Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 8, Episode 5
Wake of the Flood 50: Row Jimmy
Archival interviews:
- Jerry Garcia, by Greg Harrington, St. Paul, 7/10/81.
- Robert Hunter, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 1977.
- Robert Hunter, by Denis McNamera, WLIR, 3/1978.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (1:22-1:59) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There’s no question that “Row Jimmy” is a classic Grateful Dead song, beloved by many Dead Heads, played often by the band and the offshots that have followed. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: When it was perfect and all the pieces fell into place, nothing in a first set was better, really. Up there with “Bird Song” for me. I love that I got to hear Jerry play slide guitar on it — Jerry didn’t play slide guitar very much at all. So, to get to hear Jerry play slide was really great.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Winterland 1977, 6/8/77] (2:12-2:31)
JESSE: That was a bit of the Winterland June 8th, ‘77 version, probably familiar to many, now on the Winterland 1977 box. And, as much as “Row Jimmy” is a classic Grateful Dead song, it can also be a confusing song.
DAVID LEMIEUX: My first show was in-your-face, the Hartford 1987. It opened with “[In the] Midnight Hour” into a massive “Cold Rain and Snow,” “C.C. Rider.” And, even “When Push Comes To Shove,” “[My] Brother Esau.”
AUDIO: “My Brother Esau” [Dave’s Picks 36, 3/26/87] (0:00-0:27)
DAVID LEMIEUX: But there was a “Row Jimmy” in there. That was the moment, in ‘87, where… I’d always liked the song, but didn't quite… I’m not gonna say “understand,” since I understood it, but I didn’t know what to make of it. Like: what is this? It was at that show where I was just so enveloped by the sound, being in there with 15,000 people at the Hartford Civic Center, that it made sense to me. And I said, “Okay, this song…” Then I started really seeking it out in a first set.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Dave’s Picks 36, 3/26/87] (2:08-2:27)
JESSE: That show is now Dave’s Picks 36. It’s an excellent version, and I can see how it unlocked the song for young Dave Lemieux. I certainly didn’t get “Row Jimmy” at first, and I know it’s not an uncommon experience. It seems like not even the Dead themselves totally got it at first. During the band’s 1976 touring hiatus, Jerry Garcia told a journalist, “I really loved ‘Row Jimmy Row.’ That was one of my favorite songs of ones that I’ve written. I loved it. Nobody else really liked it very much – we always did it – but nobody liked it very much, at least in the same way I did.”
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Dave’s Picks 36, 3/26/87] (2:37-3:05)
JESSE: There’s something about it that’s like the musical version of one of those magic eye optical illusions. Today, we’re going to exercise our third ear and focus in on “Row Jimmy.” A classic Grateful Dead song, sure, but what kind of classic Grateful Dead song?
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (5:00-5:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
“Row Jimmy”
JESSE: In January 1973, Jerry Garcia did something he never did again — he wrote more than a half-dozen new songs at once. A few months later, around the time the band was recording Wake of the Flood, he described the experience to Cameron Crowe as a “spasm.” He added, “Sometimes, I can just crank ‘em out and other times… nothing. Like I could have a spurt in which I’d write four new songs in one week, and in the next six months I wouldn’t be able to put two words together. It’s that kind of thing.” Something had changed since the last time Garcia had cranked out batches of songs, in early and late 1971 — he had a home studio installed.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (0:00-0:35)
JESSE: That’s from a remarkable unlabeled tape reel that Mountain Girl found in 2016 and sent to our friend David Gans for digitization, who discovered a complete demo session for nearly all the songs that Jerry Garcia brought to the Grateful Dead in early 1973, featuring Jerry not only singing and playing his parts but often including basslines, keyboards, second guitar, and drum machine, apparently recorded in a home studio in a rear building behind the house that he, Mountain Girl, and their family moved into in Stinson Beach in 1971. There are no signs of other home demos just yet, but I want to believe.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (1:14-1:34)
JESSE: "We're recording close to two albums' worth of material," Garcia told Cameron Crowe, with the plan to "distill it into one record, leaving the rest in the can.” The tape contains early versions of “China Doll,” “They Love Each Other,” “Wave That Flag” (aka “U.S. Blues”), ”Eyes of the World,” “Here Comes Sunshine,” an unfinished blues-y instrumental, and “Row Jimmy.”
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (0:22-0:47)
JESSE: “Row Jimmy” has confounded and delighted generations of Dead Heads. Listening to classic versions of the song, there’s an influence that’s seemingly quite obvious, though it might not be exactly what it seems — and, in turn, might provide a key to understanding why “Row Jimmy” is such a slippery song. Please welcome back Scott Metzger of Joe Russo’s Almost Dead.
