Truckin’—got my chips cashed in1
Keep Truckin’—like the doodah man2
Together—more or less in line
Just keep Truckin’ on
Arrows of neon and flashing marquees out on Main Street
Chicago, New York, Detroit, it’s all on the same street
Your typical city involved in a typical daydream
Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings
Dallas—got a soft machine3
Houston—too close to New Orleans
New York—got the ways and means
but just won’t let you be
Most of the cats you meet on the street speak of True Love
Most of the time they’re sittin’ and cryin’ at home
One of these days they know they gotta get goin’
out of the door and down to the street all alone
Truckin’—like the doodah man
once told me you got to play your hand
sometime—the cards ain’t worth a dime
if you don’t lay ’em down
Sometimes the light’s all shining on me4
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been5
What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?6
She lost her sparkle, you know she isn’t the same
Living on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine
All a friend can say is “Ain’t it a shame”
Truckin’—up to Buffalo7
Been thinkin’—you got to mellow slow
Takes time—you pick a place to go
and just keep Truckin’ on
Sitting and staring out of a hotel window
Got a tip they’re gonna kick the door in again
I’d like to get some sleep before I travel
but if you got a warrant I guess you’re gonna come in
Busted—down on Bourbon Street8
Set up—like a bowling pin
Knocked down—it gets to wearing thin
They just won’t let you be
You’re sick of hanging around and you’d like to travel
Tired of travel, you want to settle down
I guess they can’t revoke your soul for trying
Get out of the door—light out and look all around
Sometimes the light’s all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been
Whoa-oh, baby, back where I belong
Back home—sit down and patch my bones
and get back Truckin’ on
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir
See note under “Cosmic Charlie.”
The Great Song Thesaurus lists one other song titled “Truckin’ ”: words, Ted Koehler; music, Rube Bloom, 1935.
Skeleton Key cites Hunter as saying that the doodah man was just lifted from the “doodah” chorus of “Camptown Races” by Stephen Foster (1850).
Possibly an allusion to the William Burroughs novel The Soft Machine. According to The Dictionary of Literary Biography:
The “soft machine” is both the “wounded galaxy,” the Milky Way seen as a biological organism diseased by the viruslike Nova Mob, and the human body, riddled with parasites and addictions and programmed with the “ticket” (that is, obsolete myths and dreams) written on the “soft typewriter” of culture and civilization.
There was also a British rock band by the name Soft Machine, in the late sixties and early seventies. According to Martin C. Strong in The Great Rock Discography, the band “phoned up novelist William Burroughs to ask his permission on use of group name.”
The Pop-o-Pies on their version of “Truckin’,” sang, “Dallas, got a soft-drink machine.”
Dark and light are frequent motifs in Robert Hunter lyrics. See, for example, “Comes a Time,” “Terrapin Station.”
One of the best-known lines in rock and roll and in the culture at large, this snippet has served as title and subtitle to a large number of books and articles invoking, as it does, the epoch from which it stems.
Among them are:
20 Years of Rolling Stone: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been (1987)
Some Lessons About Libel Law and Communication Science from the Long, Strange Trip of Jeffrey Masson and the Case of the Fabricated Quotations by Clay Calvert (1994)
What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been: A Hippie’s History of the Sixties and Beyond by Lewis Sanders (1989)
“Illicit Drug Use Revisited: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” by P. A. Selwyn in Annals of Internal Medicine, November 15, 1993.
“Magellan Star Scanner Experiences: What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been,” by Eric H. Seale in Advances in Astronautical Sciences, vol. 74, p. 513
A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally (2002)
Robert Hunter provides an explanation for this line:
The intention was a parody of the forties warning-style of singing commercial, specifically “Poor Millicent, poor Millicent / She never used Pepsodent/ Her smile grew dim / And she lost her vim / So, folks, don’t be like Millicent / Use Pepsodent!” I’m sure that the allusiveness, not that entirely outré in the sixties, is well lost here in the nineties. So, it’s perhaps an in-joke, but not one meant for private consumption. Just a bit of black humor that fails to fire and emerges, instead, as an enigma. 41a
Listeners may well tend to think of the Velvet Underground’s 1970 song “Sweet Jane.”
On a recording from May 28, 1982, Bob Weir sings “What in the world ever became of Sweet Jane / she lost her sparkle, you know, she isn’t the same / ever since she went and had a sex change / All a friend can say is ain’t it a shame.”
Compare the song title “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” (Al Dubin and Harry Warren, 1932):
I’ll go home and get my panties,
You go home and get your scanties,
And away we’ll go;
Mm, off we’re gonna shuffle,
Shuffle off to Buffalo.
To Niag’ra in a sleeper,
There’s no honeymoon that’s cheaper,
And the train goes slow;
Ooh, off we’re gonna shuffle,
Shuffle off to Buffalo. 42
The entire band was arrested for possession of marijuana in New Orleans in 1970. They vowed never to return. (However, they played concerts there four times in the 1980s.)
Studio recording: American Beauty (November 1970).
First performance: August 18, 1970, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. It remained in the repertoire thereafter.
Weir, Hunter, Lesh, and Hart were interviewed about the song in the 1997 film Anthem to Beauty:
Weir: There was a romance about being a young man on the road in America, and you had to do it! It was a rite of passage. And at the same time, it was the material that you drew from to write about. We were starting to become real guys, and really enjoying the hell out of it. We toured more or less four to six months out of the year. It was our bread and butter—we weren’t selling that many records. And we had a lot of fun out on the road, got into a lot of trouble. . . . We left some smoking craters in some Holiday Inns, I’ll say that, and there were a lot of places that wouldn’t have us back. All of this is absolutely autobiographical, all the stuff in “Truckin’.”
Hunter: This was written over a long period of time. . . . I had a verse: “Once in a while the music gets into the street / fifty old ladies bug every cop on the beat / they’re putting the lock on Lindley Meadow and Kezar / beginning’ to look like we can’t play in the park.” Yea, that kind of stuff had lots and lots of verses I thought, we had all thought, that we could keep adding to “Truckin’ ” over the years, but the funny thing is, once you get it down, it is down. You don’t go back, you don’t revisit it.
Hart: It was autobiographical. We told our story in song. So I knew that the words were strong. They were powerful, they were depicting real events in real people’s lives, and they became part of the fabric, part of the history of our day. People could sing it and know there were events directly connected with it.
Lesh: In those days there wasn’t any rock-and- roll bubble that would isolate us from the world as we went through it. So the walls of the hotels were all thin and we didn’t charter planes, so we flew commercial when we flew, and a lot of times we took buses. And I see a group of much younger people doing things in a way that I envy now, looking back on it.
The song, translated into French, was published in the band’s sixth newsletter (December 1972), and the lyrics were included in copies of Europe ’72, distributed in francophone European nations.