Clocks are running late

Paint by number morning sky/looks so phoney: is the first verse of Touch of Gray about waking up early or staying up all night? Does Jerry like looking out his window and seeing this sky, with everything outlined and layered in the minimal shapes that some crude intelligence thought it important to lift out of nature and communicate? Isn't sunset at Shoreline one of those things that fans have mythologized, like, what song were they playing when it happened? Were there any Grateful Dead sunrises? Jerry in aviator shades: does he wish it would be night forever? Is Jerry a paint by number guitar player? What is the nighttime of the music he makes, a sleepy breezy unseen outdoors? Phoney is a Holden Caulfield word, and it’s usually one of those boomerang words like “corny” or “cheesy” or “funky” that turn back on the speaker and drip from them like goo, like to call something phoney is itself pretty phoney, plus corny, but Jerry can say it and send it straight out at the thing. The subtitles on this DVD are stuck on (View from the Vault III, Shoreline—I always write shorline—Amphitheatre, 6/16/90, a month before the early and tragic death of Brent Mydland (when Brent is playing his introductory solo to Touch of Gray and kind of going nuts on the organ (think "Mr Moonlight") Jerry looks over to Bobby and smiles like "we are so lucky to be playing with this guy"). You see the lyrics on the bottom as they sing, so you’re forced to consider the song as an event in language. Seeing the words sharpens your perception of the storyteller: you can see the intelligence in his face as his mouth forms the words, in the way he catches and pauses on copper in copper dome bodhi drip a silver kimono, the way his mouth holds the shape of the final d of like a crazy quilt star gown through a dream night wind to sustain the meaning, and just seeing those words coupled with the man—this is the fat, old Jerry in a black tee, and his long white hair is extra long in the back—this is sort of the essence of poetry, this wild pairing of person and word (the art is in the gap between them), the shock that this is what Jerry was saying in 1990, and not just reciting the words but telling you where he is and who.