SCOTT METZGER: To me, “Row Jimmy” has a reggae feel to it. But it’s not like anybody is back there doing the upbeat chicka-chickas on the guitar, or anything that would make it overtly reggae.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (0:53-1:12) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: In some ways, it seems blindingly simple that “Row Jimmy” was Jerry Garcia’s attempt to channel reggae, which he’d soon be singing in his side band with Merl Saunders. There are those that have wondered if the title “Row Jimmy” is a nod to Jimmy Cliff, singer and star of The Harder They Come.
SCOTT METZGER: I've always thought, man, that “Row Jimmy” would have fit perfectly on the The Harder They Come soundtrack. I would love to hear Jimmy Cliff singing that song. I could just totally… I could see it so easily.
AUDIO: “The Harder They Come” [Jimmy Cliff, The Harder They Come OST] (0:00-0:29) - [Spotify]
JESSE: But here’s the thing — I’m not totally sure Jerry Garcia had heard reggae yet when he wrote “Row Jimmy.” Certainly, it’d been popular in Jamaica for a few years, and there’s a chance that it had made it to the Dead’s ears in that window. It was in 1973 that reggae made it to American shores for real.
AUDIO: “The Harder They Come” [trailer] (0:00-0:18)
NARRATOR [1973]: Jamaica’s first feature is America’s #1 cult movie…
[“The Harder They Come” song excerpt]
NARRATOR [1973]: “Jimmy Cliff, an existential hero as good as anything James Dean or Brando portrayed in the ‘50s” — Crawdaddy.
JESSE: The Harder They Come opened in the UK in 1972, but didn’t make it to the United States until it opened in New York, coincidentally, the same weekend in early 1973 that “Row Jimmy” debuted in California. It would become an underground hit in 1974 thanks in part to Deadcast buddy Allan Arkush who, as it turns out, edited the trailer we just heard. The soundtrack had both been out in the UK starting in the summer of ‘72, so it’s possible an imported copy made it over, or maybe the idea of reggae was generally wafting its way to Stinson Beach. But to my ears, it’s also possible that “Row Jimmy” only took on a reggae influence only after it was written. For some contrast, here’s how it sounded on Garcia’s solo demo, recorded in January 1973. One tiny thing to note here is one of the song’s only lyric changes. On an early draft in the Ice Nine files, as well as this demo and the first performance, it’s a glass shack, not a grass shack.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (0:48-1:16)
JESSE: And here’s how the groove felt on February 9th, when they debuted the song onstage at Maples Pavilion at Stanford.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [2/9/73] (1:04-1:35)
JESSE: It’s slowed down a tiny bit between the demo and the Dead debut, but both have much faster feels than later versions. A superb explanation of “Row Jimmy”’s groove and what’s so odd about it can be found in drummer Bill Kreutzmann’s memoir, Deal, where he calls the song a personal favorite. “It was really difficult to get a grip on it at first,” he writes. “It has a slow tempo, which makes it seem like it would be easy, but it calls for a slight reggae groove layered over a ballad. Rhythmically, the lengths aren’t traditional. They’re not just twos and fours. It’s deceiving. Basically, you have to play the song in half-time with a double-time bounce on top. It’s trickier than it sounds.” Let’s listen to that debut version from February again.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [2/9/73] (2:52-3:17)
JESSE: There, the double-time bounce is in the kick-drum, giving it a pretty different feel that doesn’t imply reggae to my ears. I hear “Row Jimmy” not as an attempt to integrate reggae but another chain in Jerry Garcia’s songwriting, looking for a new groove the Dead could sink their teeth into; it almost feels like the next iteration of “Tennessee Jed.” I hear the connection in the faster earlier versions of both of those songs. Here’s a brisk “Tennessee Jed” from Chicago, October 22nd, 1971, now Dave’s Picks 3.
AUDIO: “Tennessee Jed” [Dave’s Picks 3, 10/22/71] (0:00-0:15)
JESSE: And here’s “Ramble On Rose” from that same night.
AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [Dave’s Picks 3, 10/22/71] (0:10-0:22)
JESSE: They’re not sequels so much as a series of rhythmic ideas. The common thread is that they seem like new grooves conceived for the purpose of being fun to play and the suspicion that probably the Dead would bring something unexpected and cool to them, then matched accordingly with Robert Hunter lyrics.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [2/9/73] (0:11-0:28)
JESSE: Last episode, we discussed Keith Godchaux’s “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away,” a song as harmonically complex as it was rhythmically straightforward. Musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell from the City College of New York had a different reaction to “Row Jimmy.”
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: For me, what I find so appealing as a listener and so difficult trying to think of it as a musician, is it seems to be moving in multiple temporal realms. It’s, like, in slow motion, but it also has a quicker lilt in there. It’s kind of mindblowing in its time sense. And that’s really what’s new about it, because harmonically, that’d be sort of the opposite of [“Let Me Sing Your Blues Away”]. Here, it’s regular chords moving in fairly typical rock progressions, but it’s in molasses.
