There’s another song in Weir’s songbook, never performed live, that actually sort of gets at this same thing. I would shake you and me but Robin is shaking us now." She said this: “"Try not to squander your life on meaningless, multi-tasking bullshit. How often do we stand back and think about that? And when we do, isn’t it a lot easier to think of ourselves and our lives as meaningless specks against the sprawl of space and time?Īnne Lamott wrote this past week about Robin Williams’s death, and what meaning she can extract. This song is about our place in the long time-line of existence of all things. It’s much more difficult, I find, to credit the optimism and the hopefulness of our fellow beings on this fragile planet. It’s the easy answer, to say: what a load of crap. Is there meaning in the here and now of our life and loves that transcends even the end of the world (as we know it)?Ĭynicism, I have noted off and on throughout my life, is all too easy. The song challenges me to wonder if that is really true, or if it’s just a hopeful platitude. They tell only the sketchiest, most universal of love stories: our love will never die, even though the whole world will eventually end. OK, I didn’t say that very well, but anyone who has struggled with these late-period Weir songs knows what I mean.ĭixon’s words do seem simplistic, yes. The rhythmic patterns, the big multi-layered chords, the changes in meter and tone, all add up to something that seems calculated to disrupt any comfort we might have been sinking into. Weir’s songs from this era (anything from “Victim or the Crime” forward) seem aggressively innovative, shall we say. Weir seems to consciously take what could have been a fairly innocuous pop tune and put it into a hard left turn in several places in the song, but most notably in that chorus, with the backing vocals chanting “E-ter-ni-ty.” Opinions differ as to the song’s viability, overall quality, and worthiness, but there were times when the song was played in shows that the long, drawn-out “E-ter-ni-ty” struck just the right tone. Willie Dixon at Monterey Jazz Festival, 1981. He's just sitting there laughing, saying, 'Now you see it. I'm sitting there with my mouth open literally, and Willie's laughing. I can hear what's happening just sort of echoing around in there and I'm astounded by the simple grace of what he has just presented to me. And so I started singing through these simplistic lyrics, and that simplicity takes on a whole other direction.īy the time I had sung through them, it's like my head is suddenly eons wide. Now he wants me to read through it and sing the melody I have and see if they fit. And they seem, you know, awfully simplistic. He hands these lyrics to me and I'm reading through them. Now I'm really stoked to be working with the legendary Willie Dixon and I'm prepared for just about anything. Then he dashes off this sheet of lyrics and hands it to me. He wanted me to run a certain section by him again and stuff like that, and we started working on a bridge. I had this chord progression and melody that I wanted to run by Willie to see if he liked it. “Guitar Player” magazine ran an interview with Weir in 1993: The song was written during the sessions for Rob Wasserman’s Trios album. The Grateful Dead covered a fairly lengthy list of his songs, attesting to his influence on the band: “Down in the Bottom,” “I Ain’t Superstitious,” “I Just Want to Make Love To You,” “Little Red Rooster,” “The Same Thing,” “Spoonful,” and “Wang Dang Doodle.” Plus a couple they only played once, or only in soundcheck. Willie Dixon (1915-1992) was one of the preeminent blues songwriters and performers of all time. Plus, it’s a Bob Weir composition (with Rob Wasserman), and it’s definitely time for a Weir tune, after about four or five straight Garcia songs.Ĭo-writing a song with one of your personal heroes-that seems like a dream come true. Searching for a song for this week, this week in which we lost Robin Williams, I realized that “Eternity” might be a good choice. (I’ll consider requests for particular songs-just private message me!) Therefore, the best part, I would hope, would not be anything in particular that I might have to say, but rather, the conversation that may happen via the comments over the course of time-and since all the posts will stay up, you can feel free to weigh in any time on any of the songs! With Grateful Dead lyrics, there’s always a new and different take on what they bring up for each listener, it seems. Here’s the plan-each week, I will blog about a different song, focusing, usually, on the lyrics, but also on some other aspects of the song, including its overall impact-a truly subjective thing.
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