Grateful Dead

By David Dodd

Here’s the plan—each week, I will blog about a different song, focusing, usually, on the lyrics, but also on some other aspects of the song, including its overall impact—a truly subjective thing. Therefore, the best part, I would hope, would not be anything in particular that I might have to say, but rather, the conversation that may happen via the comments over the course of time—and since all the posts will stay up, you can feel free to weigh in any time on any of the songs! With Grateful Dead lyrics, there’s always a new and different take on what they bring up for each listener, it seems. (I’ll consider requests for particular songs—just private message me!)

"China Doll"

“Just a little nervous from the fall.” Is there a more beautiful, beautifully-sung, and stunningly-recorded phrase in all of music? OK, so maybe in something by Brahms, or on Abbey Road, or in some other exquisite piece of music. But I cannot count the number of times over the years that I have been brought up short by that phrase as performed and captured on Mars Hotel. And there’s so much behind it, by the point it happens in the song, that it just takes my breath away. I think that is what the phrase is meant to do, both lyrically and musically, and it succeeds.

But what all happens up to that point in the song?

It’s pretty well-known that the song is “about” (how I hate that concept sometimes…) suicide. Or, maybe, a suicide. Its working title was “The Suicide Song.”

Hard to imagine tackling a much heavier topic than this. “Seeking all that’s still unsung” is a job not for the faint of heart. I think we can agree that Robert Hunter is anything but faint-hearted. But—suicide?

What is the story in the song? As always with Hunter, ambiguity abounds, of course, so anything I say should be taken with a giant block of salt.

A conversation is underway. (Or, perhaps it is a monologue, with the singer/narrator addressing another. I find this unlikely, since Hunter’s version of the lyrics as presented in A Box of Rain contains pretty specifically-implemented dialogue indicators, by way of italicized and non-italicized text. Of course, a listener wouldn’t see those on the page, and the band never used two singers ((as in “Jack Straw”)) to differentiate the voices.) Whichever, a series of events is related.

There was a pistol shot. It happened at such-and-such a time. The “bells of heaven” ring. Those events could be the voice of a third-party narrator.

Then: Tell me what you done it for. That sounds like the voice, either of an aggrieved lover, a friend, or perhaps a being at the gate of heaven.

The response’s meaning is colored by whichever of those possible voices you want to consider. Now we have several potential directions in which the song could be heading all at once. And is heading, because of the number of listeners. I only mentioned three possibilities, and I am pretty certain that only scratches the surface, depending on the frame of reference of the listener.

As the dialogue is laid out, the conversation goes like this:

Voice A (The Interrogator): Tell me what you done it for.

Voice B (The Suicide): “No I won’t tell you a thing. Yesterday I begged you before I hit the ground—all I leave behind me is only what I found. If you can abide it let the hurdy-gurdy play—Stranger ones have come by here before they flew away. I will not condemn you, nor yet would I deny….”

Voice A: I would ask the same of you, but failing will not die. Take up your china doll. It’s only fractured—and just a little nervous from the fall

OK—this is a complicated conversation, with a great deal of backstory missing, and no narrative to explain. So the story is ours to create. Is the first voice saying, with the final response, that dying was not the logical consequence of doing what Voice B asked “yesterday”? And what could it have been that the suicide had begged of the interrogator? We can only speculate.

As with the real human beings we come in touch with every day, we really know practically nothing of their history, what they have through or are currently going through. We are encountering each other in the dark, and that kind of encounter requires extreme care.

What I really wonder about this song is whether it achieves for others what it achieves for me, which is, as almost always with Hunter’s songs, a feeling of empathy for the characters. There is not a right and wrong here. The interrogator does not offer condemnation, just as the suicide does not. Both characters have reasons for their actions, and both are worthy of our sympathy and understanding.

The manner in which Garcia set this song is another example of songwriting collaboration perfection. And the Mars Hotel recording, with the harpsichord-like (maybe actually a harpsichord?) keyboard part, supports the concept absolutely. It’s a tender song in every way—things have been fractured, but perhaps they can be, in some sense, salvaged.

As a final note, I love it that the final line is followed up by a “la la la” tag. It’s reminiscent of the final “verse” of “Ripple.” There is something about the use of syllables that carry no explicit meaning that allows them to be invested with whatever meaning is ready to be heard by the listener. Us.