Out on the edge of the empty highway
Howling at the blood on the moon
A diesel Mack come rolling down my way
Can’t hit that border too soon
Running hard out of Muskrat Flats1
It was sixty days or double life
Hail at my back like a shotgun blast
High wind chimes in the night
Oh, oh, pride of Cucamonga2
Oh, oh, bitter olives in the sun3
Oh, oh, I had me some loving
And I done some time
Since I came down from Oregon
There’s a lesson or two I’ve learned
By standing in the road alone
Standing watching the fires burn
The northern sky it stinks with greed
You can smell it heavy for miles around
Good old boys in the Graystone Hotel4
Sitting doing that git-on-down
Oh, oh, pride of Cucamonga
Oh, oh, silver apples in the sun5
Oh, oh, I had me some loving
And I done some time
I see your silver shining town
But I know I can’t go there
Your streets run deep with poisoned wine
Your doorways crawl with fear
So I think I’ll drift for old where it’s at
Where the weed grows green and fine
And wrap myself around a bush
Of that bright whoa, oh, Oaxaca vine6
Yes it’s me, I’m the pride of Cucamonga
I can see golden forests in the sun
Oh, oh, I had me some loving
And I done some time
And I done some time
And I done some time
Words by Robert Petersen
Music by Phil Lesh
This doesn’t seem to be an actual geographical location. There is a Muskrat Creek in Wyoming, and a Muskrat Falls in Newfoundland, but from the context of the song, this should be a place in Oregon or California. The Oregon place-name of Idanha, in Marion County, on the North Santiam River southeast of Salem, and about four miles upstream from Detroit, Oregon, may have originally been named Muskrat Camp.
The “Flats” designation is a common one in American slang, according to The Dictionary of American Regional English, which says that it is used “often in combinations; used as a jocular or derogatory nickname for a town or district.” Some examples given are: Goose Flats, Oakie Flats, Poverty Flats, Pot Liquor Flats, Tar Hill Flats, Penrose Flats. A strong case has been made for the possibility that Muskrat Flats refers to Klamath Falls, Oregon, from clues within the song, and from Petersen’s own history.
Cucamonga is a city in San Bernardino County, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. Population ca. 110,000; elevation 1,110 feet. The word cucamonga is from the Shoshone and means “sandy place.” The city’s corporate name is Rancho Cucamonga.
It was mentioned in the Jan and Dean song “The Anaheim Azuza and Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review and Timing Association.” There is a mention of this place in another song as well: Louis Jordan’s “How Long Must I Wait for You” (“Track 99 for CoupeCaMonga”).
Anne Lamott’s novel Rosie (North Point Press, 1983) repeatedly refers to one of its characters as the “Pride of Cucamonga,” in a joking way, but in explicit reference to “an old Grateful Dead song.”
Unconfirmed but convincing correspondence over the years has held up Pride of Cucamonga as a brand of cheap jug wine sold in the 1970s and a fruit label from the 1930s.
Also the title of a poem by Petersen, in the collection Alleys of the Heart:
those long fires of autumn
pigpen & i saw along highway 99
bitter olives
in the stare & blister of sun. 65
Graystone is the name applied by inmates to almost every jail building and is often formalized into the actual name of the jail, as was the infamous maximum-security Graystone at the Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, California. Robert Petersen spent some time, indeed, in such hotels.
Graystone College n. Und. a prison. Also
Graystone Hotel, Gray-Rock Hotel. Joc. Cf. GRAYBAR HOTEL.
1933 Ersine Pris. Slang 41: Graystone College, any prison. 1962 Crump Killer 198: I nodded to the County Jail: “There’s the Graystone Hotel,” I said. . . . (Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang)
Compare “Silver Apples of the Moon,” one of Hunter’s whimsical titles for the instrumental outtakes captured on Infrared Roses (1991).
Morton Subotnick’s 1967 work for synthesizer Silver Apples of the Moon, commissioned by Nonesuch Records, became a best-selling album in the classical-music category. Subotnick’s piece, in turn, was named for a line from William Butler Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus”:
and walk among long dappled grass,
and pluck till time and times are done
the silver apples of the moon,
the golden apples of the sun.
A likely reference to marijuana grown in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.
Studio recording: Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel (June 27, 1974)
Never performed live by the Grateful Dead. First performance by The Dead: June 15, 2004, at Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado.