CRYPTICAL ENVELOPMENT
The other day they waited, the sky was dark and faded,
Solemnly they stated, “He has to die, you know he has to die.”
All the children learnin’, from books that they were burnin’,
Every leaf was turnin’, to watch him die, you know he had to die.
The summer sun looked down on him,
His mother could but frown on him,
And all the other sound on him,
He had to die, you know he had to die.
Words and music by Jerry Garcia
THE FASTER WE GO, THE ROUNDER WE GET
Spanish lady come to me, she lays on me this rose.1
It rainbow spirals round and round,2
It trembles and explodes.
It left a smoking crater of my mind,
I like to blow away.
But the heat came round and busted me3
For smilin’ on a cloudy day.
Chorus:
Comin’, comin’, comin’ around, comin’ around, comin’ around in a circle,
Comin’, comin’, comin’ around, comin’ around in a circle,
Comin’, comin’, comin’ around, comin’ around in a circle.
Escapin’ through the lily fields4
I came across an empty space
It trembled and exploded
Left a bus stop in its place
The bus came by and I got on5,6
That’s when it all began
There was cowboy Neal7
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land8
Comin’, comin’, comin’ around, comin’ around, comin’ around in a circle,
Comin’, comin’, comin’ around, comin’ around in a circle,
Comin’, comin’, comin’ around, comin’ around in a circle.
Words by Bob Weir
Music by Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann
CRYPTICAL ENVELOPMENT REPRISE
And when the day had ended, with rainbow colors blended,
Their minds remained unbended,9
He had to die, oh, you know he had to die.
Words and music by Jerry Garcia
One of the most pervasive symbols in Grateful Dead lyrics and iconography, the rose is a symbol laden with meaning. This is its first appearance in a Dead lyric.
According to J. E. Cirlot’s A Dictionary of Symbols, the
single rose is, in essence, a symbol of completion, of consummate achievement and perfection. Hence, accruing to it are all those ideas associated with these qualities: the mystic Centre, the heart, the garden of Eros, the paradise of Dante, the Beloved, the emblem of Venus, and so on. 9
An extensive entry on the rose in Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (Funk & Wagnalls, 1972) includes the following information:
Originally from Persia, the rose is said to have been brought to the West by Alexander. To the Arabs the rose was a masculine flower. It was anciently a symbol of joy, later of secrecy and silence, but is now usually associated with love.
The entry continues for several hundred words and is worth tracking down.
Gabriele Tergit’s Flowers Through the Ages contains many pages on the history and folklore of the rose. Some passages:
Soon the mysterious rose, sacred to Venus in earlier times, became the flower of the Virgin Mary, who herself became the Rosa mystica. The temple of Jupiter Capitolinus became St. Peter’s, the temple of Juno Lucina the church of S. Maria Maggiore, and the processions honouring the Mother of God walked on rose petals, just as the processions carrying the images of the pagan gods had done.
and
The scholastics derived the origin of the rose from the drops of Christ’s blood falling upon a thornbush.
and
The rose was dedicated to the goddess of love, that is, to the eternal mystery of the continuity of life. As such it was the symbol of mystery and secrecy. “Mystery glows in the rose bed, the secret is hidden in the rose,” sang the Persian poet and perfumer Farid ud-din Attar in the twelfth century. A more prosaic explanation is that the folded structure of the rose, by its nature, conceals a secret inner core . . . in Germany, we read in Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff [Ship of Fools], in the late fifteenth century: “What here we do say, shall under roses stay.”
and
We do not know where the rose comes from. Rose fossils 32,000,000 years old have been found in Colorado and Oregon; they resemble the East Asian roses more than the American ones of today.
The first record of an authentic European rose is a highly stylized one in a fresco at Knossos in Greece; it dates from the sixteenth century B.C.
It is possible that Central Asia is the home of the rose. The most beautiful woman of India, the goddess Lakshmi, is supposed to have been born from a rose composed of 108 large and 1,008 small petals.
Every country between twenty and seventy degrees north has its indigenous roses.
The Dictionary of Christian Art defines the rose as:
A floral symbol sacred to Venus and signifying love, the quality and nature of which was characterized by the color of the rose. A symbol of purity, a white rose represented innocence and or innocent (nonsexual) love, while a pink rose represented first love, and a red rose true love. When held by a martyr (such as Saint Stephen), the red rose signified “red martyrdom,” or the loss of life, and the white rose “white martyrdom,” or celibacy. According to Ambrose, the thorns of the rose were a reminder of human finitude and guilt as the roses in the Paradise Garden had no thorns. A thornless rose was an attribute of Mary as the Second Eve. (Apostolos-Cappadona)
The literature is voluminous, and the point is easily taken: Roses have had tremendous significance for as long as history has been recorded, and likely for long before that. The rose is a metaphor waiting to happen, and people have always ascribed to it some aspect of the mystery of life. In the words of Robert Hunter:
I’ve got this one spirit that’s laying roses on me. Roses, roses, can’t get enough of those bloody roses. The rose is the most prominent image in the human brain, as to delicacy, beauty, short-livedness, thorniness. It’s a whole. There is no better allegory for, dare I say it, life than roses. (Jackson, Grateful Dead) 11
According to The Larousse Dictionary of World Folklore:
In several mythologies the rainbow is a bridge connecting earth to a supernatural otherworld; for example, the Norse Bifrost, which connects heaven and earth and is guarded by Heimdall, is identified in the Prose Edda with the rainbow.
and later in the same entry:
a more general and enduring belief in Europe is that the end of the rainbow marks valuable buried treasure, generally a crock of gold.
