Garcia always put down that performance, too. The song also has a special, strange place in Dead history: It was part of their five-song set at Woodstock, a year before “High Time” was recorded. The elliptical way Garcia ends Hunter’s verses with “Well, I know” is arrestingly pretty, and, living up to the title of the song, Garcia’s delicious pedal steel work was way spacier than anything Merle Haggard or Buck Owens - his California country heroes - would have condoned. It’s a classic example of the band bending traditional music to fit its own ideals.
“It’s a beautiful song, but I was just not able to sing it worth a shit.” Others would disagree. “The song that I think failed on that record was ‘High Time,’” Garcia told Rolling Stone in a 1972 interview. In that regard, Garcia was never more unhappy with a studio performance than he was with this country-blues breakup song. Garcia and the Dead were always extremely critical of their recorded output they always felt more comfortable onstage, where songs truly blossomed, than in a studio. And without it, what would that music have been?”Īll those sides of Garcia - musically and internally - emerge in this collection of the 50 greatest songs that he performed with the Dead and from his solo records. But you know, what great man doesn’t have that? His bright side, his ebullient side, far seemed to outweigh. Who knows, but there was a decided darkness to him. “I suppose it had something to do with losing his dad so young, and possibly his finger getting chopped off. “That man had an agony almost that he had to fight,” Hunter said. Nor was he simply “Jolly Jerry,” as his longtime lyrical collaborator, Robert Hunter, told Rolling Stone in a 2015 interview. Over the roughly 35 years that he wrote and recorded songs with the Dead and on his own, Garcia was an uncommonly eclectic musician - equally at home with folk, bluegrass, electronic music, old-timey ballads, country, reggae, and Chuck Berry-style rock & roll. Just as the Grateful Dead were more than just a “jam band,” Jerry Garcia was more than just the affable Captain Trips of the scene. It’s good that a few things in this world are clear to all of us.” But with lines like Krazy Kat peeking through a lace bandana/ like a one-eyed Cheshire/ like a diamond-eyed jack / A leaf of all colors plays / a golden string fiddle / to a double-e waterfall over my back, it may be wishful thinking to say that that the words were really “clear to all of us.” To this day, numerous faithful still debate the meaning of the lyric, as seen on a number of websites devoted to discussing the song.Related: Grateful Dead Ultimate Album Guide People seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. In his outstanding anthology A Box of Rain, Hunter wrote, “Nobody ever asked me the meaning of. One of Hunter’s most abstruse pieces, which became a staple of the Grateful Dead’s legendary hours-long concerts, was “China Cat Sunflower.” It was recorded for the band’s 1969 studio album Aoxomoxoa, and later released on the live Europe ’72 triple album set in a mash-up with the old blues number “I Know You Rider.” The two songs segued together perfectly, and the Grateful Dead performed the combination well over 500 times in live performances.
Most of the band’s classics are songs that Hunter wrote the lyrics for, like “Truckin’” and “Friend of the Devil.” Even 1987’s “Touch of Grey” became part of the fabric of life for so many counter-culturalists, some of whom actually were grey by the time “Touch of Grey” was recorded.
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