JESSE: When Garcia recorded his demo, he wasn’t quite sure if the song was done yet. Though it contains all of Robert Hunter’s lyrics—no more, no less—Garcia also plays through a segment where he seems to leave room for another verse. Or maybe it’s just a placeholder for the slide guitar solo to come.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (1:39-2:09)
JESSE: In addition to the two layered pulses, there are other complications. As Shaugn points out, and Kreutzmann hints at in his book, the verses are 13 bars each, except for the first, which is 14, to accommodate the intro riff. And then the solos. We’ll let Scott Metzger explain them.
SCOTT METZGER: The form of the solos is so… again, it's so bizarre. These tunes do not play themselves! You have to know the form of the solos on “Row Jimmy” in order to get through it. You kind of can’t fake your way through it. You’ve got to know, because the bars are very crooked, so to speak. There’s some bars of four, there’s some bars of three, a couple of bars of two.
JESSE: By the end of the first tour, the feel had shifted slightly, with the kick drum in half-time, thickening the molasses. Here’s what one of those solos sounds like from Salt Lake City on February 28th, 1973, now Dick’s Picks 28.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Dick’s Picks 28, 2/28/73] (3:56-4:27) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
SCOTT METZGER: If you sat there and just listened to “Row Jimmy” and counted, “1… 2… 3… 4” over the solo section, it would not line up. It eventually lines up — but in the middle of it, there’s all these crooked moments where the bars are landing in unexpected places.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Dick’s Picks 28, 2/28/73] (4:31-4:50) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It got even slower by the spring, going from 60 bpm down to 50, if you count at the half-time tempo, and this is where I hear the reggae start to come out — especially in Bob Weir’s guitar part. This is from the May 26th version at Kezar Stadium on the Here Comes Sunshine box set.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (1:52-2:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: By July, it’s safe to say Jerry Garcia had at least heard the soundtrack to The Harder They Come.
AUDIO: “The Harder They Come” [Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders, Live at Keystone] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: That was from Live at Keystone by Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders, recorded a few weeks before the Wake of the Flood sessions, one of their first versions of the Jimmy Cliff song, which would become a Garcia staple for the next two decades.
AUDIO: “The Harder They Come” [Jerry Garcia & Merl Saunders, Live at Keystone] (0:30-0:49) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Garcia would later cover “Sitting in Limbo” and much later “Johnny Too Bad,” tying it with Planet Waves for the most songs in Garcia’s later songbook. In some ways, though, the issue isn’t when Jerry Garcia absorbed reggae — but when his bandmates did. My guess is that the Dead’s collective discovery of reggae helped them clarify the groove that Garcia had conceived for “Row Jimmy,” which would become a durable part of the Grateful Dead’s songbook for the rest of their career. And, in the bigger picture, it doesn’t matter at all what “Row Jimmy” owes to reggae. Like Robert Hunter’s lyrics, the groove is pretty durable, and no matter when they discovered reggae, they certainly weren’t trying to imitate it anyway. And this is the other slippery part of “Row Jimmy” that we’ve been studiously avoiding until just now — what’s it all about?
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (1:09-1:38)
JESSE: There have been roughly five gazillion times when David Gans has saved our collective tuckus, and today we’ve got another one. David interviewed Robert Hunter over a pair of sessions in 1977 for BAM, now collected in his book Conversations with the Dead. Thanks to the magic of David’s tape recorder, we’ve got a whole lot of Robert Hunter today talking about his lyric writing and “Row Jimmy” especially, so much that I’m going to take the honor and opportunity to welcome Robert Hunter to the Deadcast to talk about not only what a few songs mean, but how they mean.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Some of them are trying to make sense, and others of ‘em are just dreams. Sometimes, I communicate dreams, and sometimes I fail to communicate a dream, and it doesn’t make sense either and that song kind of goes off into limbo. Unless it has a really good beat to it, in which case people say, ‘Well, I can’t hear the words, but it sounds good.’
JESSE: David asked Hunter where “Row Jimmy” came from and got what seemed to be a fairly straightforward answer. At first. Please hold your takes about how this all applies to “Row Jimmy” until you make your way through this whole section of the episode. David was a bit off-mic and some of the questioning happened mid-conversation, so I’ll stand in for those parts, just following David’s line of questioning.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: “Row Jimmy” — that's just chronicling, in a somewhat surrealistic way, a time when I left San Cristobal, New Mexico and took off walking. I was gonna walk to Denver, and I walked all day, and indeed walked a hole through my boots. I found I’d walked the wrong direction — I'd walked to Taos all day. So then I turned around and hitchhiked off to Denver from there. But I don't know, it's sort of the things that go through your head when you run away, or whatever it was I was doing. I was leaving and I had no reason to be in New Mexico anymore, and I had no place to go from there particularly. And I just had a hankering to go on the road.
