing me towards the world of simple BPM tapping apps for smartphones. Just put on a jam, tap your finger to the beat and it'll measure it for you. It's like a pocket calculator for music nerding and a way to measure one of the song's changing elements. Here's a bit from June 28th in Chicago where it bounces around 125bpm. For this and some others, you might have to ask a taper to hear.
- [75:22]
B
The rest of the Sam.
- [75:52]
C
The structure of the song had already gotten pretty modular, but the vacuum left by the old fireworks ending seemed to call out for new inventions, at least for a little bit. On this Chicago version, it opened into a jam on Happiness as drumming the piece on Mickey Hart's then new Diga Rhythm Band LP that soon evolved into Fire on the Mountain. This is what a 140 40bpm eyes of the World sounds like. About as fast as they'd ever do it. From July 14, 1976 at the Orpheum in San Francisco. A few days later, July 17, now Dave's picks 18, the Tempo is back down to a more luxurious 120bpm and the Jam becomes a platform for a cool motif initiated by Keith Godshow that sounds like a memory of the old ending.
- [77:34]
B
Sam.
- [78:01]
C
On September 28th in Syracuse, it unfolded into a one time only theme that Dick Lotvalla labeled the Orange Tango gem for reasons that make sense to me in a synesthetic sort of way. Now on Dick's Picks 20. I mean, what the heck is that? Maybe it's just a supplication jam. Whatever it is, it's a beautiful one time only flowering. By the spring of 1977, it slowed down slightly, settling into a nice space that's a bit faster than the earlier versions, but chiller than the more manic takes. The ominous alternating chords aren't gone entirely, but they're not part of the song so much as part of its harmonic language. You can hear Geith Godshow lean in that direction on lots of versions in 1977, like this one from May 7th. Now on, get shown the light. Just listen to those marvelous dark little clouds.
- [80:09]
D
Just magnificent versions. 77. There's some pretty speedy versions, but they also really rocked it out. It just had so many iterations through the years, from the slower to the faster to the much faster, back to the slower. And I just. I really feel it was a song that always works for the Grateful Dead. Whenever I saw it live, whether it was in 88, which was one of the lesser interesting years for it compared to 1973 or 77 or 90. But even those were just terrific to see live. I saw some great versions of Eyes of the World at that time. I mean, really great stuff.
- [80:48]
C
There's one version from 1977, especially that mini Heads love.
- [80:52]
D
You think of English Town, where it's a powerful song, it's a lot faster, but it's just Jerry Shredding, you know, when we talk about Jerry Shredding, that's what he's doing on those versions.
- [81:26]
C
Even without the big ending, it still had the power to make memories. The September 3, 1977 version of Eyes of the World from Raceway park in Englishtown, New Jersey. Dix Picks 15 is a jam centerpiece of the Dead's biggest outdoor gig since Watkins Glen, therefore becoming the jam centerpiece of many formative experiences for the youth of the northeastern United States. Standing in for these Deadheads is Mike Ruggieri, who left us this message@stories.dead.net my.
- [81:53]
I
Favorite version of Eyes of the World is from the very first Dead show I attended. My cousin, some friends and I went to our first show at Englishtown Raceway in New Jersey in September of 77. We were just 15 years old. We lived in Yonkers, New York, a suburb north of New York City, and took a train into Manhattan and then a bus from the Port Authority two hours out to Englishtown. It was an absolutely crazy day. As we arrived by bus, the roads were all blocked. As we got close to the Raceway with the roads clogged, we just all just ran off the bus and headed to the show. It was the largest crowd I'd ever been in in my whole life. The day was hot and humid and hotter again with absolutely no shade. But the music, as you know, was amazing. Hours and hours later when the show was over, we realized we had absolutely no idea where to get the bus back to Manhattan. So we found a payphone and called my mom in Yonkers, New York and fortunately we had cousins in Englishtown, so who knew? So she called them to come pick us up. Of course, the show is like a mini Woodstock and was all over the news that day. So my mom had been worried the whole day. When we met our English Town cousin, he was worried that we were carrying drugs because apparently the news reports were focused on everyone smoking pot at the show. He said, I know the cops in this town, you guys better not have any drugs. We laughed and we told them no, we had no drugs. At least we had none left. So my mom and uncle drove two hours from Yongvas to come pick us up. That two hour ride home was fun. Not this was my very first show and it's still the best Eyes of the Worlds I've ever heard. And I still listen to it often on Dick's picks 15.
