Melody Monday

Grateful Dead

Terrapin Station

12-31-78

"...till things we've never seen will seem familiar"

First performance: February 26, 1977, at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino, California. "Terrapin" opened the show, which also included the first "Estimated Prophet."  It has occupied a stable place in the repertoire ever since, though only on two other occasions has it appeared in the first set.

There are some interesting aspects to this song. Most notably, the fact that the Grateful Dead's realization of the piece is, in Hunter's view, lamentably incomplete, leaving out as it does the lyric resolution. Garcia intentionally uses only a fragment of Hunter's lyric. In Box of Rain, Hunter writes more about "Terrapin" than about any other single piece, with the exception of "Amagamalin Street." Hunter's own recording of "Terrapin," on Jack O' Roses is complete, and attempts to incorporate a plethora of imagery and iconography from all over the Grateful Dead map, especially in the "Ivory Wheels/Rosewood Track" portion of the song. Ultimately, Garcia's decision to treat the piece as a fragment is far more satisfying. 

Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics

"Faces in the Fire"

Lewis Carrol

"The night creeps onward, sad and slow:
In these red embers' dying glow
The forms of Fancy come and go.

"The picture fadeth in its place:
Amid the glow I seem to trace
The shifting semblance of a face." 

T.S. Eliot's oft-quoted lines from the 

"Four Quartets: Little Gidding" 

"What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning."

JG