Moving Along

Song 386: This week’s playlist pick is Truckin' by the Grateful Dead, written by Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Robert Hunter, and you can find a YouTube video of it here. Back in the early 1970s, if you listened to any rock FM radio station long enough, you would surely hear this cut. I picked up on it pretty quickly, though it took me a while to warm up to the rest of American Beauty. The LP did eventually become a regular spinner on my turntable, as I grew to appreciate it more than I had initially, but this closing track remained the highlight of the record. For a while, I struggled to decipher some of the lines, though I soon understood that Houston was too close to New Orleans and that New York had the ways and means. At that point in my life, I was indeed sick of hanging around and really thought I'd like to travel, so I hit the road when I could, though I surely wasn't Truckin' nearly as much as this band. On a side note, earlier today I uploaded a new song on YouTube called Wheel - a Reinvention that includes, in the first verse, a sly reference to this classic, which, as I just found out from doing the research tonight, was recognized by the United States Library of Congress in 1997 as a national treasure. I sure would like to have my reinvention of the wheel achieve that status someday!