Dead Songs in Depth

    
So Many Roads
w: Hunter m: Garcia
AGDL: http://arts.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/soma.html
LASF: http://www.whitegum.com/songfile/SOMANYRO.HTM
  

    
So Many Roads 
Lyrics: Robert Hunter
Music: Jerry Garcia

Copyright Ice Nine Publishing; used by permission.

Thought I heard a blackird singing
Up on Bluebird Hill
Call me a whinin' boy if you will
Born where the sound don't shine
And I don't deny my name
Got no place to go, ain't that a shame?

Thought I heard that KC whistle
Moaning sweet and low
Thought I heard that KC when she blow
Down where the sun don't shine
Underneath the kokomomo
Whinin' boy got no place to go

So many roads I tell you
So many roads I know
So many roads, so many roads
Mountain high, river wide
So many roads to ride
So many roads, so many roads

Thought I heard a jug band playin'
"If you don't... who else will?"
From over on the far side of the hill
All I know the sun don't shine
And the rain refused to fall
And you don't seem to hear me when I call

Wind inside and the wind outside
Tangled in the window blind
Tell me why you treat me so unkind
Down where the sun don't shine
Lonely and I call your name
No place left to go, ain't that a shame?

So many roads I tell you
New York to San Francisco
So many roads I know
All I want is one to take me home
From the high road to the low
So many roads I know
So many roads so many roads

From the land of the midnight sun
Where the ice blue roses grow
Along those roads of gold and silver snow
Howlin' wide or moaning low
So many roads I know
So many roads to ease my soul
  

    
"Where the ice blue roses grow." Damn.

his was without a doubt one of their best songs. The imagery, the joy
and pain, the sense of history and sweet wisdom, and the sound of
Garcia moaning passionately at the end. It has the ability to make me
smile and cry - perhaps simultaneously.

I just put the boxed set version on a mix tape of otherwise non-GD
music for an old friend I miss and I'm waiting to see what she thinks
of it...

One wonders if this (or "Lazy River Road" or "Corrina") could have
been a radio hit if their asses had got around to making another album.

And I'm still wondering when someone will get around to making a
decent quality compilation of the songs that most likely would have
filled said album...
  

    
This song has one of my very favorite Hunter images:

Wind inside and the wind outside
tangled in the window blind

Perfect!
  

    
"Look out of any window", "Look into any eyes" fr; "Box of Rain".

At the level of self-reference and reference to traditional and
earlier pop lyrics that Hunter achieves and builds upon,the possible
dimensions are almost innumerable and wide-open to speculation. they
can mean or point to something different almost any time you consider
them.

Or, you can just sit back and listen to Jerry wail away at that
closing "So many roads I know, So many roads to ease my soul" over and
over and over in the last few concerts, and soak in whatever notions
fill your own heart. 
  

    
The full-circle references to Winin' Boy, KC Moan, a jug band... they
move me. Is it really "born where the sound don't shine"?

Another lyric that works as Hunter-to-Jerry message too.
  

    <scribbled by riescher Thu 27 Mar 08 05:45>
  

    
I never saw the potential for sexual metaphor in this song until now,
reading it on a page. I know its not really there, but its almost as
funny as "see how it feels in the end":

forest of fellatio:
she blow
Down where the sun don't shine

and sexual frustration:
        Tell me why you treat me so unkind
Down where the sun don't shine
  

    
"rock 'n' roll, baby, in the ol' caboose"
  

    
WAILIN' in the old caboose, no?
  

    
ah, that's not as good, then.
  

    
hearing jerry sing

"the wind inside, the wind outside 
tangled in the window blinds"

is really close to my favorite:

"gone are the days we stopped to decide
where we should go
we just ride."


i love this song.  i love the pain and hope in "thought i heard.."
  

    



Tim White writes:




Hi there
I've just caight up with the latest postings, especially about SMR, and
I've been musing about the writing relationship between Hunter and Garcia.
(Far more interesting than working right now!)

There are words Hunter wrote for Jerry to sing in a character - no one
suggests Jerry *is* August West or the "me" character in Wharf Rat.

Then there are songs where perhaps Hunter intended the words as a message
to Jerry:
"Ain't nobody messin' with you but you
Your friends are getting most concerned
Loose with the truth, maybe its your fire
Baby I hope you don't get burned"

SMR though is different, like Hunter is writing words for Jerry to sing to
express directly how he, Jerry, is feeling.

So today looking at the words for SMR, I got to thinking, how must Hunter
have felt when he heard the final performances of that song? what must it
be like to write the words that allow your best friend of 30-odd years to
express his pain as nakedly as Jerry does on the 7/9/95 performance?
I wasn't there, but just listening to it on CD has made *me* cry at times.

But I also find hope there too, what is it that will help Jerry along the
road home? The love coming back from the 'heads. If thousands of  people
could hug one man, that's what it would sound like.

Tim

"Peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but the existence of justice
for all people." Martin Luther King Jr.
  

    
On the track of allusions to other (presumably by convention, earlier)
songs, in SMR we have:

"Howlin' wide or moaning low"

while in Loser, there is:

"Don't you push me baby, 'cause I'm moaning low"

Of course, like an old bluesman, we can expect Hunter to reuse the
money phases without necessarily intending to invoke the earlier song.
But for the listener, the invocation may be effective irrespective of
the intentions of the shaman.

Happy Trails

Happy Trails
  

    
alludes to K.C. Moan as well, no?

I think the line in Liberty about "whole damn world looking back at
me" also captured Hunter's sense of what it was like to be in Jerry's
shoes, tempered with his own "whoosh" experience of semifame from the
early '70s.
  

    
a "whinin boy" is evidently a special type of locomotive used to pull
extremely heavy loads.  i sent hunter an email many moons ago asking
about that term and i believe that was his response.  i could have
picked it up somewhere else, though.  
  

    



Fred Carret writes:



I was just listening to "So Many Roads" for the first
time, from 9/18/94. Wow. So I checked out the
Annotated Lyrics, and I couldn't believe nobody
mentioned this:

"And you don't seem to hear me when I call"

... Chorus of "Big Boss Man", anyone?
  

    
In the Row Jimmy thread I recently posted this about "windin boy" - it
comes from From Howard Reich and William Gaines' biography of Jelly
Roll Morton, Jelly's Blues (Da Capo, 2003):

Jelly Roll Morton was known as the "windin' boy" for a particular
pelvic motion at which he was proficient.
  

    
I think, then, that there are at least 3 different variants:

whinin' boy
winin' boy
windin' boy

Very different referents for each!
  

    
Right. And in Elijah Wald's "Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and
the Invention of the Blues", he says the term "rider" was used for a
guitar. So that one has a few possible meanings as well.
  

    
Just noticed an interesting contrast between:

"All I know, the sun don't shine, and the rain refuse to fall"

and

"There the morning rain don't fall, and the sun always shines"

from "Early Morning Rain."
  

    
I first heard this song on a local (L.A.) Dead radio show back in
February 1992, probably the first performance of it.  It hit me
quite forcefully; my first thought was that Jerry was trying to tell
us something, and what he was saying was that he was not going to be
around much longer.  
  

    

That weariness also characterizes "Days Between," composed around the same
time. Befitting a guy who looked 75 when he died at 53.
  

    
Days Between is certainly about looking back by someone who has run
his race. 
  

    
Hunter always wrote for the present AND the future performances of
his lyrics. And he knew who would be singing them, in Jerry's case. 
  

    
"One wonders if this (or "Lazy River Road" or "Corrina") could have
been a radio hit if their asses had got around to making another
album."

Could have been, which at that point was probably the last thing
they needed.