JESSE: We’re of course going to let Robert Hunter continue this seemingly true story and add two notes. The first is to gently remind you to hold those takes — memory can be a fascinating thing sometimes. The second is to add that this particular trip out of New Mexico took place in the late summer of 1967—the end of the so-called Summer of Love back in San Francisco—and was, at least in some tellings, precipitated by Hunter mailing several sets of lyrics to his friend Jerry Garcia, and Garcia telling him to get himself to San Francisco to become the Grateful Dead’s new lyricist. However it unfolded, it wasn’t a direct journey.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: I had 20 bucks, a copy of Don Quixote and my black Stewart scarf. I had thrown my glasses away a couple of months before; I was determined that I would see. So I couldn't see I had holes in my boots. I had a copy of Don Quixote and walked the wrong way all day! I tried to sleep under a railroad trestle in a ditch and there was no sleepin’. As the sun went down, it started getting very cold, big, juicy mosquitoes and everything. I was pretty exhausted. I got up and hitchhiked half the way to Denver, I guess. A cop stopped me — he said, “Look, I'm not going to arrest you, you could get arrested for hitchhiking there.” He said, “We just have to feed you. Go off and don’t let me catch you anymore.”
JESSE: The story takes a turn that sounds like it be from an early Bob Dylan press bio.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Finally, I got picked up around Pikes Peak by a carnival truck—yes, I did—and they asked me if I wanted to join the carnival. And of course I wanted to join the carnival. There was a big truck that said “HAUNTED HOUSE” on the back. So we got into Denver, it was storming and miserable. I only had $1.75 left. The guy dropped me off there, and the carnival is setting up in town the next day. I couldn’t find the phone number to get in touch with him, in order to get over and get in on that trip. So the carnival is out of town, set up and out of town before I knew it. I missed the carnival. So, I got hung up in Denver for a month.
JESSE: It was a circuitous route back to the Bay Area.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Hitchhiked up through Laramie and out to Salt Lake City. I had a blow out, 100 miles an hour, right front blow out driving this car in Wyoming. It was quite an experience.
JESSE: We’re going to skip a few parts. In still a different telling of the story, sometime after Denver, Hunter made it through Reno and, with the help of a slot machine, parlayed a nickel into enough coinage to call Garcia at 710 Ashbury and tell him he was on his way. He eventually made it back to California just before Labor Day 1967.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Went out to Palo Alto again, where I ran into Phil directly. He said, “Hey man, we're going up to Rio Nido [on the] Russian River to play, and we’re doing ‘Alligator’ and ‘China Cat Sunflower.’” I said, “Wow,” so I came up. I’d sent them the lyrics for that from New Mexico. I went up and wrote the first half of “Dark Star” that day. So I got right to work — I fell right into it. It was all happening.
AUDIO: “Dark Star” [“Dark Star” 7-inch single, 1968] (0:45-1:04) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: What’s remarkable is that Robert Hunter was willing to then explain to David how his trip from New Mexico to the Bay Area fed into “Row Jimmy.” Keep holding the takes.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: That song is leaving New Mexico and walking through the desert. But the image in my mind… because what I’m doing when I’m leaving there, chronologically that morning, is I’m taking my first totally-committed step onto the road. I’ve decided I’ve put it off long enough — I have no more business here, and it’s time to go on the road. It seemed to me that everyone was supposed to do that at the time, including me. And I did it: I just cut completely loose, and I went on the road. I jumped in the air, in other words. Now, the question is, what can you make out of being on the road? Can I double-twist while I’m in the air? Can I make something of this? A figure? Can I make an impression of my mind, something here that’s going to last, something to my character? Whatever. Make me hipper, wiser, whatever.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (2:06-2:34)
JESSE: But what about this part?
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (0:36-0:43)
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: That’s an injunction that's put into you: ‘You have no place on the road.’ And what you learn on the road is that you have no place on the road. Get back home is the message of the road — get back home, and make one. But the road is the wanderer. This is a place where people have to go through to find where they belong, to situate there, and then spread roots out.
JESSE: Far out. David pointed out that some of the images that Hunter was describing pertaining to “Row Jimmy” could also apply to “Mississippi Half-Step.” Listen closely for the sound of a lightbulb going off over Robert Hunter’s head.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Well, as a matter of fact, that's something I was talking about. I wasn't talking about “Row Jimmy” at all, and I gave you a pretty convincing explanation, didn’t I?
EMILY LITELLA [1978]: Oooh, well that’s very different!
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Okay. And those two tunes they're both from the same album, aren’t they?
JESSE: Yes sir, “Mississippi Half Step” and “Row Jimmy” are both on Wake of The Flood, sir.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Well, okay, then it's easy to see that they're all part of the same consciousness that time that I was involved in.
JESSE: All of which to say is that Hunter’s whole story about hitchhiking happened, more or less, and it did get channeled into a Grateful Dead song. Another way of putting that is to mentally project that whole story back two episodes and attach it in your mind to “Mississippi Half-Step.”
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (1:35-2:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Hey, I can interpret it is my problem, man, I can interpret things. I’m a Kabbalist, almost. I don’t know anything about the Kabbalah, but hand me a copy like that, I'll tell you what it means. I can even interpret Robert Hunter lyrics! Throw me another.
