When the cardboard cowboy dreams and his cornucopia
Opens up the sky and blows my mind to the corners of
[Far in bar rent shine] running beneath high trembling dove
Leaving me transfixed and raving in the wake of the hammer blow
On my way out of town I stumbled on the shards of a hungry [scream]
And further up into the backdoor circle, where the [power and crystal sea]
[Could this go rise by all allow ——] on the strength of an anguished sigh
And a paranoid reentry blanket flies sleeping on a slingshot ride
As my patchwork [world/quilt] unravels, I ramble yes too high
[From the looping antrobus with his magic meant so high]1
Shining out a masquerade from dawn to alpha plus
Watching mashed potatoes dribble in the heat of reality’s earth
[For the intro doom from] running to him
It wasn’t ever so
Turns the wall into the sky above me, there is no place to run
Words and music by Phil Lesh
A township in Cheshire County, England. See note under “Can’t Come Down” for more discussion of Cheshire and its cat.
No official recordings. Studio recording released as part of a bonus CD with Phil Lesh’s autobiography, Seaching for the Sound (2005).
First of only two documented performances: July 17, 1966, at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco.
This song is usually known as “Cardboard Cowboy” or “No Left Turn Unstoned” (named after a sign in front of Ken Kesey’s old house in La Honda, California, which featured the phrase that was coined by Prankster Paul Foster). Weir introduced it as “No Left Turn Unstoned” in the show on July 29, 1966. Lesh, in a spoken introduction to the release on the bonus CD noted above, stated that they actually called the song “The Monster” because it was “big and ugly and hard to play.” The cover for the bonus CD lists the song as “Cardboard Cowboy.” Hence its title above.
In an interview, Lesh was asked whether he had written any lyrics before writing “Childhood’s End”:
Only once, but this [Childhood’s End] came out a lot better than that one [which was] “No Left Turn Unstoned.” [Laughs] It was a truly awful song I wrote for the Grateful Dead during the Matrix era—I think it was ’67, maybe ’68. It’s on a couple of tapes, I think. It’s so God-awful I can’t even listen to it to find out what it was like. [Laughs] 2
The David Nelson Band song “Fable of a Chosen One” contains the phrase “no left turn unstoned.”
Perhaps worth noting is the huge preponderance of NO LEFT TURN signs throughout San Francisco. Sometimes you just have to turn right three times in a row in order to effect a left turn.