- [84:26]
C
If you glance at Grateful Dead set lists from early 1977, you might note Estimated Profit and Eyes of the World starting to bump up against one another and then eventually segue into one another. It happened for the first time on May 15, 1977 in St. Louis, now in the May 1977 box, and around 175 times after. Thanks, Jerry Bass. In 1988, Garcia explained to Blair Jackson why he loved the transition from Estimated Profit into Eyes of the World. In an interview conducted for the sadly out of print book Going down the Road, A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion, Garcia said they have an interesting key relationship to each other. You can play an E major seventh scale against the leading F sharp minor in Estimated Profit without changing a note. So it's the same intervals exactly. It's just in different places on the scale that makes it so you can play through a lot of places. And when we're making that transition, we go from like B minor to C7 to A little E minor or a little C major. There are all these possible changes so that by just changing one or two intervals, all of a sudden they'll work. But sometimes we have to discuss them because they're not all that obvious. It's not obvious what the leading tones are also the rhythmic relationship is very off, so I can find a pulse in there that'll just be a perfect tempo for Eyes of the World, regardless of what tempo Estimated Profit was at. And that makes it interesting for me because it's wide open.
- [86:28]
B
Sam.
- [87:04]
C
That version of the Transition was from September 4, 1980. Now download series volume 7. With the tempo coming in extra briskly around 130 bpm. The tempo varied incredibly, and still does, depending who's playing it. We're going to follow the Eyes groove a little bit further. Let's reset our ears slightly. This is from November 5, 1977, in Rochester. Now Dix picks 34. Notably, it's not played coming out of another song, which it seems like sometimes resulted in slower versions. The double drummers are playing a more pronounced backbeat, but the tempo and feel are pretty close to the original 1973 versions. But some funny things happen with all the tempo shifts to the point where there are a few different arrangements of Eyes of the World that almost sound like different songs. In this version from May 14, 1978 in Providence. Now, in the 30 trips around the Sunbox, Garcia barely even states the feel and rhythm of Eyes going into it around 134bpm and treating it more like a mode of soloing than a song with a form. But then in the spring of 1981, Garcia basically rewrote his guitar part entirely and played it that way for most of the year and occasionally in years thereafter. This version is from Hartford, April 18, 1982, where it's easy to hear it. I think of that as the 81 arrangement of eyes, even though it lasted a while longer on and off. As Sean o' Donnell points out, it's like a fusion of Weir's rhythm parts for Eyes of the World, and the music never stopped. What's funny is that I think after playing it so many ways for so many years, with the rest of the band coming up with new parts to match, Garcia more or less reverse engineered Weir's feel from the Wake of the Flood era. Here's what Weir's part sounds like for reference. The tempos shifted, the jams extended, the feels were all over the place. If you pick a random Dead show from the early 1980s that includes eyes of the World, it's almost impossible to know what it's going to sound like. No other Dead song varied as widely from version to version, even if the jams contracted a bit. David lemieux as the 80s go on.
- [90:38]
D
Those are the ones that I sometimes I'm not so keen on 85, 86, those really fast ones, the ones that clock in at six minutes. The tempo was really fast, but Jerry's playing really fast. There's the other part is that, yes, it's really fast, but they're hitting their changes perfectly, which is they're not blowing it because it's so fast. So they're hitting their changes and Jerry is still able to play incredibly quickly on them.
- [91:27]
C
That was Hartford 87, aka Dave's Picks. 36, 87.
- [91:31]
D
I saw a couple versions that were again, very, very fast. And then it was like 88, 89. They were good. That I thought, very good. When they played in Hartford on the spring of 90, it was still a faster version came out of playing in the band, which I love playing Eyes. What a combo. But then on 3, 25, that was the day they decided, let's slow this song back down. Let's bring it back to the 1974 Tempo. Which they did.
- [92:26]
C
That version on March 25, 1990, at the Knickerbocker arena in Albany, opened the second set, which it didn't often do. There'd been slow versions of Oz, almost all happening when the song came out of a quieter song or a pause in the action. It might not even have been planned to slow the song down until Garcia started playing it. But the Knickerbocker version set the stage for what to many Deadheads was a pivotal early 90s moment.
- [92:48]
D
And then the very next version, Branford's in the house. They play Eyes of the world at that 1974 Tempo, and Branford just. I mean, we know what Branford did with the song.