JESSE: Okay, how about we do “Row Jimmy” now? Actually, amid all of that, they did get pretty deep into “Row Jimmy,” using its dream-like lyrics as a stand-in for Hunter’s lyrics as a whole. The song actually contained two sets of Hunter’s lyrics fused together.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: “Row Jimmy Row,” the original idea was: “How long, Jack, ‘till we get to Singapore? How long, Joe, did we sign on for? Better keep bailing while the rain pours down, the day crew’s sleeping and the night crew’s drowned.” And the chorus was: “Row Jimmy row, gonna get there, I don’t know” — and I lifted that out of this other context and put it in there.
JESSE: That other context was a song called “Fair to Even Odds.” In his lyric collection, A Box of Rain, Hunter notes that it was written concurrently with “Friend of the Devil,” which would place the first seed of the “Row Jimmy” chorus in early 1970. Hunter would occasionally perform a fragment as a prelude to “Row Jimmy” in his solo shows and you can hear how the keep on bailing motif connected the hard-luck sailor in “Fair to Even Odds” to the hard-luck sailor in the chorus of “Row Jimmy.” This is from June 19th, 1980 in London.
AUDIO: “Fair To Even Odds” [Robert Hunter, 6/19/80] (0:04-0:37)
JESSE: Later, Pete Sears of Jefferson Starship and a gazillion other Bay Area bands set the lyrics to music on his 2000 solo album, The Long Haul, if you’d like to hear the rest of how it goes. Thanks to Alex Allan for pointing out these connections.
AUDIO: “Fair to Even Odds” [Pete Sears, The Long Haul] (0:16-0:38) - [Spotify]
JESSE: “Row Jimmy” is a pretty dreamlike song to me, but Hunter’s clarification of a central image here helps me ground the frame of the song a little more.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: I like my little setups and the characters. I like: “Julie catch a rabbit by his hair, come back step, like to walk on air” — that’s a whole song in itself. And there’s another song: “Look at Julie down below, the levee doin the dopaso” — that’s another little thing. “Here’s my half a dollar if you dare, double twist when you hit the air.”
JESSE: David asked about what it meant to “hit the air.”
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: From jumping down. Oh, I didn't make that clear: “Come back step, like to walk on air…” Well, I guess it has this image of jumping from the levee. I guess I fancy a higher jump.
JESSE: Placing the whole song around a levee over a river somewhere at the outskirts of town grounds the song somewhat.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Here's Julie, doing this: “can you double twist when you hit the air?” It’s kind of, what do you do when you face the void? “Dopaso” — some kind of movement.
JESSE: And what’s a “dopaso”?
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Dopaso is a square dance movement. There's a doe sido and do paso in square dancing. I think on a dopaso, instead of going around like this, I think you do it with another partner. I don’t remember exactly what it is now.
AUDIO: “Video Square Dance Lesson #10” (0:16-0:34) - [YouTube]
SQUARE DANCE CALLER LARRY KRABER: Okay, the name of this call is — do-pas-o. The definition is: bring your partner by the left; corner by their right; partner by the left. And if no other call is given, it ends in a courtesy turn.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: “Here’s a half a dollar if you dare, double twist when you hit the air…” The main thrust of that is: do you dare jump into the air at all? And once you’ve jumped in the air, are you going to have presence of mind enough to do a trick?
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (2:13-2:40)
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: I guess that there have been times in my life that I haven't really cared whether I communicated directly or not. I had this idea that the impressions that I had—in myself, the emotional impressions—would [be communicated] through my symbols. In this case, they would communicate the emotional impression that I wanted, which a person would relate to his own experience. And it wasn't my business to authentically detail the experiences that led up to it, but rather to give impressions. And those impressions can relate to no one but myself.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (2:34-3:04)
JESSE: Julie jumping from the levee provides a central image to the song, but I’ve always held onto that last verse and this next bridge as providing parallel keynotes of longing that can focus “Row Jimmy” emotionally for me. The first is just to think about it as a breakup song.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (3:05-3:30)
JESSE: The second is to look at through a desire for the departed past — not necessarily a nostalgia, but an acknowledgement that something is irretrievably gone. Maybe it’s the world visible in the rearview mirror of the car Keith Godchaux is driving in “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away” while blasting the new radio-powered top 10.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (4:10-4:36)
JESSE: However you’d like to think about “Row Jimmy,” it provides a lot of space to do that, drifting over the 7-minute mark at its slow, weird pace on the album version. By the time they got to the Record Plant to make Wake of the Flood in August 1973, they’d performed it at virtually every show that year to date, nearly three dozen times. They set to tracking the song on Friday, August 10th, the last day of the first week of sessions. It was perhaps the easiest of the whole album.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” ((Take 1) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: If you’ll notice on the new edition of The Angel’s Share, there’s barely two minutes worth of “Row Jimmy.”