Other references to rainbows are found in “The Eleven,” “Crazy Fingers,” “What’s Become of the Baby?” “The Music Never Stopped,” “Estimated Prophet,” and “Saint of Circumstance.”
From an interview by David Gans with Bob Weir and Phil Lesh:
Weir: Interesting story with “The Other One.” It was one of the first tunes I ever wrote. Actually, we came up with the “map,” basically, for the song in a rehearsal somewhere, just kickin’ stuff around. And then I took it and started shaping it up, and things like that. We went on a tour, in the Pacific Northwest, and I was, you know, I was not done with it, I was wondering what the song was about, and then one night it sort of came to me. Basically, it’s a little fantastic episode about my meeting Neal Cassady. I wrote the two verses—that’s all there is to it, really, is two vees—and then we played the gig that night and came home the next day, and when we came home we learned the news that Neal had died that night.
Gans: Wow.
Weir: The night that I wrote that. As legend has it, he died counting the railroad ties on the tracks.
Lesh: From Dallas to Denver.
Weir: Something like that. San Miguel de Allende [Mexico], I think, is where he was. So I guess that was a little visitation, that’s—not unlike Neal.
Lesh: But if I remember correctly, as soon as you had the words, then we did the song.
Lesh: I mean, we did it that night. It didn’t require any rehearsal.
Weir: Right.
Gans: Now, I remember a version from a little bit earlier, maybe late in ‘67, you had a different set of lyrics; the first verse is “the heat come ‘round and busted me”. . . and then there was a second verse that was about “the heat in the jail weren’t very smart,” or somethin’ like that . . .
Weir: Yeah, that was after my little . . .
Lesh: Water balloon episode?
Weir: I got him good. I was on the third floor of our place in the Haight-Ashbury. And there was this cop who was illegally searching a car belonging to a friend of ours, down on the street—the cops used to harass us every chance they got. They didn’t care for the hippies back then. And so I had a water balloon, and what was I gonna do with this water balloon? Come on.
Lesh: Just happened to have a water balloon, in his hand. . . . Ladies and gentlemen. . . .
Weir: And so I got him right square on the head,
and . . .
Lesh: A prettier shot you never saw.
Weir: . . . and he couldn’t tell where it was comin’ from, but then I had to go and go downstairs and walk across the street and just grin at him . . . and sorta rub it in a little bit.
Gans: Smilin’ on a cloudy day. I understand now.
Weir: And at that point, he decided to hell with due process of law, this kid’s goin’ to jail. He didn’t have a thing on me. It never got to court, but on the other hand, I did get thrown in jail and beat up a little bit. I guess—what, what does a water balloon amount to, is that assault with a . . .
Gans: Friendly weapon. 12
Often written as “Skippin’ through the lily fields.”
Chapter Six of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test is titled “The Bus.” He says:
I couldn’t tell you for sure which of the Merry Pranksters got the idea for the bus, but it had the Babbs touch. . . . Then somebody—Babbs?—saw a classified ad for a 1939 International Harvester school bus. The bus belonged to a man in Menlo Park. . . . Kesey bought it for $1,500—in the name of Intrepid Trips, Inc. Kesey gave the word and the Pranksters set upon it one afternoon. They started painting it and wiring it for sound and cutting a hole in the roof and fixing up the top of the bus so you could sit up there in the open air and play music, even a set of drums and electric guitars and electric bass and so forth, or just ride. Sandy went to work on the wiring and rigged up a system with which they could broadcast from inside the bus, with tapes or over microphones, and it would blast outside over powerful speakers on top of the bus. There were also microphones outside that would pick up sounds along the road and broadcast them inside the bus. There was also a sound system inside the bus so you could broadcast to one another over the roar of the engine and the road. You could also broadcast over a tape mechanism so that you said something, then heard your own voice a second later in variable lag and could rap off of that if you wanted to. Or you could put on earphones and rap simultaneously off sounds from outside, coming in one ear, and sounds from inside, your own sounds, coming in the other ear. There was going to be no goddamn sound on that whole trip, outside the bus, inside the bus, or inside your own freaking larynx, that you couldn’t tune in on and rap off of.
