the book of the dead, 10

It surprises me that Here Comes Sunshine is a song I dig and that it’s one of my favorite Grateful Dead tunes. They performed it fairly often throughout 1973 and into '74, but then, from what I can tell, the song was more or less retired before Bruce Hornsby convinced them to bring it back into the live repertoire 17 years later.  It’s not the type of thing I would typically connect with. Performances of the song tended to meander ad infinitum in the Mixolydian mode, the flat 7 encouraging the jams to never fully resolve so much as peter out from pure exhaustion. I’ve got some versions of the song that go on for 18 fucking minutes!  By 1973, rock ‘n roll had obviously evolved quite a bit from the two-minute pleasures of Love Me Do and Little Deuce Coup.  But Here Comes Sunshine has a vibe that wins me over. It helps that it’s a song about gold mining. Get out the pans don’t just stand there dreaming! I’ve often wondered if the line ‘keep the mother rollin’ one more time’ refers to the mother lode, which I know from my days of studying the Wobblies to be a term for the central vein of ore within a grouping of gold or silver deposits. In any case, the song gives us another satisfying taste of Americana. Sure, at times the harmonies could be a little off the mark, and you might find yourself wishing that more care and precision were taken in tuning the guitars. But this is part of the Dead’s rag tag charm, the ability to sound slapdash and perhaps somewhat inattentive in one instance, only to become intense and serious as a heart attack just a few ticks later. When you tour as continuously as the Dead did for so long, with so many people depending on you to give their lives meaning and structure, the energy’s not gonna be there every night. Garcia in particular carried an enormous burden, one he was not altogether comfortable with, and one he had to essentially anesthetize himself against. But even so, there were plenty of nights when it all came together, when the focus was there, and when the band could get lost in the music, the rest be damned. Those were the nights when their playing and overall aura would be downright mesmerizing…