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” ((Take 1) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:21-0:39) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: We just heard a little bit of the incomplete first take, which Garcia stops for no obvious reason.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” ((Take 1) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (1:26-1:49) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JERRY GARCIA [8/10/73]: Let’s do another one…
JESSE: One thing to observe is that Keith Godchaux is playing some kind of organ. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: He's kind of moving away from, at least on the album, from the grand piano. There’s a lot of electric sounds coming out of Keith's fingers and they're really, really good.
JESSE: Brian Kehew is the engineer who got The Angel’s Share recordings into shape.
BRIAN KEHEW: It’s kind of a standout on these records because it changes their vibe, in a way, to a different thing. I can see where they wanted to be one foot in the past, but also modern. It does keep them up to what’s happening at the time — maybe even a little bit ahead of it, too. Because they're not going for space rock/Hawkwind types of synthesizer sounds; they’re going for very musical ones, which makes more sense. But it does have a little less feel of the foot in the past that they always tend to keep.
JESSE: The track sheet for “Row Jimmy” reveals that the keyboard sound for the song is actually a combination of two keyboards — a Farfisa, the same kind of combo organ that Pigpen played during the Dead’s early days.
AUDIO: “Dancing in the Street” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 7/3/66] (0:03-0:16)
JESSE: The other is a clavinet, perhaps the famous D6 model introduced in the early ‘70s, heard most clearly on the bridge.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (2:05-2:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: In the spring of 1973, Keith Godchaux had added a Fender Rhodes to his stage setup, and he plays on the studio version of “Row Jimmy,” overdubbed onto the final take.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (5:26-5:59) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But Keith had never played any kind of electric organ onstage before the sessions. Brian Kehew knows from keyboards — one of his other gigs is as the touring keyboard tech and occasional fill-in keyboardist for The Who.
BRIAN KEHEW: I think it's important to note that, for keyboard players, electric piano and real piano have this touch control that's about as important as the notes you play. And a Hammond organ doesn't: any kind of organ is a very fixed volume. So if you pound on it harder, it doesn't change the levels. But on a piano and an electric piano, or clavinet even, you can play softer or louder with just your finger control. That's a very important part of your expression. So for him, it must have been weird to have a synthesizer show up that just plays a stiff C minor chord or a G chord and it doesn't do anything but just hold that steady note. So it's kind of limiting in a way, but it does add a new color which many people felt was very exciting and interesting. But it feels electronic against what they're doing, whereas a Hammond organ, given its nature, sounds a lot more organic.
JESSE: I do find it a bit of a strange call to have Keith play it live in the studio and not overdub it later, but it does add a bit more of a reggae touch, though filtered through slightly fancier keyboards. Though he’d experiment with a B3 onstage in the fall of 1973, it never made it to “Row Jimmy.” Take 2 of “Row Jimmy” was also incomplete, just a groove-setting.
JERRY GARCIA [8/10/73]: Let’s get that groove steady for a while. It’s rushed a little.
JESSE: On take 3, they made it through a complete version.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (6:01-6:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Someone asks if they’re going to attempt a fourth version, and Garcia poses a fine question.
JERRY GARCIA [8/10/73]: What was wrong with that?
JESSE: Like me, musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell loves the way Weir’s rhythm guitar part ties the room together.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: One of the most beautiful parts in listening to the record again is Bob’s pizzicato background. It’s an amazing part of this time sense, how all the parts create the whole in this song. In the chorus, his little pizzicato, palm-muted with his right hand, is really just perfect.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (0:56-1:11) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: The instrumental parts would all be like fragments of a tune. So in some ways, it's them hitting their stride as, like, a chamber music group here with this record. There’s bits of “Here Comes Sunshine” that are like this, too, where it’s the composite that really holds it together.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (1:11-1:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Something else that’s worth mentioning here about “Row Jimmy” and reggae and the summer of 1973 in general: homegrown Jamaican pop music had been born in part from the enormous sound systems that thrived in Kingston starting in the late 1950s, evolving through a variety of styles before becoming reggae. The sound systems continued to evolve, too, a fixture of Jamaican music, and sometimes emigrated from Jamaica along with their owners. “Row Jimmy,” which may or may not have been influenced by reggae, was recorded on Friday, August 10th in Sausalito. The next day, Saturday, August 11th, the Dead went back to the Record Plant for some more work, and across the country in the Bronx—one place where reggae had definitely taken root—a Jamaican-born teenager nicknamed Kool Herc DJ’d what would become known as the founding party of hip-hop.