The painting job, meanwhile, with everybody pitching in in a frenzy of primary colors, yellows, oranges, blues, reds, was sloppy as hell, except for the parts Roy Seburn did, which were nice manic mandalas. Well, it was sloppy, but one thing you had to say for it; it was freaking lurid. The manifest, the destination sign in the front, read: FURTHUR, with two u’s. 13
Other buses in rock-music lyrics include the Who’s “Magic Bus” and the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour.”
Being “on the bus” means, well, let’s hear Kesey explain it [via Tom Wolfe]:
“There are going to be times,” says Kesey, “when we can’t wait for somebody. Now you’re either on the bus or off the bus. If you’re on the bus, and you get left behind, then you’ll find it again. If you’re off the bus in the first place—then it won’t make a damn.” And nobody had to have it spelled out for them. Everything was becoming allegorical, understood by the group mind, and especially this: “You’re either on the bus . . . or off the bus.” (Wolfe) 14
A reference to Neal Cassady:
He didn’t like his other verses, and now in Oregon, he thought of the Pranksters, and of course of Neal Cassady. Neal had spent some ten days that January sleeping in the attic of 710 [Ashbury Street, in San Francisco, the Grateful Dead’s house], generally hanging out with Weir, who slept on a couch on the second floor, most of his belongings in a paper bag. The room with the couch also had the stereo, and Weir would lie there, still silenced by the effects of his past use of LSD, as Neal gobbled speed, juggled his sledgehammer, and raved. John Barlow later speculated that Weir was somehow “dreaming” Cassady. In their polarities, there was a powerful bond. In Portland, Weir reviewed what he had written about meeting Neal: Escapin’ through the lily field. . . . That works, he thought to himself as he finally went off to sleep. A couple of thousand miles south, Neal Cassady lay dying of exposure on railroad tracks near San Migeul de Allende, Mexico. Found and brought to the hospital, he died later that day, February 4, 1968. The band learned of his death when they got home to 710 from the tour. (McNally) 15
A more-or-less direct reference to Never-Never- Land, from Sir James Matthew Barrie’s 1902 play, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up. Peter Pan, who says he ran away on the day he was born, and who never ages, takes visitors to Never-Never-Land (also called Neverland).
A letter from Willy Legate to the editors of DeadBase states that this line more or less alludes back to “Mindbender” (performed in early 1966; on the November 3, 1965, Emergency Crew demo):
If only I could (be less fine)
If only I knew what to find,
Everywhere and all of the time—
It’s bending my mind
Phil and Jerry gave the title “Mindbender.” (Each accuses the other of writing it.)
Studio recording: Anthem of the Sun (July 18, 1968).
First documented performance: October 22, 1967, at Winterland Arena in San Francisco. It remained in the repertoire thereafter, though the Cryptical Envelopment portion was dropped after 1972 (it was brought back for eight performances in 1985). Therefore, the part of the lyric titled “The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get” came to be known simply as “The Other One.” “Cryptical Envelopment” was later revived by Phil and Friends, and by The Dead. Over the years, various inconsistencies in titling and crediting of the various portions of the suite have resulted in almost no one knowing anymore exactly who wrote what and what it was called, or why.
Some variant lyrics, from early performances:
1st verse:
When I woke up this morning my head was not attached
I asked my friends about it, try to find out where it’s at
[inaudible] . . . came up inside of me, blew the dust clouds all away
The heat came ‘round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day
2nd verse:
Well the heat down in jail they weren’t very smart
They taught me how to read and write, they taught me the precious arts
When I was breaking out of jail I learned that right away
That they didn’t need me telling them about smiling first and running [ ]
1st verse:
When I woke up this morning with the sky in sight
I would ask the walls about it, but they vanished overnight
I could not think or spell my name or _?_ the words away
The heat came ‘round and busted me for smiling on a cloudy day.
When I woke up this morning my head was not in sight
The band frequently dedicated this song to Owsley.
Garcia was asked about his portion of the lyric:
Seriously, I think that’s an extension of my own personal symbology for “The Man of Constant Sorrow”—the old folk song—which I always thought of as being a sort of Christ parable. 16
MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW
I am a man of constant sorrow
I’ve seen trouble all of my days
I bid farewell to old Kentucky
Place where I was born and raised
All through this earth I’m bound to ramble
Through storm and wind, through sleet and rain
I’m bound to ride that northern railroad
Perhaps I’ll take the very next train
For six long years I’ve been in trouble
No pleasure here on earth I’ve found
For in this world I’m bound to ramble
I have no friends to help me now
It’s fare you well, my own true lover
I never expect to see you again
For I’m bound to ride that northern railroad
Perhaps I’ll take the very next train
Your friends they say that I’m a stranger
You’ll never see my face no more
There’s just one promise that is given
We’ll meet upon God’s golden shore
I am a man of constant sorrow
I’ve seen trouble all of my days
I’m going back to California
Place where I was partly raised