Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 8, Episode 8
Wake of the Flood 50: Eyes of the World
Archival interviews:
- Robert Hunter, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 1977/1978.
- Branford Marsalis, by David Lemieux and Gary Lambert, Shakedown Stream, 5/15/20.
- Bob Weir, Keith Godchaux, Donna Godchaux, and Jon McIntire, WAER, 9/17/73.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There’s no other Grateful Dead song quite like “Eyes of the World,” a fan favorite at the heart of Wake of the Flood, played every year between its debut in 1973 and the last shows in 1995. It has some of Robert Hunter’s most open-ended lyrics.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Wake of the Flood] (1:13-1:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Eyes of the World” was one of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s most significant compositions, a cornerstone of the Grateful Dead’s music, both a fixed song and a monument to lasting change. The Grateful Dead jammed, of course, and “Eyes of the World” was one of the band’s most reliable jamming vehicles. But one of the ways that “Eyes of the World” was different from other Grateful Dead songs was how different it could be from itself. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's a perfect song also, and it has allowed the Dead to do so much within in its various guises — whether it's the 1973-74 versions, with a very distinct and unique jam at the end, which I love. And when they nail that thing, which they do most of the time… it’s so good. It’s so good.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 19, 10/19/73] (11:08-11:32) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was from the ending in 7/8 time that the band played throughout 1973 and 1974, which we’ll get into a bit later. That version was from October 19th, 1973 in Oklahoma City, now Dick’s Picks 19.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Without A Net, 3/29/90] (5:50-6:18) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the version from March 29th, 1990, featuring Branford Marsalis on saxophone, a favorite of many Dead Heads, released on Without A Net the same year it was recorded. The song was a hit among heads from the moment it appeared. In September 1973, before Wake of the Flood was even released, a pair of Dead Head DJs at WAER in Syracuse grilled Bob Weir about “Eyes of the World.”
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: The words are Hunter, and the melody is Garcia.
JESSE: They even made him recite the lyrics.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: “Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world / The heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own… The song that the morning brings / The heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own.”
Little “Eyes”
JESSE: As we’ve learned this season of the Deadcast, a lot of the lyrics on Wake of the Flood had been lurking in draft form for several years by the time Jerry Garcia set them to music. From Grateful Dead Records, Ron Rakow.
RON RAKOW: I sat at Jerry's feet when he wrote songs. I saw the process. I heard songs before his wife heard them, songs that changed my life.
JESSE: Rakow got to witness some of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter’s creative process.
RON RAKOW: I walked in on it a lot of times. Jerry had a pile of lyrics on single pages, and I would say the pages were between nine and 13 inches high. Now, a ream of paper when you get it from a box is about two-and-a-half inches high. When you take it out of the paper wrap and start to use it, it starts to occupy more space. But I would say that that was between one and two-thirds and two reams of paper.
JESSE: “Eyes of the World” was a set of lyrics that came out of the stash. The lyrics were written sometime between early 1969 and mid-1971, the period in which Robert Hunter lived with Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl in Larkspur. Hunter told Blair Jackson about the origins of “Eyes of the World” in 1989 — “I’m pretty sure ‘Eyes of the World’ was from Larkspur. I remember I'd practice trumpet out there in the shed all the time — blow my brains half-out until I got psychedelic and then I'd go write. I finally had to quit it—I was afraid I'd blow a blood vessel in my brain if I didn’t give it up.”
AUDIO: [chaotic trumpet]
JESSE: That was, uh, a dramatic reenactment. In the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, a few folders for Ice Nine Publishing contain early versions of songs. “Eyes of the World” is one of them. The lyrics are almost exactly as the Dead would sing them, with one difference. At the top of the page, there are six additional lines. They’re not in the same rhyme scheme as “Eyes of the World” or any rhyme scheme at all. Just below them is an extended ellipses, suggesting that either these lines are a separate prelude to what follows — or possibly they are the continuation of something from a previous page. But given that the “Eyes of the World” lyrics are fully formed, with capital letters clearly denoting what the CHORUS is, my thought is that the following words are the lost prelude to “Eyes of the World”:
I sat with a bag of white gold
tied to my wrist by a silver silk ribbon
and the night circled round like a
curtain preparing to draw
till I couldn’t remember the
question I couldn’t recall
Is that the lost prelude to “Eyes of the World”? It does sound like night falling on an outlaw. But is it the kind of sleep that they might wake up to find out that they’re the eyes of the world? Or perhaps disguised as a squirrel, as a friend used to sing?
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (2:00-2:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: We’re going to let Jerry Garcia’s solo demo for “Eyes of the World” guide us through our first conversation here, recorded in January 1973 in Stinson Beach, California. We asked Ron Rakow if Garcia recorded a lot of home demos.
RON RAKOW: He did a lot of them in camera.
JESSE: That’s an old filmmaking term for making your edits manually, with the stop, start, and pause buttons of the equipment. In musical terms, that means a tape deck with on/off functions and not music else.
RON RAKOW: But then he got a studio. His studio was, oh, 25 feet from the back door to his house—not even—and on a piece of land that was a little higher than the house. So the studio was a really nice one-room building that was very, very nice. Very effective. I guess you could have an engineer and another person. It was very small. He could do it all by himself. And he did, often, and he put things together. He played everything but the drums.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (0:32-0:49) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: While there are many phrases of “Eyes of the World” that are deeply resonant to me, and it conveys the powerful feeling of coming into one’s self inside a bigger cosmology, I’ve never been able to grasp at a particular narrative inside the song; as I found out when researching this episode, there’s a poetically logical reason for that. Once again, we have our friend David Gans to thank, who I want to hug for sharing more of his wonderful conversations with Robert Hunter from 1977 and 1978. David was and is a fine songwriter and he questions some of the mechanical ways Hunter constructed his lyrics. Hunter’s answers, as always, provide surprises and wisdom. Hunter used the phrase “eyes of the world” in the conversation, and David asked what it meant to him.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Have you had that flash? Of looking through everyone's eyes at once? I mean, have you ever walked down the street and inhabited every… like, London is a good place to do that, where you walk down the street and you say: ‘There are so many things going on behind those windows, and the only way that you can possibly find out is to sort of inhabit ‘em all for a while.’ But you can’t be yourself when you’re doing that. Everyone is there but you. That’s a flash that’s open, that people do, that’s a regular flash.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (1:14-1:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: David asked about the song’s perspective — who is the “you” in “wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world.”