AUDIO: “Apache” [Incredible Bongo Band, 40 Years of the Incredible Bongo Band] (0:00-0:19) - [Spotify]
JESSE: “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band wasn’t reggae, but it sounded next-level coming from an imported Jamaican sound system. Jamaican music would transform American music in the next half-decade, and take deeper root in and around the Dead, though in pretty different ways than in the Bronx. In August 1973, it was obvious there were new grooves in the air. Besides Keith Godchaux’s clavinet, there aren’t a whole lot of overdubs on “Row Jimmy,” but I’ll note that the vocals are especially sweet.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (5:26-6:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Please welcome back, Mrs. Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: One of the things that I loved about singing with the Grateful Dead was the fact that so much of the vocals were not like background-voice vocals — it’s ensemble singing. There were background vocals on certain songs and certain parts, but a great deal was ensemble singing. You take Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty and you’ve got ensemble singing on so many of those songs. It translated as well to the next era that included Wake of the Flood and [From the] Mars Hotel and Blues for Allah — just a lot of ensemble singing, and that was really fun.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (6:01-6:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: We would have to work on the harmonies, but I had been singing harmony since I was six years old. That wasn’t a real struggle for me. But it was taking it into a group format and knowing where the tone of your voice is going to fit in within the chord structure, and determining all of that between three people. So… that’s fun! That’s fun figuring that stuff out.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (6:21-6:37) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX-MACKAY: It was always so much fun doing vocals with Jerry and Bobby. Every time we encircled that microphone, it dissolved into a comedy routine. They were both so funny, and we would laugh and laugh and laugh. We had the best time around the microphones in the studio.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (6:40-7:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Robert Hunter himself was a little skeptical about the album version, telling WLIR in 1978 that he thought it was maybe a bit too slow. As always, sorry about the cruddy audio quality and all love to the Dead Heads who preserved this.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: I think some of the problem has to do with choice of tempos — tunes like “Row Jimmy Row” is a good example, of a tune that’s written very very well at that tempo on stage because of all the power, you get the place rocking slowly back and forth, and I don’t really think it translates to the album at that tempo. A bit quicker would have moved it.
JESSE: “Row Jimmy” would stay a favorite in the repertoire. Though it would get slightly more rare in the later ‘70s and early ‘80s, the band’s road hiatus year of 1975 would be the only year it didn’t get played at all — the definition of a durable tune. Unlike a few songs on Wake of the Flood, “Row Jimmy” would retain its core feel the remainder of its time in the band’s repertoire — though different eras of the song would highlight different parts of the song’s dynamics. The song became a forum for Jerry Garcia’s rare slide guitar playing. This is from November 17th, 1973 in LA, now Dave’s Picks 5, one of many beautiful versions from those fall tours.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Dave’s Picks 5, 11/17/73] (2:28-2:47)
JESSE: It remained an outlet for Garcia’s slide. Usually, but not always. Here’s Garcia describing it in 1981.
JERRY GARCIA [7/10/81]: “Little Red Rooster” and “Row Jimmy Row” are the only tunes that I really play slide on. And even those, partially — sometimes I take the slide off and play a normal solo. Nothing is hard and fast in the Grateful Dead.
JESSE: Garcia’s slide is one thing to keep an ear out for. The non-slide versions are a bit rare, like this one from June 22, 1973 in Vancouver, now on the Pacific Northwest box. Perhaps the slide got confiscated at the border.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Pacific Northwest, 6/22/73] (2:06-2:23) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In practice, at least Bill Kreutzmann felt like it took a while to get the song in hand. Ballads “used to scare me a little,” he told Blair Jackson in 1989, “because it’s harder to find a groove on them. Not ‘Stella Blue,’ which is pretty straight ahead, but on something like ‘Row Jimmy,’ for instance, I just wasn’t sure the band had the groove on it; or maybe I just didn’t have it in my heart. But I’ve learned how to deal with it, and now I’ll just sit right in the middle of the quarter-beats. I used to feel hesitant about certain songs because I didn’t think we could just jump into the feeling.”
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Get Shown the Light, 5/8/77] (1:17-1:49) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s the May 8th, 1977 version, what the song sounded like with Mickey Hart back in the fold, the reggae coming out even more. Unlike some of the more “progressive” songs from the Wake of the Flood era, Garcia’s rhythmic concept made it a good fit for the double-drummer Dead, giving them room to play. You can hear Keith Godchaux playing around with his new Polymoog, moving it slightly closer to the sound on the album.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Get Shown the Light, 5/8/77] (4:50-5:21) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Brent Mydland would embrace the expanded keyboard colors more in the 1980s. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: Brent did some beautiful things on it. There was a lot of space in that song — it wasn't in your face the whole time, there [were] a lot of quiet moments. And in those spaces… a lot of bands would just fill those spaces, all six guys would fill it with sound. The Dead didn't do that. So when it was Brent's turn to fill some of those spaces, I loved it.
JESSE: Mydland even sometimes took a solo of his own before Garcia’s second, this is from Truckin’ Up To Buffalo, July 4th, 1989.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Truckin’ Up to Buffalo, 7/4/89] (4:15-4:47)
DAVID LEMIEUX: I even remember seeing Weir… quite a few times when they would do it, he'd hold his guitar like he was rowing. During the quiet part of the end. And when they got that littlet shuffle going at the end, just really, really exceptional. Just loved it.
