Sensational '70's Tune for Monday, August 10th, '09

"Truckin'" is both a signature song for the Grateful Dead and an anomaly in its catalog. As the group developed a capacity for songwriting in the late '60s, it also embraced a private mythology that entranced followers and puzzled outsiders, its original songs featuring odd musical structures and highly abstract lyrics by poet Robert Hunter. With 1970's Workingman's Dead, both musical and lyrical tendencies were roped in somewhat, with the songs beginning to conform to folk, country, and rock conventions and Hunter's words turning more aphoristic than opaque. American Beauty, the follow-up to Workingman's Dead that was released only six months later, continued this trend. And with its final track, "Truckin'," both music and lyrics became surprisingly straightforward without losing any of their impact. In a sense, "Truckin'" was a typical Hunter lyric in that its verses were built on free-standing vignettes rather than a continuing narrative and were given over to striking imagery and turns of phrase. But for once there was no doubt about the scene the lyricist was setting. After accompanying the band on tour, he was giving his impressions of life on the road. He began with the slang phrase of the title, which dated back to blues songs of the 1920s, when it probably stood in for a similar word beginning with an "F"; which had been used for a 1935 song by Rube Bloom and Ted Koehler that became a number one hit for Fats Waller; and which had been adopted by underground comics illustrator R. Crumb, a popular San Francisco figure who had drawn Grateful Dead concert posters. Crumb's "doodah man," referred to in the lyrics, was pictured with exaggerated legs stretching out before him as he trucked down the street. In Hunter's terms, though, "truckin'" also referred to traveling around the country, actually, as well as metaphorically, in trucks. Hunter's travelogue owed something to Chuck Berry songs like "The Promised Land" as he named one city after another on the road. And he even recounted a specific incident, the January 31, 1970, arrest of the band on drug charges in New Orleans. "Set up -- like a bowling pin," was his defense. It was only the most extreme of the hassles mentioned in the lyrics; "Truckin'" is not a positive view of life on the road by any means, and even its most celebrated lines, the bridge "Sometimes the light's all shining on me/Other times I can barely see/Lately it occurs to me/What a long strange trip it's been," describe disorientation. Band members Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir combined to write a Chuck Berry-derived rock & roll shuffle to accompany Hunter's words and recorded a vibrant version with guest musician Howard Wales on organ for American Beauty. They introduced the song as the opening number of their concert at the Fillmore West in San Francisco on August 18, 1970. Warner Bros. cut the 5:09 album version to 3:13 for release as a single in November, and "Truckin'" became a minor chart entry, while American Beauty reached the Top 30 and eventually sold over one million copies. Warner Bros. put "Truckin'" on both of its Grateful Dead compilations, ^The Best of the Grateful Dead/Skeletons From the Closet (1974) and ^What a Long Strange Trip It's Been: The Best of he Grateful Dead in 1977. The Dead played "Truckin'" in their concerts regularly for 25 years. In the statistic-happy world of the Dead, it ranks among the group's most played songs. According to John W. Scott, Mike Dolgushkin, and Stu Nixon's -DeadBase X: The Complete Guide to Grateful Dead Song Lists, the Dead played 2,318 shows between 1965 and 1995, and they played "Truckin'" at 520 of those concerts, or better than once in every five performances. That puts the song in eighth place among the Dead's most-played songs. (Here are the first seven: "Me & My Uncle" [613], "Sugar Magnolia" [596], "The Other One" (aka "Quodlibet for Tenderfeet") [586], "Playin' in the Band" [581], "China Cat Sunflower" [552], "I Know You Rider" [549], and "Not Fade Away" [530].) Naturally, live versions have turned up on the many Dead concert albums, starting as early as Europe '72. As a song closely identified with the band, "Truckin'" has earned few covers outside of the many Grateful Dead tribute albums, among which Dwight Yoakam's version on 1991's Deadicated is notable.