Dead Songs in Depth

    
Standing On The Moon
w: Hunter m: Garcia
AGDL: http://arts.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/sotm.html
LASF: http://www.whitegum.com/songfile/STANDOMO.HTM
  

    
Standing on the Moon 
Lyrics: Robert Hunter
Music: Jerry Garcia

Copyright Ice Nine Publishing; used by permission.

Standing on the moon, I got no cobweb on my shoe
Standing on the moon, I'm feeling so alone and blue
I see the Gulf of Mexico as tiny as a tear
The coast of California must be somewhere over here
Over here

Standing on the moon, I see the battle rage below
Standing on the moon, I see the soldiers come and go
There's a metal flag beside me someone planted long ago
Old glory standing stiffly, crimson, white and indigo
Old glory standing stiffly, crimson, white and indigo
Indigo

I see all of South East Asia; I can see El Salvador
I hear the cries of children and the other songs of war
It's like a mighty melody that rings down from the sky
Standing here upon the moon I watch it all roll by
All roll by
All roll by
All roll by

Standing on the moon, I see a shadow on the sun
Standing on the moon, the stars go fading one by one
I hear a cry of victory, another of defeat
A scrap of age-old lullaby down some forgotten street

Standing on the moon, where talk is cheap and vision true
Standing on the moon, but I would rather be with you
Somewhere in San Francisco on a back porch in July
Just looking up to heaven at this crescent in the sky
In the sky

Standing on the moon with nothing left to do
A lovely view of heaven but I'd rather be with you
A lovely view of heaven but I'd rather be with you
Be with you
I'd rather be with you
[etc]
  

    
Posted on behalf of David Taffet:



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 00:35:08 -0500
From: dtaffet <dtaffet@pixelsync.com>
To: ddodd@well.com
Subject: Regarding the lyrics to Standing on the Moon

David -

I've just stumbled across your Grateful Dead annotated lyrics site.

I realize it's been 8 years since the page was updated and you've
likely moved on to other things, long since, but I've had thoughts
about this song from the time I first heard it that few people would
care enough about to discuss. I thought you might, since you have some
reader comments here and there.

To me this is the song of the American Bodhisattva. Given Hunter's
penchant for religious imagery and being steeped in Buddhist thought,
the moon seems to me to be referring, as in Zen, to the polished mirror
of the still mind which reflects the light of the sun.

The singer is in a state of spiritual completion, of enlightenment, if
you will, seeing everything laid out before him and feeling the
anguish of human suffering. But he is opting, out of love for his
fellows, rather than to maintain his view of heaven, to be on some
porch, a mundane, normal, backyard kind of place, with the listener:
everyone. He's making the decision the bodhisattva makes of refusing
entrance into Nirvana before everyone is enlightened and returns to the
world of backyards and human love.

That's what I think the intention of the song is.

Great site, by the way.

David Taffet
  

    

that is nice.
  

    
That is very nice.

I have often heard it differently, as a kind of blues for the price of
fame. Even more so when I think of it in counterpoint to the feel good
blues, Sittin' on Top of the World.
  

    

> blues for the price of fame

Yeah.

> counterpoint to the feel good blues, Sittin' on Top of the World.

Nice!
  

    
I woke up with this in my head and was reminded that, when it
premiered, I thought it was Hunter's effort to imagine his way into,
and will a different more positive outcome for, Jerry's addiction. 

I'm not a fan of opiates culturally or as a user, but the distancing
from the turmoil of the world is often described by users as a
benign effect of that class of drugs, different from hallucinogens,
MJ, or coke. 

I'd like to think that the last two verses are what, in 1988, Hunter
wished for Jerry to feel when Jerry next used opiates to relieve the
pain of being Jerry.
  

    
SOTM expresses the disembodiment felt when you realize the
acceleration in  momentum of your public identity has reached escape
velocity and left the real you floating in space. 
  

    

I like both interpretations, and I have felt that a great number of Hunter's
lyrics were to some extent epistles to Jerry.
  

    
I don't think there's a conflict. Addiction is to infamy what fame
is to alienation.  
  

    
David, Can you share some of the songs you find to be direct
messages to Jerry?
  

    

Althea, for starters.
  

    
Yeah, I've always thought of Althea as being directed to Jerry.
  

    
Yep, "Nobody messing with you, but you, your friends are getting
most concerned" is pretty direct. Interesting that Hunter is
addressing Garcia through as a female spirit, or the Jungian anima
as described in Blair's 1991 interview with them both.
  BJ: I think "Althea" is one of your most interesting songs. JG (to
Hunter): What is she? The anima? The helpful lady, big sister kind
of... RH: I don't know if it's the anima; I'm not a Jungian. JG: Me
neither. [Laughs] I don't know. I see her out there. RH: You evoke
her, you don't say what she is. JG: She's beyond description. RH:
Minerva. JG: Right. Your helpful god-woman. RH: Or Athena. Sure. BJ:
The whole thing is just an evocation of her, in the same way a song
like "She Belongs to Me" just offers these flashes of feeling more
than information about the main character. It's more mood than
anything else. JG: Well, sometimes the mood is the thing, and it
says it better than anything else does.
  

    
Just as the songs can rattle around in each of our heads over years
of listening and singing, I think Hunter consciously wrote his
lyrics in a way that he knew would resonate with the singer for whom
he primarily wrote them, changing over time and circumstances. So
many songs can be thought of through this grid. 
  

    
I thnk it "Shakedown Street" as being as reality-based as "Truckin'."
That narrator could have been talking to me, but I wasn't around at the time
it was written. Very much a comment on thee internal GD culture.
  

    
Think OF...
  

    
Yup!