JESSE: One thing I like about the later versions is how the outro chorus of the song developed its own dynamics. The first pass through was a singalong.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Truckin’ Up to Buffalo, 7/4/89] (7:20-7:38)
JESSE: Then leaning into the reggae feel, this one is from March 26th, 1990 at Nassau Coliseum, now on the Spring 1990 box. Like so.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Spring 1990, 3/26/90] (8:10-8:37)
JESSE: And then the final choruses became a place for the band to hang ornamentation, not quite soloing, not quite jamming. Listen to what Bruce Hornsby is playing here. This is from View From the Vault II, from June 14th, 1991.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [View From the Vault II, 6/14/91] (8:52-9:22)
JESSE: “Row Jimmy” is a classic example of a song staying the same while the Grateful Dead changed around it. To demonstrate, and maybe get a new perspective on the song’s evolution, we’ve assembled a supercut version — a few seconds from the earliest takes, starting with Jerry’s home demo, an early live version, and the Wake of the Flood recording, followed by a little bit from each year the song was in rotation. It might be a little bumpy. I’ll read off the dates afterwards, but it’s fascinating to hear it evolve from the original conception through its different textures and feels around the pulse.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Jerry Garcia home studio demo, 1/73] (0:00-0:19)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [2/9/73] (0:32-0:50)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Here Comes Sunshine, 6/10/73] (0:33-0:47) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (0:53-1:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Dick’s Picks 12, 6/28/74] (1:16-1:28) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [June 1976, 6/10/76] (1:20-1:36)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Winterland 1977, 6/8/77] (1:50-2:08)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Dave’s Picks 23, 1/22/78] (2:17-2:33)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Road Trips Vol. 3 No. 1, 12/28/79] (3:41-4:01) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Go to Nassau, 5/16/80] (3:45-4:00)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [5/11/81] (3:41-4:01)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (3:38-4:06) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [10/20/83] (3:54-4:10)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [4/17/84] 94:54-5:10)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [6/25/85] (5:38-5:55)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [12/16/86] (5:11-5:31)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Dave’s Picks 36, 3/26/87] (6:46-7:15)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 7/3/88] (6:50-7:12)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Truckin’ Up to Buffalo, 7/4/89] (7:19-7:36)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Spring 1990, 3/26/90] (7:51-8:08)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [View From the Vault II, 6/14/91] (8:52-9:08)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Dick’s Picks 27, 12/16/92] (8:11-8:31) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [9/20/93] (11:18-11:35)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [3/23/94] (8:53-9:10)
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [5/28/95] (12:19-12:55)
JESSE: We’ve posted a standalone video with a full list of dates and venues, but we started with Jerry’s solo demo from January 1973; the debut at Stanford on February 9th, 1973; RFK Stadium on June 10th, 1973; the Wake of the Flood version; Boston Garden on June 28th, 1974; Boston Music Hall on June 10th, 1976; Winterland on June 8th, 1977; MacArthur Court in Eugene on January 22, 1978; Oakland Auditorium Arena on December 28th, 1979; Nassau Coliseum on May 16th, 1980; Hartford Coliseum on May 11th, 1981; Madison Square Garden on September 20th, 1982; Worcester Centrum on October 20th, 1983; Niagara Falls Convention Center on April 17th, 1984; Saratoga Performing Arts Center on June 25th, 1985; Oakland Coliseum on December 16th, 1986; Hartford Civic Center on March 26th, 1987; Oxford Plains Speedway on July 2nd, 1988; Buffalo on July 4th, 1989; Nassau Coliseum on March 26th, 1990; RFK Stadium on June 14th, 1991; Oakland Coliseum on December 16th, 1992; Madison Square Garden on September 20th, 1993; Nassau Coliseum on March 23rd, 1994; and Portland Meadows on May 28th, 1995, the very last version. And, after the Grateful Dead, “Row Jimmy” wasn’t going anywhere. The first recorded reggae cover arrived on the Fire On the Mountain tribute in 1996, sung by Bob Marley collaborator Judy Mowatt.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Judy Mowatt, Fire On the Mountain] (0:28-0:52)
JESSE: Phish’s Trey Anastasio has done it, one of the few Dead tunes he’s done outside his collaborations with members of the Dead themselves. Indie folkies the Decemberists have done it, too, recording it on their 2011 EP, Long Live the King.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [The Decemberists, Long Live the King] (1:21-1:56) - [Spotify]
JESSE: “Row Jimmy” is too weird to be a standard, exactly. Like Robert Hunter’s lyrics, it’s a dream, ready for dreaming. We’ll end with one more quote from David Gans’s 1977 conversation with Hunter, not necessarily about “Row Jimmy, but not necessarily not about Row Jimmy either.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: You know, I really, really would prefer not to get into tearing apart the symbology of my own songs, and I’ll tell you why — because symbols are evocative. If there were a more definite way to say things than with the symbols, then you’d say it that way.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (6:02-6:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]