Grateful Dead – "China Cat Sunflower" (1969)

Crying Leonardo words

From out a silk trombone

I rang a silent bell

It’s a very special time of the year at 2 or 3 lines.

January is gone, and February is here . . . which means that it’s time for 28 Posts in 28 Days™.  Happy happy joy joy!

This year, 28 Posts in 28 Days™ will feature the best albums released during the first half of rock music’s “Golden Decade” – which began the year I entered 7th grade and ended the year I graduate from college.

Next year, 28 Posts in 28 Days™ will focus on the best albums from my college years – 1970 through 1974.

As for the next 28 Posts in 28 Days™ – we’re talking February 2028 – I might feature albums from my law school years.  Assuming I’m still alive in February 2028, of course.  (I have a condition called “I’m old,” and they tell me there’s no cure for it.)

[Note: for those of you who are new to the 2 or 3 lines party, I should explain what 28 Posts in 28 Days™ is.  I used to do 28 themed posts in February – one each day.  That got to be too hard, so I cut back to doing 12 themed posts in February.  However, I liked the 28 Posts in 28 Days™ name so I kept it.  If you took the name too literally, that’s on you!]  

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You younger 2 or 3 lines readers may wonder what the hell I’m talking about when I talk about a record album – also known as an LP.

An LP is a big round black thing that plays music.  Here’s a picture of one:

Many years ago, it wasn’t unusual for people to put an album on a turntable and listen to it straight through.  

Actually, they’d listen to the first side straight through, then turn the album over and listen to the second side.

Today, people construct playlists that usually contain songs by many different recording artists.  In essence, you create your own personalized albums rather than listening to the particular group of songs an artist has chosen to put on an album.  

If you want to repeat or skip a song on your playlist, it’s easy to do so.  But when all we had were LPs, repeating or skipping songs required some effort – you had to walk over to your record player, pick up the tone arm, and attempt to drop it on the blank groove that preceded the track you wanted to hear.  It was much easier just to listen to an album in its entirety.

Unfortunately, most albums were a mixture of good and bad tracks.  If you were lucky, the good tracks outnumbered the bad ones – but all too often, the reverse was true.  I hate to think how many albums I bought because they had two or three great songs that I had heard on the radio – only to discover that the rest of the album was filler.

While the albums I’m featuring in this year’s 28 Posts in 28 Days aren’t perfect, they’re pretty darn close to it.  Sure, you might find a stinker here or there, but the bulk of the albums consists of grade A stuff.   

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 SPOILER ALERT: there will no Beatles album in this year’s 28 Posts in 28 Days.

That will shock some of you.  But I make no apology for that.

The Beatles recorded a lot of great music.  But their albums contain a lot of clunkers.  None of them are as perfect as the ten albums I’ve chosen to feature this month.

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One other group that didn’t make the cut is the Grateful Dead.

Not every Grateful Dead song sucks.  But a lot of them do – including “China Cat Sunflower,” which I stumbled across recently on a Sirius/XM channel.

Robert Hunter said he wrote the song’s lyrics while “I had a cat sitting on my belly, and was in a rather hypersensitive state, and I followed this cat out to – I believe it was Neptune – and there were rainbows across Neptune, and cats marching across the rainbow.  This cat took me in all these cat places; there’s some essence of that in the song.”

Author Eric Wybenga said “China Cat Sunflower” has “one of the very few rock-and-roll lyrics (including Dylan’s) that has as much impact on the page as it does sung, if not more. . . . ‘It’s about acid’ does it less justice than the observation that it's about seeing, sensing, and making connections in a sensuous world.  Anyone out there remember what it was like to be three years old?”

I don’t remember what it was like to be three years old, but I hope it was nothing like the lyrics to “China Cat Sunflower”:

Look for a while at the china cat sunflower

Proud walking jingle in the midnight sun

Copperdome bodhi drip a silver kimono

Like a crazy quilt star gown through a dream night wind

Krazy Kat peeking through a lace bandanna

Like a one-eyed cheshire, like a diamond-eye jack

A leaf of all colors plays a golden-string fiddle

To a double-e waterfall over my back

Comic book colors on a violin river crying Leonardo

Words from out a silk trombone

I rang a silent bell, beneath a shower of pearls

In the eagle-winged palace of the Queen Chinee

Click here to listen to “China Cat Sunflower.”

Click here to buy the version of “China Cat Sunflower” that was released on the Grateful Dead’s 1969 studio album, Aoxomoxoa.

Grateful Dead – "U. S. Blues" (1971)

Red and white, blue suede shoes

I'm Uncle Sam, how do you do?

[NOTE: The late Ronald Reagan used to tell a joke about a very optimistic young boy who was given a big pile of horsesh*t for Christmas.  After receiving his gift, the child smiled, grabbed a shovel, and began digging.  When his father expressed his surprise that the boy wasn't disappointed with the present, the youngster replied, "Dad, with so much horsesh*t, there has to be a pony in here someplace!"  Today's featured recording – the 10th and last member of the 2025 class of inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES "GOLDEN DECADE" ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME – is one of the rare ponies to be found in the very large pile of horsesh*t produced by the Grateful Dead.  Here's a slightly edited version of my original July 5, 2012 post about "U. S. Blues."] 

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When I was a senior in college, I remember my girlfriend asking me why we had never been "into" the Grateful Dead.  (We were at a party at the time, and the host was playing a Grateful Dead song, and we probably somewhat impaired – which is almost a necessary condition to being into the Dead.)  She was almost as big a music fan as I was, but I don't think either of us owned a single one of their albums.

Chick magnet Jerry Garcia (circa 1974)

I did buy a Jerry Garcia solo album (Garcia) when I was in college on the strength of a couple of tracks I had heard on the radio, but I'm not sure I was even aware that Jerry Garcia was in the Grateful Dead.  (Hey, we didn't have the internet back then.)

I still have never listened to an entire Grateful Dead album straight through, and I'm not conversant with very much of their prolific recorded oeuvre.  But that won't stop me from expressing authoritative-sounding opinions about their body of work.

My impression was then (and remains today) that the Grateful Dead produced a few really good songs, but that life is too short to listen to much of their music.

I would say the same thing about Bruce Springsteen and Elton John – and Paul McCartney and John Lennon as solo artists.  Each of them produced a little gold but a lot more dross.  I don't think any of them has produced a CD's worth of worthwhile music.

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Along with "Bertha," "Truckin'," "Casey Jones," and a few others, "U. S. Blues" is a Grateful Dead keeper.  The song (which was the first track on the group's seventh studio album, From the Mars Hotel) is peppier than the usual Grateful Dead dirge -- the honky-tonk piano makes all the difference -- and the lyrics are clever and funny and not too political.  

The song's lyrics really remind me of rap lyrics – it's more about the way the words sound and fit together than their meaning:

Gimme five

I'm still alive

Ain't no luck

I learned to duck

The singer seems to be some kind of hustler, but he's a charming, lovable hustler – think Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man – and he's very, very cool under pressure:

Check my pulse

It don't change

Stays seventy-two

Come shine or rain

Saying "shine or rain" instead of the more familiar "rain or shine" to make the line rhyme is a very hip-hop thing to do – the rhyme is paramount, and inverting the usual word order gets your audience's attention.  (It's certainly true to say that the Grateful Dead's pulse "don't change" – it may get up to 72 in this song, but it's usually much lower than that.  Much of the time, it's barely perceptible.)

Wave the flag

Pop the bag

Rock the boat

Skin the goat

Now we're really rolling – that verse is 100% sound and . . . not fury, exactly . . . but it sure signifies nothing.  (Which is OK with me.)

I'm Uncle Sam

That's who I am

I hear a hint of Popeye's "I yam what I yam, and that's what I yam" in that line.