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Oh, maybe that's what's wrong with that tune — that I would that I would even dare to address somebody else with that idea: “Wake up discover that you are the song that morning brings.” But it is another one of those things, because it's basically — wake up and discover I am the song, is what I'm saying. But I'm not brave enough to say “I”; I have to say “you.” And if I wasn't even that brave, then I’d have to say he or she or it.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (1:35-1:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: All these pronouns lose their sense [of meaning] outside of the experience of yourself as a unit, against everything else as the other — the generalized other. There's me, and then there's everybody and everything else. But, when you take the context that “Eyes of the World” is supposed to be happening in, you lose that. So there’s a problem about saying you, I, or he, she or it. There’s a problem in saying that. So, I chose the “you,” I chose the second person. And then it even goes into the third person.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (2:19-2:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: “There comes a redeemer and he slowly too fades away / and there follows a wagon behind him that's loaded with clay / and the seeds that were silent all burst into bloom and decay / And the night comes to quiet and it's close on the heels of the day.” You have to put these things in a person. As you’ve found in songs, there comes a point where you want to say something that isn’t “I,” “you,” or “them.” You find that you can’t do it, that you have to take a pronoun approach to it or you don't say anything.
JESSE: Imagine no pronouns, it isn’t hard to do. And it’s true, it’s old lyricists’ wisdom that one unfailing way to make the singer of a song sound unbalanced is to not include any pronouns in the lyrics. But as Robert Hunter observed, it’s rather hard to do that in practice. His solution was to just ignore the rules of pronouns entirely, just like Krazy Kat, George Herriman’s immortal cartoon anarchist invoked in “China Cat Sunflower,” a song that’s also got pronouns in it.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Sometimes I will switch back and forth because I have to use pronouns, since I'm speaking in English and I don't have a pronoun that I really desire to use there, either I or you. But I have to for convention’s sake, and to make any sense out of it that can be heard. So sometimes I will jump persons, but ordinarily only in that context.
JESSE: As a young songwriter, David Gans obviously wanted to know more.
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: Lord only knows, man. You'll have to find out the same way I do, by trying it. And when you don't do it right, being shot at for it. And when you've done it right, being applauded. It's a question of seeing.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (3:49-4:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
ROBERT HUNTER [1977]: You're never going to resolve the pronoun paradoxes. You just have to make your own solutions each time. And sometimes when you make that solution and decide which person to put it in, that's going to condition the next verse you write. It'd be a different verse than if you’d chosen a different person.
JESSE: Though the lyricist had no problem switching between pronouns at will, I’m willing to bet the singer didn’t feel the same way. Changing the chorus of “Eyes of the World” or many Dead songs to the first person seems a taste messianic for Garcia. I think putting the chorus in the omniscient second person is part of what gives the songs their power, underscored by the four-part gang vocals the Dead arranged for the song. Here’s a tiny bit of the band rehearsing the song in January 1973. It’s pretty low fidelity, but you can hear all four singers in the mix right from the start.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [1/73 rehearsal tape] (1:14-1:48)
JESSE: In its original demo form, the song was pretty close to how the Dead would do it, with a few notable differences, which highlight some of the ways “Eyes of the World” grew into something even more special. Fair warning, we’re going to get into some music theory about the different pigments of “Eyes of the World.” Think about this conversation like the song itself, all pointed towards that outro jam.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (0:05-0:32) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: From the City College of New York, Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Arts, please welcome back to the Deadcast, Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: He kind of robotically goes back and forth between E major 7 and A for a bar each, compared to the sort of bouncy, quick motion of the fully-formed intro. Which really sets the tone for it, the sort of bounce that the tune always has.
JESSE: “| don’t remember writing ‘Eyes of the World,’” Garcia told Blair Jackson in 1989. “But I do remember that basically it wanted a samba feel, which it still sort of has. It was kind of a Brazilian thing.” On the demo, the phrasing on the song is slightly different, a little woozier. One thing to note — the bird that Hunter references is a nut-hatch. This is what the vibratory call of a red-breasted California nut-hatch sounds like, thanks to the Cornell Guide to Bird Sounds.
AUDIO: Vibratory calls [Red-breasted Nuthatch 12 CA] (0:00-0:09) - [CornellLab]
JESSE: But right from the very first demo, Garcia sang it nut-thatch. And I bet you do, too.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (0:58-1:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: It was a broad chorus, feeling almost exactly like the Dead would do it. Almost.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (1:14-1:49) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: In the tags that get stuck after the choruses, this original version has E minor to A7.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (1:49-1:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: It just sounds really different. Normally it's B minor to A.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Wake of the Flood] (1:28-1:34) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
SHAGUN O’DONNELL: Funnily enough, it's the second chord that sounds really different to my ears — the A, even though it's more similar, less big of a change. But somehow, the E minor to A7, it's suddenly like a ii-V progression that doesn't land where it would normally land. So it sounds surprisingly different, even though it's basically one chord different and a chord extension different.
That Cool Ending Thing
JESSE: The song would change in some small ways between Garcia’s demo in January and the Dead’s debut in February, but also one big way, at least for people who love 1973-1974 Dead. Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: The other big change in the demo is for the parts where the solo’s gonna go and he just kind of vocalizes, he just sits on an E major 7, and then sticks a tag at the end.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (2:00-2:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That’s gorgeous, though.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: Very different than the later alternation between E major 7 and B minor. That change is the most important in my mind, in terms of what he can play over it. You have to be very conscious of the D sharp in the E major 7 changing to the D natural in the B minor. And that’s why it feels like such a directed place to do it when he does it in the real version, the final version.