- [93:32]
C
That was Branford Marsalis hearing and playing Eyes of the World for the first time. The March 29, 1990 version of Oz would be released just six months later on Without a Net, Dead's first new live album in a decade. And it opened new doors. For starters, just the connection between Branford Marsalis and the Dead. Branford spoke with David Lemieux and Gary Lambert for the shakedown stream in May 2020. As soon as I walked on the stage, first of all, they had tower lights, which I hadn't seen since the 70s. That's already cool. You know, the light shows it become the Vara lights and everything sheen and ran, moving around. I'm like, damn, tower lights. That's great. And then they didn't have a set list. That was like the greatest thing, no set list. So literally anything could happen. And it was before they had the Talkback system. So they would literally kind of stop trying to say, okay, we all want to play. Hey, let's play this. Ah, let's do this. Let's do. Hey, let's do some Dylan, man. Yeah, that's great. I mean, I was like, man, this is. That's my kind of thing. I love that. He'd arrived at the show as a guest of Phil Lesh, who corralled his bandmates into having Marsalis join the band on stage. They did exactly what I would do when I don't know, someone. They said, so look, we'll bring you up on the last song of the first set. That way, if it sucks, you can say, yeah, thanks for playing, see you later. That's exactly what I do. Either at the end of the show or right before the intermission, I can say, yeah, man, thanks for coming.
- [94:56]
E
That.
- [94:57]
C
That's it. So trying to remember, I think it was Birds. That version is now in the so Many Roads box. They put me over there next to Jerry, and he started playing some things and I played off of him. He looked around and smiled, and we had a little thing going, and I thought that was it. And I said, well, thanks for letting me play. And they were all like, no, stay for the second half. It'd be great. And then everything after that was just, yeah, whatever that became. I definitely didn't expect that when I was driving down the New York throughway. The collaboration opened the door for the Dead's music in a bigger way. It seems like a given these days that the Dead's music would be compatible with jazz musicians, and there are a few instances of that happening in the 60s and early 70s, even more in Garcia's club bands with Merle Saunders. But the Dead shows with Branford Marsalis made it possible for them to undertake exciting collaborations with saxophone titan Or Net Coleman and younger lion David Murray, and set the tone for numerous developments in the years since Jerry Garcia's death in 1995. The song has meant so many things to so many people, in part because it's been so many things itself. There have been covers aplenty, but it's a song that's told its own story in so many ways that it's fitting we do another supercut, starting with a demo, following the album form and moving through versions from each year through 1995. We've posted a full list of dates and venues@dead.net deadcast.
- [97:46]
B
Right outside this lazy summer home Ain't got time to call you Song creation Ignore right outside the lazy gate of winter wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world Got the morning Sam There comes a redeemer and he slowly too fades away My loads of wagon behind him that's loaded with clay.
- [100:01]
C
Seeds.
- [100:01]
B
That were silent all burst into bloom and he gave light comes so quiet let's close on the heels of the.
- [100:13]
E
Day.
- [100:17]
B
Wake up you find out that you are the eyes of the world we now discover that you are the song that the morning Sam we live no particular way but I won't Sometimes we ride on your horses Sometimes we walk alone Sometimes hear all the songs.
- [101:51]
F
Of old.
- [101:56]
B
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the.
- [102:00]
F
World.
- [102:04]
B
As it teaches its all and the thoughts of the soul Discover it's you are the song that the morning it.
- [104:12]
C
And if you've gone to see any of the post Garcia Dead projects, it's changed even further lately with the Wolf Bros and Dead and company. In addition to sometimes singing Marvin Gaye's what Goes On, Weir seems to have added yet another new ending. We'll let you track down the tapes and leave you with this one final story about Eyes of the World, courtesy of Charlie Fraser, host of the Blues for Breakfast show on Wizn in Burlington, Vermont, and who plays in the band Mr. Charlie we were way up on the side of a mountain playing a private party for friends that we did every year and having ourself a grand old time with the fall colors and the beautiful day. We look over and there's four hikers standing at the edge of the field, so we invite them over. It turns out they had been up on the Long Trail which runs the length of Vermont, and have been taking a break, having a sandwich, talking to Grateful Dead and specifically talking about Eyes of the World when one of them said, wait a minute, do you hear Eyes of the World? And sure enough, they did. So they said, let's go investigate. So they came on down, joined our party and had themselves a grand old time for the rest of the afternoon, shaking their bones. It's amazing how you play Grateful Dead music. And they will come.
- [106:06]
A
Thank you very much for tuning in to the great good old Grateful Dead cast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode. Ron Rackow, Ned Lagin, David Lemieux, Brian Kehue, Holly Bowling, Eric Davis, Sean o', Donnell, Brian Schiff, Jake Hurley, Mike Dulgushkin, Dan o', Hanklein, Lippy, Peter Egart, Davis Schneiderman, Mike Ruggieri and Charlie Frazier. Extra Special thanks to Friend of the Dead cast David Ganz for contributing audio from his interview archive. We couldn't do it. David, thank you. And thanks very much to you for tuning in. Don't forget to, like, subscribe and share an episode of the Dead cast on your social media. And give us your Grateful Dead related stories by recording yours over@stories.dead.net Executive Producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.