Shake the hand

That shook the hand

Of P. T. Barnum

And Charlie Chan

P. T. Barnum began his career as a showman in 1835, when he bought and put on display a slave who claimed to be 161 years old (and George Washington's nurse to boot).  He went on to exhibit General Tom Thumb (a midget who was less than three feet tall) and Chang and Eng, the original Siamese (conjoined) twins, and organized "The Greatest Show on Earth."

P. T. Barnum with Tom Thumb

Given Barnum's history as a mountebank and his utter contempt for the common man – his famous catchphrase was "There's a sucker born every minute" – it's no surprise that he went into politics, becoming mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and then entering the Connecticut legislature.  

I'll drink your health

Share your wealth

Run your life

Steal your wife

Of course he'll drink your health – especially if you're picking up the tab – because there's no better way to make a sucker out of you than by getting you drunk.

And of course he'll share your wealth – Uncle Sam shares your wealth every time you get a paycheck, but especially on April 15.

(Don't worry if he steals your wife.  If she's anything like most of the wives I know, he'll probably insist on giving her back to you very soon.)

We're all confused

What's to lose?

Wave that flag

Wave it wide and high

I hope none of you find it offensive that this song portrays Uncle Sam as a bit of a con man.   As the saying goes, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

That certainly doesn't mean all patriots are scoundrels, of course.  But it does mean that scoundrels often exploit patriotism – or religion, or economics, or science – so they can pull the wool over your eyes.  When all else fails, wave that flag!

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The Grateful Dead has to have been one of the most overrated live bands in history.  

Click here to see a 1978 performance of "U. S. Blues" at Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke University.  It was included on a live Dead album – an official one, not a bootleg – so the group must have thought that performance was a particularly good one.  Plus it appears to be the closing song of that show, so you would think the boys would have pulled out all the stops.

Despite all that, this is a pretty ho-hum rendition of the song.  Jerry Garcia keeps forgetting to sing into the microphone, and the band reduces the volume when they get to the chorus instead of belting it out – just the opposite of what they should have done.  (The verses are sung by Garcia, but the the backup singers join in for the chorus – usually, more voices equal more volume, but not here.)  

I'm not the first person to come to this conclusion: the popularity of the Grateful Dead as a live band can only be explained by the fact that about 90% of their typical audience was as high as a kite.  (Have you heard the old joke about the Dead?  What does a Deadhead say when the drugs wear off?  "This music sucks!")

Click here to listen to "U. S. Blues."  (The animated part of this video was produced by the U. S. Information Agency around the time of the Bicentennial, and it's very trippy – it will remind you a little of Yellow Submarine, but patriotic.)

Click here to buy "U. S. Blues" from Amazon.

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.

Grateful Dead – "Truckin'" (1970)

Lately it occurs to me

What a long, strange trip it’s been

Have you heard the 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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The Grateful Dead recorded a few good songs – I think today’s featured song is their very best one.  But most of their music blows.

They are overrated, overrated, OVERRATED!

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Click here to listen to “Truckin’,” which was released in 1970 on the Dead’s fifth studio album, American Beauty.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Seldom Scene -- "Rider" (1973)

I know you, Rider

Gonna miss me when I'm gone

Rarely does a day go by that I don't encounter music that makes me say to myself, "That song would be perfect for 2 or 3 lines."

Most of the times that happens, I'm talking a walk or riding my bike or driving in my car, and I forget the song because I don't write myself a note reminding myself not to forget it.

That happened with today's featured song, which I meant to write about a long time ago.  I don't recall quaffing a dram of Nepenthe any time recently, but something buried all thoughts of "Rider" deep within the flotsam and jetsam that inhabits my brain.  And there it might have stayed forever but for the fact that the previous 2 or 3 lines featured the Go Home Productions mashup of Blondie and the Doors titled "Rapture Riders."

In 1934, famed folklorists John and Alan Lomax included a song titled "Woman Blue" in their book American Ballads and Folk Songs.  

Their lyrics to "Woman Blue" -- ten verses' worth -- are prefaced with this comment:  "An eighteen-year-old black girl, in prison for murder, sang the tune and first stanza of these blues."  I have no idea where they got the other nine verses.

