Dead Songs in Depth

    
Foolish Heart
w: Hunter m: Garcia
AGDL: http://arts.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/fool.html
LASF: http://www.whitegum.com/songfile/FOOLISHH.HTM
  

    
To A Foolish Heart 
Lyrics: Robert Hunter
Music: Jerry Garcia

Copyright Ice Nine Publishing; used by permission.

Carve your name, carve your name in ice and wind
Search for where, search for where the rivers end
Or where the rivers start
Do everything that's in you, you feel to be your part
But never give your love my friend unto a foolish heart
Unto a foolish heart

Dare to leap, leap from ledges high and wide
Learn to speak, speak with wisdom like a child
Directly to the heart
Crown yourself the king of clowns or stand way back apart
But never give your love my friend unto a foolish heart
Unto a foolish heart

Shun a friend, shun a brother and a friend
Never look, never look around the bend
Or check the weather chart
Sign the Mona Lisa with a spray can, call it art
But never give your love my friend unto a foolish heart
Unto a foolish heart

A foolish heart will call on you to toss your dreams away
Then turn around and blame you for the way you went astray
A foolish heart will cost you sleep and often make you curse
A selfish heart is trouble, but a foolish heart is worse

Bite the hand, bite the hand that bakes your bread
Dare to leap, where the angels fear to tread
Till you are torn apart
Stoke the fires of paradise with coals from hell to start
But never give you love my friend unto a foolish heart
Unto a foolish heart
  

    

Jerry Garcia 9/28/89:


JG:  I write a song from the top down.  That is to say, I usually start with
a melody, and then the chord changes, and somewhere in there -- or else I
start with the text that Hunter gives me, and I work out from there.  I don't
present a song to the band until I have a basic rhythmic feel for it, the
melody as I imagine it to be sung, and the chord changes.  That has to be in
place before I feel like I've got a song....

Sometimes I'm more diffuse than others.  My diffuse song on [Built to Last]
was "Foolish Heart," where my original notion of it was much more stringy.  I
had a kind of Pete Townshend kind of acoustic guitar thick rhythm notion,
something between that and that kind of the U2 uptempo roll -- the
fingerpicking roll. Something along those lines -- I sort of wanted it to
have something like that. But it's the evolution of the parts in the band
that made me completely rethink it.  I eventually abandoned that idea
totally.

The thing that's interesting about "Foolish Heart" is it doesn't have any
pads in it.  Nobody's playing chords in the song, not anybody.  Everybody's
playing lines, and the lines hook up and tell you all you need to know about
the harmonic content of the song.  You don't wonder where it's going.  It's
so beautifully designed, it's like a clock.  It's really lovely.  It
surprised me it came out so interesting and so perfect and so totally its own
personality.  That's the Grateful Dead in action, really.

DG:  Brent came up with that line that really made it lock into place.  But
then you came up with an answer for it on the album, and that was the thing
that emerged.  The first time we heard it I thought, "Yeah! He locked it.
That covers that last little bit."

JG:  Well, it started with Weir's little thing.  I wanted Weir to play the
little hook here, which is [sings] into the first chord [of the verse].  And
I wanted the suspended thing there.  So I wanted that tonality there, and
Brent played that line, and I had Weir play that other line, and all of a
sudden it was starting to -- "Oh, I see!"  So now there's room for me to do a
little thing that's going to fit in there.  But the unpredictability of Bob's
part in there is one of the things that makes it really interesting to listen
to....

DG:  Is your answering line going to come back out onstage now?

JG:  Yeah, to some extent.  It doesn't really appear very often; it seems to
characterize it just because it's there at all.  I was not going to have that
at all; in fact, I almost thought, "I don't think I even want to play the
guitar on this tune."  During the body of the tune I only play a few notes
and a few chords on the one, and a couple of little answers in the chords,
and a couple of little licks in the body of the tune -- that is, against the
vocal.  Apart from that, it's hands off, mostly, and most of what you
perceive as the rhythm are the little things that Mickey's doing, which is
like a net of teeny-weeny rhythm instruments that occur once every four bars,
some of 'em.  Just little sounds, but they add to the overall groove.  And
Phil's part is incredible, the way it comes up in between Brent and Weir's,
in their holes.  But it still maintains the feel of the tune rhythmically on
a certain level; his part is really remarkable too.  It's another one of
those things -- it's pure Phil and it's also just totally absolutely
appropriate.
  

    
Wow - great piece. You really managed to draw some insights out of
Jerry.
  

    
there was a great version at laguna seca in the same show with a
midi-drenched drums of ear shatting drama.
  

    
1988?
  

    
That's amazing. The song sounds so simple, and yet reading that it sounds 
so complicated.
  

    
yes, i think 88