Loose Lucy is my delight
She comes running and we ball all night
Round and round and round and round
Don’t take much to get me on the ground
She’s my yo-yo, I’m her string
Listen to the birds on the hot wire sing1
Chorus:
Singing: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Singing: Thank you
for a real good time
I got jumped coming home last night
Shadow in the alley turned out all my lights
Round and round and round and round
Don’t take much to get me on the ground
Loose Lucy—she was sore!
Says I know you don’t want my love no more
(Chorus)
Bebop baby, how can this be?2
I know you’ve been out a-cheating on me
Round and round and round and round
Don’t take much to get the word around
Cross my heart and hope to die
I was just hanging out with the other guys
(Chorus)
Went back home with two black eyes
You know I’ll love her till the day I die
Round and round and round and round
Don’t take much to get the word around
I like your smile but I ain’t your type
Don’t shake the tree when the fruit ain’t ripe
(Chorus)
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Jerry Garcia
In response to a query about what a bird on a hot wire might sense, I received this answer from a long-time power company employee:
With regard to birds on a wire, the wire ordinarily doesn’t run at much higher temperature than the ambient air unless the cable is heated by the sun. They can get fried if they get between one of the three transmission lines or between one line and neutral or ground.
Synonym for bop:
A style of jazz developed in the early 1940s in New York, which came to full maturity by 1945 in the work of Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Charlie Parker (alto saxophone) [et al]. The word bop is a shortened form of the vocables (nonsense syllables) “bebop” or “rebop,” which were commonly used in scat singing to accompany the distinctive two-note rhythm. . . . (New Grove Dictionary of American Music)
Studio recording: Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel (June 27, 1974).
First performance: February 9, 1973, at the Roscoe Maples Pavilion, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. It remained in the repertoire through 1974, then disappeared until 1990, after which time it remained in fairly steady rotation. In post-Garcia formations, the song has been sung by guest artists, most notably Sammy Hagar in The Dead’s first concert as The Dead, on February 14, 2003, at the Warfield in San Francisco.