Grateful Dead – "Truckin'" (1970)

Lately it occurs to me

What a long strange trip it’s been

A Grateful Dead song in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME?

Believe me, I’m just as surprised as you are.

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Have you heard this old joke about the Grateful Dead?  

Q: What does a Deadhead say when the drugs wear off?  

A: “This music sucks!”

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Druggie humor isn’t funny.  (Are Cheech and Chong funny?  Are Dude, Where’s My Car? and Half Baked funny?  Or The Big Lebowski?)

Likewise, druggie music usually isn’t good music.

As regular readers of 2 or 3 lines know, I am not a big fan of the Dead. For one thing, their records are generally waaaaay too laid back for me.  (They badly needed a producer who constantly yelled “Let’s do another take, but this time PLAY WITH SOME F*CKING ENERGY!” at them.)

But even a blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while, and the Grateful Dead wrote so many songs that it’s almost a statistical certainty that a few of them would turn out to be good songs.

“Truckin’” (which was released on American Beauty in 1970) is probably the best of the Dead’s songs.  The 12/8 time signature gives the song a lot more rhythmic drive than the typical Dead song, and the lyrics reflect the zeitgeist as well as any song of that era.

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Did you know that the Grateful Dead performed “Truckin’” in concert a total of 520 times – making it the eighth-most performed Dead song ever?

If we were talking about any band other than the Grateful Dead, I would find it absolutely astonishing that were people out there who tabulated every live performance of every Dead song.  (I’m a little OCD myself, but knowing exactly how many times “Truckin’” was performed in concert, and how that song stacked up against other Dead songs when it came to live-performance frequency is a clear indication of OCD squared . . . maybe OCD cubed.)

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If you want to better understand what “Truckin’” is all about, click here and you’ll be taken to a webpage that provides an exhaustive (not to mention exhausting) prolegomenon to that song’s lyrics.

For example, you’ll learn that the most famous line from the song – “What a long strange trip it’s been” (which Dead fans abbreviate to “WALSTIB”) – is used in the titles of scientific articles that appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal and also in a volume of Advances in the Astronautical Sciences.

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Click here to listen to “Truckin’.”

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon.