You say you’re living in a world of trouble
All your schemes have popped like a bubble
Your mother told your sister
And your brother told your friend
Now your secret’s out, and you don’t have to pretend
You can see for yourself, it’s really not the end
Chorus:
You’re standing there with tears in your eyes
There’s too much going on now, there’s no time to cry
You say the walls are closing in on you child
All your friends have put you in exile
Bad luck seems to follow you all around the world
You can’t seem to find no peace of mind girl
You will take a chance to seem so bad
(Chorus)
Every minute is a brand-new day
And there are some games that I’d just love to play
Even bad scenes are for real, there’s no time to cry
Since you left your old scene behind you
Go ahead and let the green light find you
It’s warm and friendly girl and it won’t blind you
Come out in the street and the weeds won’t grind you
See the love is in the air, you feel it all around you
Your yesterdays are all left behind
There’s a brand-new light in your mind
You don’t need a key to define
What’s written on the magic sign
There’s no time to cry
When the season of the magic lantern
Is transformed into a funny pattern
And the wheel of fortune has a flat tire1
You can’t seem to get any higher
When you go above the [ ] machine, you find a horseshoe
(Chorus)
Words and music by the Grateful Dead
In tarot, card number ten:
The wheel of fortune revolves on its axis of two straight branches springing from the edge of a cliff of barren rock and dirt. Near the wheel of fortune grows a bed of red roses signifying hope. The blindfolded woman of fortune, with an expression of blissful unawareness, turns the wheel depicting the uncertainty of change. She is the dispenser of sorrow and joy. At the top of the wheel sits a man with his legs crossed in the form of an X while his right hand grasps the hand of a woman. The man holds a hat in his left hand, rejoicing in his deliverance and success. On the descending side of the wheel, a man falls off the edge of the cliff. Love and death are thus equally dispensed. The wheel of fortune has eight spokes signifying that each state of life is across the wheel from its opposite. The wheel of fortune is the perpetual motion of a continuously changing universe and the flowing of human life. (Kaplan) 3
First verified performance: October 6, 1966, at the Love Pageant Rally in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco—on the occasion of the outlawing of LSD. The first issue of the Haight-Ashbury periodical The Oracle was subtitled The Love Pageant Rally Issue. Also present at the rally, usually seen as a warmup for the milestone event the Human Be-In, were Janis Joplin and Ken Kesey with the Merry Pranksters. “Alice D. Millionaire” was dropped from the repertoire later that same year, after a limited number of performances. Sometimes referred to as “No Time to Cry.”
From Living with the Dead:
I have to get back to San Francisco State. . . . I get out there in time for the last song, “Alice D Millionaire,” based on that wonderful headline in The San Francisco Chronicle when Owsley got busted for the first time. The headline read LSD MILLIONAIRE Arrested. (Scully) 4
This would place the first performance a few days earlier than October 6, since the San Francisco State College gig was on October 2, at the SF State Trips Festival.
From Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:
Little by little, Owsley’s history seeped out. He was thirty years old, although he looked younger, and he had a huge sonorous name: Augustus Owsley Stanley III. His grandfather was a United States Senator from Kentucky. Owsley apparently had had a somewhat hungup time as a boy, going from prep school to prep school and then to a public high school, dropping out of that, but getting into the University of Virginia School of Engineering, apparently because of his flair for sciences, then dropping out of that. He finally wound up enrolling in the University of California, in Berkeley, where he hooked up with a hip, good-looking chemistry major named Melissa. They dropped out of the University and Owsley set up his first acid factory at 1647 Virginia Street, Berkeley. 5
Wolfe goes on to tell of the quality of Owsley’s LSD, renowned worldwide, and of its influence on the Beatles:
It was in this head world that the . . . Beatles first took LSD. Now, just to get ahead of the story a bit—after Owsley hooked up with Kesey and the Pranksters, he began [working with] a musical group called the Grateful Dead. Through the Dead’s experience with the Pranksters was born the sound known as “acid rock.” And it was that sound that the Beatles picked up on, after they started taking acid, to do a famous series of acid-rock record albums, Revolver, Rubber Soul, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club Band. Early in 1967 the Beatles got a fabulous idea. They got hold of a huge school bus and piled into it with thirty-nine friends and drove and wove across the British countryside, zonked out of their gourds. They were going to . . . make a movie. 6