The blonde in the bleachers
She flips her hair for you
Above the loudspeakers
You start to fall
She follows you home
But you miss living alone
You can still hear sweet mysteries
Calling you
The bands and the roadies
Lovin’ ’em and leavin’ ’em
It’s pleasure to try ’em
It’s trouble to keep ’em
‘Cause it seems like you’ve gotta give up
Such a piece of your soul
When you give up the chase
Feeling it hot and cold You’re in rock ‘n’ roll It’s the nature of the race It’s the unknown child So sweet and wild It’s youth It’s too good to waste
so i was 18 years old, living in my first apartment – a vast five rooms with appliances 180.00 including heat hot water and electricity! my friend John comes over. its sometime in daylight. we must a blown a joint or two cause that’ s what we did then. anyway he has this grateful dead album, in those vinyl days it was on three LPs. Europe ’72. of course i knew about the dead, heard bits n pieces on the radio and randomly a house parties, but never really followed. But this was great grateful dead stuff. some of my most favorite pieces of music – the china cat/know you rider, sugar magnolia. Course as we did in those days we played things over and over and sang along. we particularly got stuck on Tennessee Jed – mostly because it had an easy enough chorus. I still remember though John telling me how much he didn’t like that part of the song where the dog gets kicked. We must have played it or bits of it anyway for hours. I don’t know what happened after that. i don’t remember anything else of the day. Just me n john and Europe 72 on a second hand turntable-radio-8track tape player- combo my mother had found at a tag sale. Eventually the stereo got stolen and I had to move out due to certain legalities interrupting my outlaw ways. About a year or so afterwords John got to be best man at my first wedding. Then he got married too. And then divorces and now I have no idea wherever he is but if i could I’d say thanks. Thanks for being my friend, thanks for the Grateful Dead, thanks for Europe’72 . I’d tell him how its become a tradition of mine on Good Friday to play nothing but The Dead and how because of that I’m sitting here in another bright and sunny kitchen thousands of miles away from that one where we sat and smoked the day away; thinking of him as I write.
The blonde in the bleachers
She flips her hair for you
Above the loudspeakers
You start to fall
She follows you home
But you miss living alone
You can still hear sweet mysteries
Calling you
The bands and the roadies
Lovin’ ’em and leavin’ ’em
It’s pleasure to try ’em
It’s trouble to keep ’em
‘Cause it seems like you’ve gotta give up
Such a piece of your soul
When you give up the chase
Feeling it hot and cold You’re in rock ‘n’ roll It’s the nature of the race It’s the unknown child So sweet and wild It’s youth It’s too good to waste
