The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics by David G. Dodd

Author:David G. Dodd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

In 1972, Bobby decided he wanted to make the solo album that became Ace. When he entered the studio in early February, he brought an odd lot of material, most of it germinative. We had spent some of January in my isolated Wyoming cabin working on songs, but I don’t believe we’d actually finished anything. I’d come up with some lyrics (for “Looks Like Rain” and most of “Black-Throated Wind”). He worked out the full musical structure for “Cassidy,” but I still hadn’t written any words for it.

Most of our time was passed drinking Wild Turkey, speculating grandly, and fighting both a series of magnificent blizzards and the house ghost (or whatever it was) that took particular delight in deviling both Weir and his malamute dog.

(I went in one morning to wake Bobby and was astonished when he reared out of bed wearing what appeared to be blackface. He looked ready to burst into “Swanee River.” Turned out the ghost had been at him. Weir had placed a 3 A.M. call to the Shoshone shaman Rolling Thunder, who’d advised him that a quick and dirty ghost repellant was charcoal on the face. So he’d burned an entire box of Ohio Blue Tips and applied the results.)

I was still wrestling with the angel of “Cassidy” when Bobby went back to California to start recording basic tracks. I knew some of what it was about . . . the connection with Cassidy Law’s birth was too direct to ignore . . . but the rest of it evaded me. I told him that I’d join him in the studio and write it there.

Then my father began to die. He went into the hospital in Salt Lake City and I stayed on the ranch, feeding cows and keeping the feed trails open with an ancient Allis-Chalmers bulldozer. The snow was three and a half feet deep on the level and blown into concrete castles around the haystacks.

Bobby was anxious for me to join him in California, but between the hardest winter in ten years and my father’s diminishing future, I couldn’t see how I was going to do it. I told him I’d try to complete the unfinished songs, “Cassidy” among them, at a distance.

On the eighteenth of February, I was told that my father’s demise was imminent and that I would have to get to Salt Lake. Before I could get away, however, I would have to plow snow from enough stack yards to feed the herd for however long I might be gone. I fired up the bulldozer in a dawn so cold it seemed the air might break. I spent a long day in a cloud of whirling ice crystals, hypnotized by the steady 2,600 rpm howl of its engine, and, sometime in the afternoon, the repeating chords of “Cassidy.”

I thought a lot about my father and what we were and had been to one another. I thought about the delicately balanced dance of necessary dualities. And for some reason,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.