JESSE: Here’s what that section sounds like on Wake of the Flood, with Jerry Garcia’s guitar solo removed, so you can hear the change more clearly.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Wake of the Flood] (1:32-1:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Though it’s not included on Wake of the Flood, the song had a two-part jam in 1973 and 1974 that developed in the first few months they started playing the song, before they made it to the Record Plant. None of the jam would even be attempted at the studio sessions, but it’s such a significant piece of music that it would almost constitute a lost composition if not for the fact that so many Dead Heads know it so well from the scores of live tapes and now official releases. It begins with more special effects. Or affects.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: The chord changes at the end there is part of this new language, even though it didn't make it onto the record version. The move from the E major 7 to the Eb minor—where you're using common tones to make a shift that sounds really dramatic but shares something with the prior chord—is a really effective music move, because you can change the mood extremely, but it can fall into the hands nicely and can be smooth in another sense.
JESSE: They used this move several times in the jam with different chords. Early, they’d move to G# minor. These examples are how that section sounded at the end of the song’s first tour, recorded February 26th, 1973 in Lincoln, Nebraska, now Dick’s Picks 28. To me, it sounds like a gorgeous blue sky suddenly filling with dark clouds.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 28, 2/26/73] (8:54-9:17) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: And then the clouds blow away.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 28, 2/26/73] (10:05-10:23) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: What’s just as powerful as that outro jam is what it became almost instantly, a wonderful example of what seems to be collective writing by the band. Later in the jam, another shift went to Ebm (or perhaps D#m, depending on your perspective), setting up the next and most dramatic phase of the ending. It’s hard to know for certain if what you can hear on the February 15th, 1973 tour opener in Wisconsin is an example of instant composition, or the execution of a musical move that had been discussed previously. Listening closely, I think it was planned ahead. Jerry Garcia’s guitar tone has a lot of low-end metallic bite, making it sound more like the upper register of a bass, but you can hear him signal a riff in 7/8 with the whole band coming in behind on the second pass.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [2/15/73] (15:35-15:49)
JESSE: But then everybody gradually locks around the riff.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [2/15/73] (15:50-16:14)
JESSE: If it was spontaneous, it’s amazing. If it was planned to feel spontaneous, it’s also amazing, which it did for pretty much all the versions the band played for the next two years, maybe in part because it was never executed in quite the same way. Here’s a tight-ish from Springfield on March 28th, now Dave’s Picks 16, with extra dissonance from Weir.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dave’s Picks 16, 3/28/73] (10:34-11:02)
JESSE: The collectively written ending in 7/8 time became a template for a new kind of Grateful Dead music, an early sign of a developing group-writing process that would manifest over the next years, culminating with the collaborative Blues For Allah in 1975. “Eyes of the World” would prove to be a major show highlight for many Dead Heads over the next two years, a powerful new song melding with a powerful new jam. Brian Schiff heard it for the first time that spring at Nassau Coliseum.
BRIAN SCHIFF: Halfway through the second set, “Truckin’” morphed into “The Other One,” and then something mystical and magical happened. The first chords of a new song began, and again, it was absolutely perfect to my ear. I knew I was hearing it for the first time, but it made me feel like it was a song I had been listening to my entire life. And when they sang the chorus—“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world”—what could be more perfect and, frankly, more Grateful Dead? Then after some of the most beautiful jamming I'd ever heard, the song evolved into this jazzy dissonant riff, which totally blew me and everyone else in the crowd away and made me realize the Dead were taking their collective history and musical experimentation to a whole other level.
JESSE: There are various species of storytelling music-goers you might meet. In New York, for example, there are those that heard Hot Tuna at the Palladium in the late ‘70s and heard less forever after. Another subspecies, and one I’m definitely jealous of, is Dead Heads who saw “Eyes of the World” with the original ending, which we’ll now present as a brief montage.
JAY KERLEY: The whole 7 jam really just grabbed me by the collar and shook me around for a while.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: That is a particularly good extended “Eyes of the World.” They did that 7 pattern.
DANNO HENKLEIN: The original version of “Eyes of the World” had this break in the middle that was quite a bit of sonic sculpture.
MIKE DOLGUSHKIN: That was something we all took note of: ‘Oh look, listen to this, what they're doing here. That's pretty cool.’
JESSE: What we’re trying to say is…
DANNO HENKLEIN: [vocalizes] [bass pattern in 7]. Remember that?
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dave’s Picks 16, 3/28/73] (10:34-11:02)
DANNO HENKLEIN: I loved that, and that was a big fuckin’ deal in concert!
JESSE: Thanks again Jay Kerley, Mike Dolgushkin, and Danno Henklein. From its first performance, “Eyes of the World” sets up a drop into the D-minor introduction for one of Garcia’s other new songs. This is from Kezar Stadium in San Francisco on May 26th, 1973, now on the Here Comes Sunshine box set. This is the super quick version of the transition.
“China Doll”
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (13:20-13:40) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “China Doll” [Here Comes Sunshine, 5/26/73] (0:00-0:09) - [dead.net]
JESSE: “China Doll” was recorded on the original batch of Wake of the Flood demos that Jerry Garcia made in January 1973 and became a delicate part of the live sets very quickly.
AUDIO: “China Doll” [Dave’s Picks 21, 4/2/73] (0:00-0:24)
JESSE: It followed “Eyes of the World” frequently enough throughout early 1973 that it makes me wonder if it was originally considered as a song suite, the way “Ripple” and “Brokedown Palace” are linked on American Beauty. “China Doll” was recorded during the Record Plant sessions in August, but ultimately left off for the band’s next album, From the Mars Hotel, in 1974. You can hear a few takes of “China Doll” on the Angel’s Share, and they’re all beautiful, recorded on August 8th, 1973, the third full day of sessions, just after catching a few takes of “Eyes of the World,” perhaps to get in the mood.
AUDIO: “Pistol Shot (China Doll)” ((Take 1) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:54-1:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As Garcia notes after the first version, they’ve gotten it from the start.
JERRY GARCIA [8/8/73]: Let’s do that one one more time, although that last one was as good as any.
JESSE: During a break in the action, some other action breaks out.