A folksinger named Bob Coltman arranged the song -- which he renamed "I Know You Rider" -- and began to perform it regularly in the late 1950s.  

Just about every folksinger worth worth his or her salt recorded it in the 1960s -- Joan Baez, Judy Henske, the Kingston Trio, Vince Martin and Fred Neil, Gale Garnett, and Judy Roderick among them.  

The Byrds, Hot Tuna, and even Janis Joplin recorded the song as well, and it was a staple in the Grateful Dead's live shows for years.  

There are many live recordings of the Dead performing the song.  All are pretty much equally lethargic and sloppy.  Here's an example:  

(Ugh.)

I think the Seldom Scene's 1973 recording of the song is BY FAR the best one out there . . . even though it doesn't include my favorite Lomax verse:

I'm goin' to de river, set down on a log

I'm goin' to de river, set down on a log

Ef I can'[t] be yo' woman, sho gonna be yo' dog

Bob Coltman altered that verse:

I'm goin' down to the river, set down on a log

I'm goin' down to the river, set down on a log

If I can't be your man, honey, sure won't be your dog

Sorry, Bob, but you've missed the point.  The singer isn't proud or defiant in the face of his (or her) rejection -- he (or she) is disappointed and bitter.  

The singer in the original version of the song is willing to be his (or her) lover's dog if he (or she) can't be her or (his) man (or woman), which is much more consistent with the rest of the lyrics.

(Geez.  2 or 3 lines is beginning to question its strict policy of gender-neutral writing.)

The Seldom Scene is an acclaimed bluegrass band that was founded in 1971 in . . . Bethesda, Maryland?

Hold your horses, Mr. 2 or 3 lines.  Are you trying to tell me that one of the greatest bluegrass groups ever doesn't hail from a hardscrabble Appalachian holler in western Virginia or Kentucky, but rather from a very affluent and tony suburb of Washington, DC?

That's exactly what I am telling you, boys and girls!

The Seldom Scene's original members included a medical student, a mathematician, and a National Geographic cartographer.  The band's mandolin virtuoso, the late John Duffey, was the son of an opera singer and a graduate of Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, which has been ranked among the best public high schools in the United States for decades.  (The school has an orchestra, a concert band, a jazz band, and a number of chamber music groups.  I don't think it's ever had a bluegrass ensemble, or offered instruction in mandolin, bluegrass fiddle, or resonator guitar.) 

John Duffey (1934-1996)

It's a bit of a mystery to me how a bunch of kids from Bethesda became a great bluegrass band.

After all, environment usually has a lot to say about how what kind of music you get from a musician.  For example, "gangsta" rap was the product of the mean streets of Compton, California.  (Straight Outta Pasadena?  Straight Outta Anaheim?  I don't think so.)

That's why it's impossible to imagine a hardcore punk band from a place like Bethesda, where the kids are mostly spoiled little country-club types whose parents are deeply embedded in the federal government, military-industrial complex, and mainstream media.

What in the world did the sons and daughters of privilege who grew up in Bethesda have to rebel against?  Soccer practice on a really hot and humid day?  Too much homework in AP English class?  

Here's "Rider":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Hot Tuna -- "Easy Now" (1974)

By this time tomorrow

Who knows where I'll be?

I almost always know where I'm going to be tomorrow.  Sometimes I wish that wasn't the case, but that's just not me.

For example, during a recent 12-day personal-business-personal trip to San Francisco, San Diego, and Granbury, Texas, I always knew where I was going to be tomorrow.  One day I woke up not knowing where I was going to spend the night, but that was an exception to my usual policy of planning trips well in advance.

