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(Thinking about these Goodnight Irene lines, in turn, makes me think of Ken Kesey, and his novel Sometimes A Great Notion, and David Gans and his song “River and Drown”: Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own. Sometimes we visit your country and live in your home Sometimes we live no particular way but our own I love the evocation of the song “Goodnight, Irene,” in the lines. I’d love to hear if others of you reading this have had a similar experience of having a “song of your own.” Whenever I think to try to capture it, it’s gone-I really can’t sing it on command, but there it is, when I stop paying attention to it directly. I know I have one-it’s a tune I think I’ve been humming to myself when I’m out walking by myself or just abstractedly doing some chore, for well over 30 years. In an interview, Hunter made an interesting statement about the “songs of our own,” which appear twice in “Eyes of the World.” He said that he thinks it’s possible each of us may have some tune, or song, that we hum or sing to ourselves, nothing particularly amazing or fine, necessarily, that is our own song. Sometimes we live in no extraordinary way-just “no particular way but our own.” Hunter is asking us to trust in something that we can’t comprehend.Īnd then, he points to our daily lives and concerns and environment, such as the birds, which we might wonder about (where the heck do they go in the winter, anyway.and how do you pronounce “nuthatch”?). “You don’t have time to call your soul a critic, no” Hunter has Garcia sing. In his Penseés, published in 1680, he wrote: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” Hunter mirrors that thought with “The heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own.” Going outside of the reason of the mind can allow an awakening. Pascal seems to me to be the most significant echo. There are echoes in the song of a wide range of literary and musical influences, from Blaise Pascal to (perhaps) Ken Kesey from talk of a redeemer to the title of the song itself. Sometimes criticized, lyrically, as being a bit too hippy-dippy for its own good, “Eyes of the World” might be heard as conveying a message of hope, viewing human consciousness as having value for the planet as a whole.
![the grateful dead font the grateful dead font](https://www.free-fonts.com/images/free/dead-world.png)
(I have begun to notice something I never saw before in the song statistics in Deadbase-the 49 performances in 1973 made me look twice at the song-by-song table of performances broken out by year in DeadBase X, which clearly shows the pattern of new songs being played in heavy rotation when they are first broken out, and then either falling away entirely, or settling into a more steady, less frequent pattern as the years go by. It was released on “Wake of the Flood” in November, 1973. It appeared in concert for the first time in that same show on February 9, 1973, at the Maples Pavilion at Stanford University, along with “They Love Each Other,” “China Doll,” “Here Comes Sunshine,” “Loose Lucy,” “Row Jimmy,” and “Wave That Flag.” Its final performance by the Dead was on July 6, 1995, at Riverport Amphitheatre, in Maryland Heights, Missouri, when it opened the second set, and led into “Unbroken Chain.” It was performed 381 times, with 49 of those performances occurring in 1973. “Eyes of the World” is a Robert Hunter lyric set by Jerry Garcia. Or, as usual, maybe I read too much into these things. Thinking about the juxtaposition of the two songs, we have “Estimated Prophet,” with its maniacal raving deluded character, very much inwardly-focused, and then, bam: “Wake up!” as the chorus begins in “Eyes of the World.” Of course, the prophet in Estimated does accuse his listeners with the line “you all been asleep, you would not believe me.” but “Eyes” seems to say that the sleeper may have been the prophet.
![the grateful dead font the grateful dead font](https://www.free-fonts.com/images/free/dead-grit.png)
Given that last week’s post was “Estimated Prophet,” it seems appropriate to move right into “Eyes of the World.” The two became almost inextricably linked through hundreds of concert performances, and I’ve always wondered a bit about that…the musical progression didn’t seem particularly natural, with the disintegrating jam out of Estimated eventually giving way to Garcia’s invocation of Eyes via its easily-identified set of opening chords. 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!) 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.