AUDIO: “Pistol Shot (China Doll)” ((Take 3) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:07-0:27) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: During this noodling, there’s a small exchange between Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh that reveals one way that Jerry Garcia was thinking about their album in progress. Somebody notes that Garcia has dropped a verse from “China Doll,” the one that begins, “if you can’t abide it, let the hurdy gurdy play.”
JERRY GARCIA [8/8/73]: … Yes, as a matter of fact, yes I am. In the interest of time, more than anything else. Everything else is shapin’ out to be real long!
PHIL LESH [8/8/73]: Well then what the hell, may as well use another verse of this — which is, what, 15 seconds? 20 seconds, maybe? 30 seconds?
JERRY GARCIA [8/8/73]: I’d just as soon have this one be short.
PHIL LESH [8/8/73]: [laughs]
JERRY GARCIA [8/8/73]: If it’s all the same to you, man…
JESSE: As a co-owner of a record company, Jerry Garcia was clearly aware that the band had to fit their songs onto two sides of an LP that could plausibly hold up to about 18 minutes of music before they started losing precious bass frequencies.
AUDIO: “Pistol Shot (China Doll)” ((Take 4) - Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (3:33-3:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JERRY GARCIA [8/8/73]: That was it…
JESSE: And so the early musical partner of “Eyes of the World” got jettisoned for another year, at least in the studio, and we’ll save our full exploration until then, too. At the Record Plant, the Dead started work on “Eyes of the World” on August 8th, but paused to work on “China Doll” and picked up “Eyes” again on the 10th. As always, there was some groove setting to do.
Catching “Eyes”
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” ((Run-Through) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JERRY GARCIA [8/10/73]: You’re rushin’…
JESSE: Garcia was rarin’ to go, already counting off the song when Dan Healy announces the first proper take.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” ((Take 1) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: There’s a little bit of chord correction.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” ((Take 1) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:50-1:03) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JERRY GARCIA [8/10/73]: Ah, it’s not an E major 7th on that last E…
JESSE: And some feel correction.
JERRY GARCIA [8/10/73]: Nah, it’s pushin’, Bobby, with those little offbeats. They’re pushing.
JESSE: A little bit later, Garcia explains what he’s hoping for Weir’s part to accomplish.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Take 14) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:02-0:34) - [dead.net]
JERRY GARCIA [8/10/73]: Nah, nah — it’s cool to accent that beat, just play it right on. So that what you’re hearing as the pattern is going through your head, is the — [vocalizes]— so it’s really fallin’... boom. [plays guitar, vocalizes] so the 2 and 4 is really hangin’ in there.
JESSE: But by then they’d actually already gotten it. The album version is take 4, the first complete pass on August 10th, though they kept going after that.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” ((Take 6) - Not Slated) [Wake of the Flood: The Angel’s Share] (0:56-1:30) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: For a while. There’s two more complete takes, including that one Garcia poo-pooed. Take 4 would go to the album, like I said, but session logs indicate that they possibly tried to record it one more time on the final day at the Record Plant, August 30th. What’s clear from the Angel’s Share takes, though, is that they didn’t intend to record the two-part fireworks show of the ending jam on the album version. Maybe there’s an alternate universe where the Dead took their time and the full “Eyes of the World” / “China Doll” suite made up a chunk of the album. Though, as thrilling as it was, and given time considerations, I could see it being hard to nail that transition from jam to ending riff in the studio, which was hard to do even live, and perhaps more easily accomplished now in the age of click tracks. With all this in mind—or totally forgotten, it doesn’t really matter which—let’s focus in on the multi-tracks for “Eyes of the World.” We’ll start with an overdub that’s mixed almost ambiently on the album, which I can pick out pretty much only if I listen to the LP and stand right between the speakers.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Percussion, Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:10) - [dead.net]
JESSE: What they decided they needed was less cowbell. The timbales part was played by local bandleader Benny Velarde, who will focus on a little more next time for his contribution to “Let It Grow,” but here’s how his timbales sound during his mostly faded percussion track on “Eyes of the World.”
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Percussion, Wake of the Flood] (1:29-1:51) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Keith Godchaux is playing organ, according to the track sheets, though it doesn’t specify which kind, I think probably a Hammond B3.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Organ, Wake of the Flood] (0:10-0:27) - [dead.net]
JESSE: In addition to the guitar part he played live on the basic track, Jerry Garcia also overdubbed an additional lead. It’s also the only tracking sheet on the album that indicates that Phil Lesh’s quad bass was in use, though somewhat paradoxically only given tracks 11 and 12. We’ll hear all of those and more in this highlights mix for the first half of the song.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Guitar 1, Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:08) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (0:09-0:16) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Guitar 2, Wake of the Flood] (0:16-0:27) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Bass, Wake of the Flood] (0:28-0:54) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Background Vocals, Wake of the Flood] (0:55-1:10) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (1:12-1:29) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Guitar 3, Wake of the Flood] (1:29-1:50) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Organ, Wake of the Flood] (1:50-1:59) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Drums, Wake of the Flood] (2:00-2:07) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Background Vocals, Wake of the Flood] (2:07-2:24) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Percussion, Wake of the Flood] (2:24-2:40) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That pretty much covers everything in the mix. I love those lush background vocals. Bob Weir broke it down for the WAER DJs in mid-September 1973.
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: On the record, it’s relatively short — it's about six minutes, and it’s edited, 5:30. It's edited down to just the head of the song, a couple of bars in between each verse of riffing and then, at the end, a sort of an extended bass solo.
JESSE: Certainly there are countless fantastic live versions of “Eyes of the World,” and we’re about to visit some of them, but we got this lovely story from listener Lippy in Mill Valley about the original studio take and that bass outro, which he discovered after becoming a Dead Head in 1980 — a nice reminder of how the impact of albums doesn’t always happen on their first release.
LIPPY: I was just immersed, listening to album after album. But the one that spoke to me heartiest and deepest in those first tender months of getting to know this band was definitely Wake of the Flood. It was the first album that I really felt was kind of my own. I loved everything about it: I loved every song, I loved the mood and the attitude, and I also loved the way it sounded. It had a particular sound — almost like a very close sound, is the best way I can put it. It was just beautiful. It all sounded of a piece, as was the Rick Griffin artwork on the cover.