One afternoon while we were in San Francisco, my first-born child (he's the one who is most like me, I think) and I spent a couple of hours in Haight-Ashbury, which is the quintessential San Francisco neighborhood for members of my generation:

Haight-Ashbury has been cleaned up quite a bit, but it's still a very eccentric neighborhood.  Here's the storefront of the Piedmont Boutique on Haight Street:

Haight-Ashbury has some spectacular examples of the wonderful Victorian houses that San Francisco is famous for.  Here's one group of Victorians on Ashbury Street:

Janis Joplin once lived in this pink Victorian on Ashbury Street:

Here's a close-up of the doorway of that house, which probably wasn't quite as gussied up when Janis was crashing there:

The most significant "Summer of Love" site in Haight-Ashbury is the house at 710 Ashbury Street that served as the Grateful Dead's communal home between October 1966 and March 1968:

Here's a photo of the Dead and assorted hangers-on sitting on the steps of that house in 1967:

Today there are odd little images of the band's members on the sidewalk in front of the house:

Here's a closeup of an image of the late Jerry Garcia:

After our architectural explorations, we slaked our thirst at the Magnolia Gastropub and Brewery, which stands just a block from the corner of Haight and Ashbury.  The Magnolia is very serious about their beer:

We sampled the Proving Ground IPA (very hoppy indeed -- 100 IBUs), Tillie's Union Ale, Kalifornia Kölsch (served in 9-ounce glasses instead of imperial pints, for some reason), and the very odd Weekapaug Gruit.  (Gruit refers to unhopped beer, which was popular in Europe in medieval times, but was replaced by hopped beers hundreds of years ago.  Gruit is flavored with a mixture of herbs instead of hops.) 

A few blocks west of Ashbury Street is the house at 2400 Fulton Street that the Jefferson Airplane moved into in 1968:

You Airplane fans out there are probably aware that the band issued a compilation album titled 2400 Fulton in 1987.  Now you know where the album's title came from.

In 1969, the Airplane's lead singer, Grace Slick, underwent surgery to remove nodes from her throat, so she was unable to perform for some time.  Several of the band's members formed Hot Tuna to give themselves something to do during Grace's recuperation.

Hot Tuna became the acoustic alter ego for the Jefferson Airplane -- after Grace recovered, Hot Tuna opened for the Airplane's live concerts at the Fillmore East and elsewhere.

Jefferson Airplane/Hot Tuna's Jack Casady

But the Airplane was not long for this world.  Marty Balin -- the primary creative force behind Surrealistic Pillow -- left the group early in 1971.  The rest of the group split into two factions -- Grace Slick and Paul Kantner (who had a child together) on one side and Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady on the other.

Kantner founded the Jefferson Starship, leaving Hot Tuna to Kaukonen and Casady, who eventually morphed it from a bluesy acoustic band into a hard-rock power trio.

When I worked at the Federal Trade Commission in the 1980s, people would bring in unwanted books and records and leave them on a table in the library for anyone who was interested to take home.  That's where I found a copy of Hot Tuna's fourth album, Phosphorescent Rat, which had been released in 1974:

I must have listened to the entire album at least once, but the only song on it that did anything for me was "Easy Now."

"Easy Now" is a great rock song, despite being very simple.  (Maybe it's a great song because it's very simple.)  It features a nasty, distortion-heavy lead guitar line and suitably growly vocals, but what makes the song special is its perfect "Goldilocks" rhythmic groove -- not too fast and not too slow, but just right.

The song's structure is repetitive and hypnotic.  Every four-bar phrase climaxes with a heavily accented second beat in the fourth measure, followed by two beats of near silence.  I would be happy if the song was twice or even thrice as long as it is.

Jorma Kaukonen

The lyrics of the song are simple but perfect as well.  The singer is restless -- he's got the "riding pneumonia" (which is similar to the "rockin' pneumonia and the boogie-woogie flu," I suppose), so he decides to hit the road and head for Mexico.

"What's he going to do when he gets there?" you might be wondering.

You're missing the point.  Getting to Mexico isn't the point of the trip.  The trip is the point of the trip.

The singer most likely will just head somewhere else once he reaches Mexico.  Hell, he might just turn around and come back home.  (You don't have a problem with that, do you?)

Here's "Easy Now":

Click here to buy the song from Amazon: