http://arts.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/truckin.html#soft
"I guess they can't revoke your soul for trying"
The Annotated "Truckin'"
An installment in The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics.
By David Dodd
Research Associate, Music Dept., University of California, Santa Cruz
Copyright notice
"Truckin'"
Words by Robert Hunter; music by Garcia, Lesh, Weir
Copyright Ice Nine Publishing; used by permission.
Truckin' - got my chips cashed in
Keep Truckin - like the doodah man
Together - more or less in line
Just keep Truckin on
Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street
Chicago, New York, Detroit it's all on the same street
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings
Dallas - got a soft machine
Houston - too close to New Orleans
New York - got the ways and means
but just won't let you be
Most of the cats you meet on the street speak of True Love
Most of the time they're sittin and cryin at home
One of these days they know they gotta get goin
out of the door and down to the street all alone
Truckin - like the doodah man
once told me you got to play your hand
sometime - the cards ain't worth a dime
if you don't lay em down
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
What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?
She lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same
Living on reds, vitamin C and cocaine
all a friend can say is "ain't it a shame"
Truckin' -- up to Buffalo
Been thinkin - you got to mellow slow
Takes time - you pick a place to go
and just keep Truckin on
Sitting and staring out of a hotel window
Got a tip they're gonna kick the door in again
I'd like to get some sleep before I travel
but if you got a warrant I guess you're gonna come in
Busted - down on Bourbon Street
Set up - like a bowling pin
Knocked down - it gets to wearing thin
They just won't let you be
You're sick of hanging around and you'd like to travel
Tired of travel, you want to settle down
I guess they can't revoke your soul for trying
Get out of the door - light out and look all around
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
Truckin - I'm goin home
Whoa-oh baby, back where I belong
Back home - sit down and patch my bones
and get back Truckin on
"Truckin'"
Musical details:
Key: E
Time signature: 12/8
Chords used: E, A, B, Bsus4, G, D, F#, Amaj7
Songbook availability:
Grateful Dead
Anthology
Best of the Grateful Dead
New Best of the Grateful Dead
The Music of the Grateful Dead Made Easy for Guitar
Grateful Dead Anthology for Guitar
Best of the Grateful Dead for Guitar
New Best of the Grateful Dead
Classic Grateful Dead: Selections from 'American Beauty'
Recorded on:
American Beauty (For an article by Blair Jackson on the process of recording and
writing the song, see Stephen Barncard's site.)
This version included on What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been
Europe '72
Dick's Picks, Vol. 1
Hundred Year Hall
First performance: August 18, 1970, at the Fillmore West, San Francisco. They opened the
show with an acoustic set, and "Truckin'" was the first song. Other firsts in the show were
"Operator", "Brokedown Palace," and "Ripple." It remained in the repertoire thereafter.
Covers:
Two versions by the Pop-O-Pies, on their White EP.
Dead Ringers on Dead Ringers
Dwight Yoakam on Deadicated
Tesla on Five-Man Acoustical Jam
Weir, Hunter, Lesh, and Hart were interviewed about the song in the film Classic Albums: The
Grateful Dead: American Beauty. (Aired on VH-1, April 1997. Directed by Jeremy Marre.
Copyright Isis Productions, Daniel Television, Grateful Dead Productions, 1997.)
Weir: There was a romance about being a young man on the road in America,
and you had to do it! It was a rite of passage. And at the same time, it was the
material that you drew from to write about. We were starting to become real
guys, and really enjoying the hell out of it. We toured more or less four to six
months out of the year. It was our bread and butter-we weren't selling that
many records. And we had a lot of fun out on the road, got into a lot of
trouble... We left some smoking craters of some Holiday Inns, I'll say that, and
there were a lot of places that wouldn't have us back. All of this is absolutely
autobiographical, all the stuff in "Truckin."
Hunter: This was written over a long period of time. And there were lots-I had a
verse: "Once in a while the music gets into the street, fifty old ladies bug every
cop on the beat, they're putting the lock on Lindley Meadow and Kezar,
beginnin' to look like we can't play in the park." Yeah, that kind of stuff, had
lots and lots of verses, I thought, we had all thought that we could keep adding
to Truckin over the years, but the funny thing is, once you get it down, it is
down. You don't go back, you don't revisit it.
Hart: It was autobiographical. We told our story in song. So, I knew that the
words were strong. They were powerful, they were depicting real events in real
people's lives, and they became part of the fabric, part of the history of our day.
People could sing it and know there were events directly connected with it.
Lesh: In those days there wasn't any rock and roll bubble that would isolate us
from the world as we went through it. So the walls of the hotels were all thin,
and we didn't charter planes, so we flew commercial when we flew, and a lot of
times we took buses, and I see a group of much younger people doing things in
a way that I envy, now, looking back on it.
Truckin'
According to The Golden Road,
"'Truckin'' was a popular dance step, and the word is immortalized in a number
of '20s and '30s songs, including the blues "Keep on Truckin'" and Blind Boy
Fuller's "Truckin' My Blues Away.""--Winter 1984.
Step It Down has a section on the "Zudie-O", a dance which incorporated "trucking"--
"You better say 'strutting' instead of 'trucking.' They're about the same, but the
old folks just didn't like you to say it so raw."--p. 137
and, later, describing the step:
"The step used in this dance also takes the same count and is a 'strutting'
two-step: step forward with the right foot, bring the left foot up to a close, step
in place with the right foot, and rest. Repeat with the opposite feet."--p. 137
The Oxford English Dictionary cites many different meanings for "truck" and "trucking". One
shade has "truck" as slang for sexual intercourse, which may explain the statement above about
"trucking" being too raw a word for the "old folks." And regarding the dance:
"5. To dance the truck. U.S. slang. 1937 Amer. Speech XII. 183/1 Only
negroes can really truck. [etc.]"
and
trucking 2. The action of dancing the truck. slang. 1944 C. CALLOWAY
Hepster's Dictionary in Of Minnie the Moocher (1976) 260 Trucking, a
dance introduced at the Cotton Club in 1933."
The OED also recognizes the phrase "Keep on trucking":
"to persevere: a phrase of encouragement. 1972. Sat. Rev. (U.S.) 28 Oct. 12
One poster...shows the famous R. Crumb cartoon characters and bears the
caption: 'Let's Keep on Truckin'."
The New Grove Dictionary of American Music describes "Truckin'" as a dance step which
was incorporated into the "lively and strenuous circle dance", the Big Apple. It describes the
"truckin'" step, "with its shuffle step and waving index finger."
The Great Song Thesaurus lists one other song entitled "Truckin'": (1935), w. Ted Koehler; m:
Rube Bloom.
doodah man
Skeleton Key cites Hunter as saying that the doodah man is just lifted from the "doodah" chorus
of "Camptown Races", by Stephen Foster.
soft machine
Possibly an allusion to William Burroughs novel, The Soft Machine.
According to The Dictionary of Literary Biography,
"The 'soft machine' is both the 'wounded galaxy,' the Milkwy Way seen as a
biological organism diseased by the virus-like Nova Mob, and the human body,
riddled with parasites and addictions and programmed with the 'ticket' )that is,
obsolete myths and dreams) written on the 'soft typewriter' of culture and
civilization."--vol 8, p. 95
There was also a British rock band by the name of Soft Machine, in the late 60's to early 70's.
The Pop-O-Pies, on their version of "Truckin'" sang:
"Dallas, got a soft-drink machine..."
I always loved that.
And this note from a reader:
Subject: truckin Date: Sat, 12 Apr 1997 17:31:49 -0700 From: Jonathan Parent
I was reading and very much enjoying your pages of GD songs and ran on the
part about "soft machine". I read your link of the soft machine and found my
take to be very differant. I was thinking that it referred to the "political
machines" of the 20's and 30's. The cities were notorious (e.g. Chicago, New
York, Detroit) for their corupt govenment--Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall in
New York and other rings of the like. Also, moonshine was run by truckers.
Moonshine was the staple of big biz in the 20's and 30's. A soft machine could
be referring to the fact that if you wished to "operate" you had to pay a small
percentage of your haul. A soft machine could refer to the fact Dallas bosses
might not enforce the fee, so the truckers would go there. Also Houston - too
close to New Orleans could refer to rival machines in compition. And if you
"worked" with one machine but not the other, you might not be so welcome. As
for New York - got the ways and means, might refer to the ways and means
commity, a board of biz that regulated biz and imposed high taxes and tarrifs on
interstate commerce. A lot of blue grass music is tales of a working mans strife,
what's more that than Truckin'?
thanxs
Jessup H. Ross
janus@hey.net
Sometimes the light's all shining on me
In Behind the Hits, Hunter describes writing the song, and notes that the line "Sometimes the
light's all shining on me" is by the band, not by him.
What a long strange trip it's been
Arguably one of the most famous lines in rock and roll, this snippet has served as title and
subtitle to a large number of books and articles, invoking, as it does, the epoch from which it
stems. It rates an entry of its own in Skeleton Key, which notes that the line's abbreviated form,
"WALSTIB", is instantly recognizable to Deadheads.
Here's a list (not claiming exhaustiveness) of books and articles which have used the phrase in
their titles:
20 Years of Rolling Stone: what a long, strange trip it's been (1987)
Some Lessons About Libel Law and Communication Science From the Long,
Strange Trip of Jeffrey Masson and the Case of the Fabricated Quotations by Clay
Calvert. (1994)
What a Long Strange Trip It's Been: a Hippy's History of the Sixties and Beyond,
by Lewis Sanders. (1989)
"Illicit Drug Use Revisited: What a long, Strange Trip It's Been" in Annalys of Internal
Medicine, November 15, 1993. By P.A. Selwyn.
"Magellan Star Scanner Experiences: What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been" in
Advances in astronautical sciences, Volume 74, p. 513. By Eric H. Seale.
sweet Jane
Robert Hunter, in his essay in reponse to Jurgen Fauth's piece on this site, provides an
explanation for this line:
"The intention was a parody of the '40's warning-style of singing commercial,
specifically "Poor Millicent, poor Millicent/ She ne-ver used Pep-so-dent/ Her
smile grew dim/ And she lost her vim / So folks don't me like Millicent / Use
Pep-so-dent! " I'm sure that the allusiveness, not that entirely outre in the '60's,
is well lost here in the '90's. So, it's perhaps an in-joke, but not one meant for
private consumption. Just a bit of black humor that fails to fire and emerges,
instead, as an enigma."
Listeners may well tend to think of the Velvet Underground's "Sweet Jane."
And this note from a reader:
Here's an interesting interpretation of the lines, "What in the world ever became
of sweet Jane?/She lost her sparkle you know she isn't the same/Livin' on reds,
vitamin C and cocaine/All a friend can say is 'Ain't it a shame?'"
Perhaps Sweet Jane can be seen as marijuana. Pot was all the rage for a while,
but then it lost its allure, and a lot of people (especially in the early '70s) moved
to pills and coke and other harder, more dangerous stuff. Somehow simple,
innocent pot lost its sparkle for many. Thus you could read the whole stanza as,
"Whatever became of marijuana? It used to be so much fun. Living on the hard
stuff, it's such a shame to see your friends go that way."
By the way, some people have long thought that vitamin C enhances the buzz of
certain drugs like LSD. And of course there's the belief, still common these
days, that vitamin C can somehow save your body from the ravages of all kinds
of abuse.
The stanza doesn't even have to be seen as a celebration of pot, since it could
just as easily be about growing up and realizing that drugs in general always
seem far more interesting when you first start playing with them than they do
after a while. A lot of people have friends who went far too far on that path.
You could also point all this in a slightly different direction and think of it as a
personal lament about your own loss of innocence.
All of this seems to dovetail nicely with Robert Hunter's comment that it was an
in-joke about certain '60s commercials, if you think of the advertised product as
pot.
I heard this basic idea some time ago from a fellow Deadhead. I only talked to
him the one time so I don't remember his name. But it works so well for me that
I haven't been able to hear that line ever since without thinking about it.
Dean Esmay -- esmay@syndicomm.com
Truckin' up to Buffalo
This note from a reader:
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 1995 22:57:18 -0800 (PST)
From: Eric Elliott
Subject: Truckin'
I don't know what the origin is, but many times I've heard the phrase "Shufflin'
off to Buffalo" in reference to dancing. I'm guessing that at some point Buffalo
was a big dance town? Since Truckin' was a type of dance it's possible that this
phrase is the source of the line "Truckin' up to Buffalo."
Thanks, Eric!
Take a look at the annotation for the word "Shuffle" in the Annotated "Chinatown Shuffle"
keywords: @geography, @gambling
DeadBase code: [TRUC]
First posted: May 8, 1995
Last revised: October 8, 1997
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