I’m flying down deserted streets
Wrapped in mother’s winding sheets
Asbestos boots on flaming feet
Dreaming of forbidden treats
When uniforms on nighttime beats
Ask me where I’m going and what I eat
I answer them with a voice so sweet
I can’t come down, it’s plain to see
I can’t come down, I’ve been set free
Who you are and what you do don’t make no difference to me
Well someone trying to tell me where it’s at
And how I do this and why I do that
With secret smiles like a Cheshire cat1
And leather wings like a vampire bat2
I fly away to my cold-water flat
And eat my way through a bowl of fat
And I say to the man with the funny hat
I can’t come down, it’s plain to see
I can’t come down, I’ve been set free
Who you are and what you do don’t make no difference to me
They say I’ve begun to lose my grip
My hold on reality is starting to slip
They tell me to get off this trip
They say that it’s like a sinking ship
Life’s sweet wine’s too warm to sip
And if I drink I’ll surely flip
I just say as I take a nip
I can’t come down, it’s plain to see
I can’t come down, I’ve been set free
Who you are and what you do don’t make no difference to me
So as I dream of forgotten seas
And granite halls and redwood trees
And of the eye that only sees
Endless mirrors and infinite me’s
About the winter’s coming freeze
This afterthought I say with ease
To all of you who made your pleas
I can’t come down, it’s plain to see
I can’t come down, I’ve been set free
Who you are and what you do don’t make no difference to me
Words by Jerry Garcia
Music by the Grateful Dead
A reference to the Cheshire Cat of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865): We first meet the Cheshire Cat in the Duchess’s kitchen. She is nursing a baby:
The only two creatures in the kitchen, that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat, which was lying on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.
“Please would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, for she was not quite sure whether it was good manners for her to speak first, “why your cat grins like that?”
“It’s a Cheshire Cat,” said the Duchess, “and that’s why.”
And a little later, she meets the cat again:
. . . when she was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire-Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.
The Cat only grinned when it saw Alice. It looked good-natured, she thought: still it had very long claws and a great many teeth, so she felt that it ought to be treated with respect.
“Cheshire-Puss,” she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. “Come, it’s pleased so far,” thought Alice, and she went on. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
And later,
“By-the-bye, what became of the baby?” [ed. note: See “What’s Become of the Baby?”] said the Cat. “I’d nearly forgotten to ask.”
“It turned into a pig,” Alice answered very quietly, just as if the Cat had come back in a natural way.
“I thought it would,” said the Cat, and vanished again.
The cat makes one more (partial) appearance, at the Queen’s croquet game. She orders him beheaded, but the executioner says he can’t behead the cat, since only the head is visible.
A footnote in the wonderful The Annotated Alice speculates on the origin of the Cheshire Cat:
“Grin like a Cheshire cat” was a common phrase in Carroll’s day. Its origin is not known. The two leading theories are: (1) A sign painter in Cheshire (the county, by the way, where Carroll was born) painted grinning lions on the signboards of inns in the area (see Notes and Queries, no. 130, April 24, 1852, p. 402), (2) Cheshire cheeses were at one time molded in the shape of a grinning cat (see Notes and Queries, no. 55, Nov. 16, 1850, p. 412). “This has a peculiar Carrollian appeal,” writes Dr. Phyllis Greenacre in her psychoanalytic study of Carroll, “as it provokes the fantasy that the cheesy cat may eat the rat that would eat the cheese.” The Cheshire Cat is not in the original manuscript, Alice’s Adventures Underground.1
Other references to the Cheshire cat in Grateful Dead and related lyrics include “China Cat Sunflower” and “Down the Road,” with its image of Garcia disappearing in the sky, leaving just “a smile in empty space.”
The evocations brought out by the use of the word Cheshire include all the wonderful characters and situations of the Alice stories, which were widely evoked in rock lyrics of the late sixties, most notably in the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit.” A case could be made for the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus” as well.
Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 horror tale, Dracula, is set in Transylvania and features an evil count who seems to have been based on the historical Vlad V of Wallachia, aka Vlad the Impaler. Count Dracula assumes the guise of a bat and sucks the blood of unsuspecting victims, who then in turn become vampires themselves.
From Lord George Gordon Byron’s 1813 The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale:
But first on earth, as vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent,
Then ghastly haunt thy native place
And suck the blood of all thy race.
Studio recording: November 3, 1965. Played 1965–66, then dropped from the repertoire. Released in the box set So Many Roads.
First performance: The only live performance documented in DeadBase is from January 7, 1966, at the Matrix in San Francisco.
Bob Weir described the writing of the song in an interview: “Well, we wrote all the music and Jerry wrote the lyrics. Jerry excused himself for a moment and went off. He came back with a couple of verses and we put together a chorus.”