So what really spoke to me immediately off the album was “Eyes of the World.” That song just touched me in so many ways, from its beautiful and complex melodies to the jamming possibilities that I could see that it presented through its harmonic structure. And just the beautiful, complex beat of it, the way that it just keeps running forward and forward in such a positive way — kind of like running through… can I say a field of daisies? Can I say a field of poppies? I think I'm gonna say that. I still hum along to those beautiful bass lines, Phil's popping bass lines on the outro: [sings Phil’s bass line] It's like a little mini symphony…
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Wake of the Flood] (4:34-4:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
LIPPY: So, I took my first college girlfriend to my Venice apartment for the first time—this is in the early ‘80s—and we fell in love over “Eyes of the World.” Wake of the Flood became our special album. She always said that it reminded her of my little Venice apartment, and our wonderful magical nights there: watching the sunsets over the beach in this kind of ratty little beach apartment, and just being fully immersed and warmed to our souls while listening to Wake of the Flood. And, of course, listening to “Eyes of the World” in particular.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Wake of the Flood] (3:03-3:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
LIPPY: So, fast forward to 2023, and we're now a 29-years-together married couple. And we still listen to the “Eyes of the World” at every opportunity, and it still reminds us how we fell in love while listening to Wake of the Flood. As a matter of fact, I can guarantee you that we're holding hands on the couch in our Marin County home right now, as we listen to this podcast — snuggling up, same as ever, listening to those high-popping bass notes lead us out of “Eyes of the World” and into the world beyond...
JESSE: We don’t often do dedications on the Deadcast, but let’s listen to that isolated quad bass solo and send it out to Lippy and his partner in Marin County.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Bass, Wake of the Flood] (4:31-5:01) - [dead.net]
JESSE: When the WAER DJs spoke with Weir and the Godchauxs before the album came out, they asked what every Dead Head tape freak in their place would ask.
RADIO DJ [9/17/73]: Does it get into the 7/4 jam?
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: No, it does not. And if you like 7/4, we’ve got more material coming. [All laugh] You’re gonna like the new 7/4.
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: It’s too hard…
BOB WEIR [9/17/73]: Nah, this one’s real easy. I’ve got an easy 7/4 up my sleeve.
JESSE: Hey, no spoilers, Weir. The DJs definitely liked the further-out parts of the Dead, like, say, the jams on Europe ‘72. Donna and Keith provide a count-pointercount on the state of space-music and the Dead. Donna?
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: There’s not really any of that type of material on this album.
KEITH GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: When we play live, the music’s all there.
DONNA JEAN GODCHAUX [9/17/73]: Right.
BOB WEIR [WAER, 9/17/73]: On a single album, it doesn't seem altogether appropriate right now to put a lot of space music and stuff like that, especially in as much as our space music hasn't really molted quite that much further into something that we'd want to really showcase yet. We're working on that, and that'll probably come up in one of our future albums.
JESSE: Peter Egart left us this message at stories.dead.net.
PETER EGART: I was lucky enough to catch the Grateful Dead for the first time as a college freshman at the University of Illinois. 2/22/73 was my first show. Later in the fall, I was working for our college radio station, which was actually two stations in one: Dormitory Broadcasting Service, and an over-the-air FM station, which was the mothership. I was music director for DBS, and my friend Pat was music director for FM. And in those days, as a music director, we would rate the songs that came in off every album that was sent to us from the record companies, and rate them for what would fit our format, and maybe which songs might be a single that would be off that album. Oftentimes, the record companies would suggest a single. In this case, when we got Wake of the Flood into the station, there was a letter along with it that said, ‘‘Here Comes Sunshine’ — let’s make it happen.’ Essentially, that's what it was, in those words.
AUDIO: “Here Comes Sunshine” [Wake of the Flood] (1:00-1:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
PETER EGART: One day, I was walking down the hallway of the station, my friend Pat was coming towards me with the Wake of the Flood album under his arm. And he said, “Pete, what do you think about the single off Wake of the Flood?” And I looked at him and said, “I don't know, I don't think it's ‘Here Comes Sunshine.’” And without missing a beat, we both said at the same time: “‘Eyes of the World.’”
JESSE: Maybe the suits at Grateful Dead Records had the same idea. In early November, the band returned to the Record Plant to chop an even shorter version of “Eyes of the World” to be released on a single, cutting almost two minutes from the 5-minutes 19-seconds of the LP take to a 3-minute 26-second edit, cutting out the verse with “there comes a redeemer…” plus a chorus and a solo. On the single, it was backed with the first two parts of “Weather Report Suite.” It didn’t fare much better than “Let Me Sing Your Blues Away.”
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Wake of the Flood] (3:21-3:54) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
Opening “Eyes”
JESSE: And if you’re still bummed they didn’t include the 7/8 ending on the album, there have been now something like three-dozen official releases of the song from 1973 and 1974, around half of the times they performed it. One version that heads love was recorded June 18th, 1974 at Freedom Hall in Louisville, now on Road Trips, Vol. 2, No. 3, with some especially aggro Keith Godchaux playing.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Road Trips Vol. 2 No. 3, 6/18/74] (12:03-12:36) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As far as I know, it’s the only time that Keith Godchaux hit that high harmony part. The pianist Holly Bowling did a transcription of the Louisville ‘74 version of “Eyes of the World” for her 2016 album Better Left Unsung. We spoke with her for our “Playing Dead” episodes.
HOLLY BOWLING: The first time that I ever arranged any Grateful Dead music for the piano was [when] I did a version of the Freedom Hall “Eyes of the World.” And I did it for the project that JamBase was doing before the Fare Thee Well shows, where a bunch of different musicians did their own spin on a different Dead song counting down to the shows. Which was kind of a crazy one to dive into — I did it as a jam transcription. The idea was to approach it more like a classical interpretation, where I'm not improvising in it. I'm taking this thing that was a much bigger sound and rearranging it for one instrument.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Holly Bowling, Better Left Unsung] (10:05-10:26) - [Spotify]
HOLLY BOWLING: The Louisville / Freedom Hall “Eyes,” I did a bunch of Phil’s bass lines on that thing, because he’s really the melody for some sections of the jam. I did ‘em and put them in my left hand, and I even experimented with — maybe I should try to play them with my right hand, because it’s so melodic and so all over the place on the piano. I ended up keeping it in my left to keep the challenge, and I swear, man… learning that guy’s bass lines on my left hand while holding down Bob’s rhythm guitar on the right is what built my hand independence.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Holly Bowling, Better Left Unsung] (4:17-4:47) - [Spotify]
[crossfade to:]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Road Trips Vol. 2 No. 3, 6/18/74] (7:00-7:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
HOLLY BOWLING: If you're looking at a scene, and you have five different painters that are all lined up, everyone's gonna paint what they see, but everyone's gonna do it in a different way. Someone's going to really focus in on the colors that are over here, the contrast. And someone else is really going to be all about the light and the dark, and someone else is going to be all about the little gritty angles and stuff.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Holly Bowling, Better Left Unsung] (8:52-9:18) - [Spotify]
HOLLY BOWLING: It's about the rhythm, and the fact that everyone is super tight together after it's been all over the place. Because that thing goes from expansive melody lines that are chromatic and all over the place, and then it sucks back in and everyone's — [claps and vocalizes syncopated rhythm]. It’s about the whole thing right there, and about the rhythm and the space that's left between that rhythmic pattern. That’s the thing there.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Holly Bowling, Better Left Unsung] (9:18-9:38) - [Spotify]
JESSE: One of my own favorite versions comes from the song’s original 1973-1974 window as well, specifically September 11th, 1974 in London, both for the recording itself, which I’ve loved for years, and the story behind it. Ned Lagin was on the Europe ‘74 tour, performing Seastones sets many nights through the Wall of Sound with Phil Lesh, and often Jerry Garcia, which would then transition into Dead sets. You can hear the longer version of this story in our special “Nedcast” from Season 2.
NED LAGIN: The first two nights were really fucked up because of power supplies and London and coke and stuff. So on the afternoon of the third day, we had a band meeting and a crew meeting, and everybody decided to flush all their stashes and take LSD that night — to get back to get away from cocaine, and get back to the brotherhood, or sisterhood or… you know, the family.
JESSE: From the Seastones set, one-by-one, the members of the Dead joined, with Ned staying on electric piano, playing a 70-minute sequence that went from Seastones into “Eyes of the World” into “Wharf Rat.” “Eyes” is around 31 minutes, or longer, if you count the start time as the moment in the prelude jam when it becomes obvious they’re headed there. This is Ned taking a gorgeous early lead on Rhodes. You can hear Keith Godchaux’s grand piano just behind him.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [9/11/74] (0:27-0:57)
JESSE: #askataper. I love how—when the Dead decided to reconnect themselves to a large consciousness—they used “Eyes of the World,” a function the song has almost certainly served for plenty of Dead Heads, almost as if lyricist Robert Hunter was doing something intentional when he wrote the words. It was a song that could channel powerful forces, both musically and internally. To discuss that, please welcome back, our very good friend Erik Davis. Erik writes a great newsletter called The Burning Shore. I recently worked as an assistant editor on Erik’s forthcoming anthology of art from Mark McCloud’s LSD blotter collection, coming out in 2024 from MIT Press. Welcome back, Erik.
ERIK DAVIS: “Once in a while, you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right…” That particular line has triggered “aha” moments in thousands—or tens of thousands—of dancing fools, because it’s particularly geared for a certain kind of “aha” moment. I think the chorus of “The Wheel” is one that has definitely found many cosmic dancers churning through a kind of grok, about the nature of time and repetition. There are these moments in the lyrics where there's sort of an extra sort of pressure on that psychedelic knowing. And “Eyes” is, for me, the great example — that's the best example. It's the one that hit me the most.
JESSE: Erik’s got some heady places to bring us, so we’re going to thread them with one of his favorite versions of “Eyes of the World,” recorded at Winterland on November 11th, 1973.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] (0:00-0:28)
ERIK DAVIS: Because it's just this extraordinary possibility that's available in all of our minds — right now, this mind, these eyes, seeing this scene in front of me with this cup, this cup of tea, this red computer, is it — is awake, is the world, whatever. There's a famous bit from the German mystic Eckhart [Tolle], where he talks about the eyes that are looking for God — that idea that what’s actually looking out for God, or realization, is God, itself in you. It’s this weird loop. Hunter gestures towards that loop, but instead of saying… it's not like, Wake up and find out that you're the eyes of God; or, Wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the universe. That's cool, but there's something particular about it being the world — not the far out, not the ultimate reality, but the world.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] (0:28-0:58)
ERIK DAVIS: This world—the world of birth and death, the world of mortality of animals, of weather, of frustration, of love affairs—and that whole sense of the cosmic nature of materiality. And, particularly, the natural world is really throughout that whole song, and in a lot of Dead. It's like in Rick Griffin’s artwork. Even the artwork for this record has a sense of cyclicity, of natural cycles, and this sort of desire to both embrace it. But also maybe get out of it because you’ve got to die — which kind of sucks, but maybe there's a way to kind of see the whole thing. And so, it's the eyes of that.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] (2:26-2:44)
JESSE: We’ll let Erik loose on Rick Griffin’s cover art another day, but Erik found something deep in “Eyes of the World,” which wrote about in his Burning Shore newsletter.
ERIK DAVIS: I've been interested in Buddhism for a long time. I read sort of scattershot across all varieties of Buddhism, and I'm really interested in the teachings that are called Dzogchen or Mahamudra, which are in some ways considered the highest teachings of, and even secret teachings, of Tibetan Vajrayāna. They tend to emphasize the kind of simple, pure clarity of mind without any particular content, and they're not really about doing elaborate visualizations, or elaborate rituals or elaborate this and that. It's really pointing directly to the empty and radiant nature of mind. It's kind of a trippy genre of Buddhist theorizing. I've been kind of into that for a while. And then, lo and behold, I discovered that there was a book translated, a book of a text from Longchenpa, who's this spiritual genius in 13th or 14th century Tibet — a real master, like one of the the all-time greats. And the title of this volume, which was a short text that was translated and had some commentary by Tibetan and American scholars, is: You Are the Eyes of the World.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] (3:02-3:30)
ERIK DAVIS: Wait a second — how did that get there? It's not the title of the actual text that they’re doing, so it was clearly the translator’s choice to pick this title. I’m like, whoa, what’s going on there? It was weird for me, not just that, Oh, here's the Dead lyric as the title of an obscure Tibetan Dzogchen text. That's an interesting question in itself. But it was also that it resonated with something truly profound about that song — particularly the chorus and that lyric, how it functions in the phenomenology of experiencing the Dead, particularly on psychedelics.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] (5:41-6:01)
ERIK DAVIS: I know a Tibetan translator who's a cool guy. He informed me that, of the great translators of Tibetan in America, a number of them are Dead Heads. There’s one guy named Craig Preston who wrote a foundational text called How to Read Classical Tibetan. In the acknowledgments of this book, he not only thanks the Grateful Dead, but he thanks them for particular sets, for particular shows.
JESSE: In the ‘90s, the American Buddhist journal Tricycle would conduct a reader survey and discover that 83% of their respondents came to Buddhism via psychedelics, which might not be a perfect sample, but still instructive.
ERIK DAVIS: There's clearly some sort of organic connection there between psychedelics and American Buddhism. And, for me in particular, “Eyes of the World” is the song that kind of condenses or crystallizes that connection. Whether or not that was in Hunter’s head is not really as interesting to me. It’s just the fact that this phrase emerges.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] (6:10-6:40)
ERIK DAVIS: So I ask him, “Well, does the term ‘eyes of the world’ appear in Tibetan at all? Since it's not the name of this particular text?” He said, “Yeah, actually it does. It’s one of the words for a translator.” There’s this whole kind of lore about this word, how it works. But the idea of “eyes of the world” or eyes of a physical place, a loka, is a phrase that’s used particularly around translation. That really interested me, because translation’s this whole thing of like: what do you do if you get that experience? You’ve had that experience where you’ve woken up, waking up like it’s a great ancient metaphor, a mystical understanding, a Buddhist awakening. You awaken, to what? That you are it — that the mind is you. The mind is the Buddha, it’s your mind. Whatever you want to say. Of course, then the problem is how do you communicate that? Can you use that to show other people? You start using language, it gets complicated. How do you do it? How do you translate these extraordinary experiences?
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] (7:35-7:53)
ERIK DAVIS: And that's sort of what I love about this kind of cluster of connections, because just the injunction, “Wake up and find out that you are the eyes of the world,” is such a beautiful and strange condensation of a certain kind of mystical grok.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] (7:56-8:15)
ERIK DAVIS: It's an injunction, even though it's very lovely and kind of hippy-trippy, and it's nice natural imagery: ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful,’ homelands, whatever. But it’s still: wake up and find it. Do it. Do it now! Right now! Why are you stopping? Don’t forget the DMT flash. It’s right there, right now. There’s kind of a punch in that chorus that I think is also part of its power.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings, 11/11/73] [9:36-9:56]
JESSE: It's a powerful chorus, no question — maybe like a higher consciousness version of Workers of the World unite. It was almost the only part of the song that didn’t change. Grateful Dead archivist David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: There's that scene during The Grateful Dead Movie where a woman is dancing to the “Eyes of the World,” to that jam at the end, and she’s just freaking out because it's just so intense. Every time I hear it, that's the feeling I get. And I'm not at Winterland in 1974 — I'm in my car, I'm at home listening. I just love what they do with it. I love the space within it.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [The Grateful Dead Movie, 10/19/74] (11:03-11:33) - [YouTube]
JESSE: That was the version that introduced me to the ‘73/’74 ending. They took 1975 off the road, though played a few local gigs, including an album release show for Blues For Allah the Great American Music Hall on August 13th, which involved some intense rehearsals. “Eyes of the World” made its return. There’s no 7/8 ending, but there is a cool bass solo over a dramatically alternating outro jam before giving way to a drum break.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [One From the Vault, 8/13/75] (9:35-10:05) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: For many, this “Eyes of the World” became just as defining as the Wake of the Flood version when it was released on One From The Vault in 1991. Davis Schneiderman left us this message at stories.dead.net. This is more or less how I first experienced “Eyes of the World” as well.
DAVIS SCHNEIDERMAN: The first time I heard “Eyes of the World” would have been April 1991. I was 16—young for 11th grade—and I had just purchased One From the Vault from the local CD store. Oversized cardboard sleeve, and, likely, it cost $16.99, a small fortune I had to accumulate as a line cook at the local Golden Corral. I didn't know enough about the Grateful Dead to understand anything about their chronology. In my small suburb outside of Allentown, Pennsylvania, both “Touch of Grey” and “Casey Jones” could have all been released in the same year, and that year could have been anywhere from yesterday back to Woodstock. And so I bought One From the Vault in that record store, and I told my friend the next day at school that “the Grateful Dead have a new album!” I was excited, as if it had been recorded at a live show just a few months before.
I was enthralled immediately, and it was “Eyes of the World” in particular that carried me somewhere I had never been. There was something about the way the song passed through the air in my room that reminded me of “Dark Star,” the only other long track I really knew. But “Eyes” felt like it was opening up a different piece of my brain and pressing it against a different part of the sky. Whereas the “Dark Star” on Live/Dead helped me travel the spaceways, “Eyes” was, for me, endlessly rooted. It was the breaking of the soil under my feet into a field bursting with possibility.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [One From the Vault, 8/13/75] (3:06-3:27) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
Watching “Eyes”
JESSE: David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: When they brought it back in ‘76, there's some great versions on that June tour in particular.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [June 1976, 6/11/76] (6:25-6:55)
JESSE: That was from June 11th, 1976 in Boston, on the June 1976 box set, one of the first shows back. It might sound like the same old “Eyes of the World,” but for this particular version, the extended jam with the ominous alternating chords was moved to the song’s introduction, though that didn’t last long either. Over the course of the so-called comeback tour and the next decades, the song changed in ways that could be subtle but also quite radical. We’re not going to run through every single variation and subspecies, but enough to get a sense of the song’s wild and unceasing evolution, more like slow-motion instant composition. So, let’s do a little “Eyes” watching.
AUDIO: Vibratory calls [Red-breasted Nuthatch 12 CA] (0:00-0:09) - [CornellLab]
DAVID LEMIEUX: In the Dead’s 30 years of performing, frankly, there aren't a lot of songs that did this — that not only had monumental changes year to year, but, even within a year, could have a slower ‘70s version, and it could also have that super-speedy version. There's very few songs like this. Most songs had a tempo and that's what they stuck with. “Eyes of the World” was a song… I almost feel that it was their own way on stage to keep things interesting, for themselves. I love that about “Eyes of the World.”
JESSE: The studio version and the live versions from 1973 through 1975 all hovered between around 106 and 110 beats per minute. With the return in 1976, the song sped up slightly, clocking usually a bit over 120 bpm during the June 1976 tour. Thanks to my friend musicologist Brian Felix for pointing me towards the world of simple bpm tapping apps for smartphones. Just put on a jam, tap your finger to the beat, and it’ll measure it for you. It’s like a pocket calculator for music nerding, and a way to measure one of the song’s changing elements. Here’s a bit from June 28th in Chicago, where it bounces around 125 bpm. For this and some others, you may have to ask a taper to hear the rest.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [6/28/76] (1:53-2:23)
JESSE: The structure of the song had already gotten pretty modular, but the vacuum left by the old fireworks ending seemed to call out for new inventions, at least for a little bit. On this Chicago version, it opened into a jam on “Happiness Is Drumming,” the piece on Mickey Hart’s then-new Diga Rhythm Band LP that soon evolved into “Fire On the Mountain.”
AUDIO: “Happiness Is Drumming” [6/28/76] (1:00-1:30)
JESSE: This is what a 140 bpm “Eyes of the World” sounds like, about as fast as they’d ever do it, from July 14th, 1976 at the Orpheum in San Francisco.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [7/14/76] (1:25-1:55)
JESSE: A few days later, July 17th, now Dave’s Picks 18, the tempo is back down to a more luxurious 120 bpm, and the jam becomes a platform for a cool motif initiated by Keith Godchaux that sounds like a memory of the old ending.
AUDIO: “Jam” [Dave’s Picks 18, 7/17/76] (0:34-1:06)
JESSE: On September 28th in Syracuse, it unfolded into a one-time-only theme that Dick Latvala labeled the Orange Tango Jam, for reasons that make sense to me in a synesthetic sort of way, now on Dick’s Picks 20.
AUDIO: “Orange Tango Jam” [Dick’s Picks 20, 9/28/76] (0:00-0:30) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: I mean, what the heck is that? Or maybe it’s just a Supplication Jam? Whatever it is, it’s a beautiful one-time only flowering.
AUDIO: “Orange Tango Jam” [Dick’s Picks 20, 9/28/76] (0:30-1:00) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: By the spring of 1977, it slowed down slightly, settling into a nice space that’s a bit faster than the early versions but chiller than the more manic takes. The ominous alternating chords aren’t gone entirely, but they’re not part of the song so much as part of its harmonic language. You can hear Keith Godchaux lean in that direction on lots of versions in 1977, like this from May 7th, now on Get Shown the Light. Just listen to these marvelous dark little clouds.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Get Shown the Light, 5/7/77] (9:22-9:49) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
DAVID LEMIEUX: Just magnificent versions, ‘77. There's some pretty speedy versions, but they also really rocked it out. It just had so many iterations through the years, from the slower to the faster, to the much-faster [and] back to the slower. I really feel it was a song that always works for the Grateful Dead. Whenever I saw it live, whether it was in ‘88… which was one of the less-interesting years for it, compared to 1973 or ‘77 or ‘90. But even those were just terrific to see live. I saw some great versions of “Eyes of the World” at that time. Really great stuff.
JESSE: There’s one version from 1977 especially that many heads love.
DAVID LEMIEUX: You think of Englishtown, where it's a powerful song. It's a lot faster, but it's just… Jerry’s shredding. When we talk about Jerry shredding, it’s what he’s doing on those versions.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 15, 9/3/77] (0:33-0:59) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Even without the big ending, it still had the power to make memories. The September 3rd, 1977 version of “Eyes of the World” from Raceway Park in Englishtown, NJ, Dick’s Picks 15, is a jam centerpiece of the Dead’s biggest outdoor gig since Watkins Glen, therefore becoming the jam centerpiece of many formative experiences for the youth of the northeastern United States. Standing in for these Dead Heads is Mike Ruggieri, who left us this message at stories.dead.net.
MIKE RUGGIERI: My favorite version of “Eyes of the World” is from the very first Dead show I attended. My cousin, some friends and I went to our first show at Englishtown Raceway in New Jersey in September of ‘77. We were just 15 years old. We lived in Yonkers, New York, a suburb north of New York City, and took a train into Manhattan, then a bus from the Port Authority. Two hours out to Englishtown. It was an absolutely crazy day. As we arrived by bus, the roads were all blocked. As we got close to the Raceway, with the roads clogged, we just all ran off the bus and headed to the show. It was the largest crowd I've ever been in in my whole life. The day was hot and humid and hotter, again, with absolutely no shade. But the music, as you know, was amazing.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 15, 9/3/77] (4:33-5:03) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
MIKE RUGGIERI: Hours and hours later, when the show was over, we realized we had absolutely no idea where to get the bus back to Manhattan. So we found a payphone, called my mom in Yonkers, New York and, fortunately, we had cousins in Englishtown! Who knew? So she called them to come pick us up. Of course, the show was like a mini-Woodstock and was all over the news that day, so my mom had been worried the whole day. When we met our Englishtown cousin, he was worried that we were carrying drugs, because apparently the news reports were focused on everyone smoking pot at the show. He said, “I know the cops in this town. You guys had better not have any drugs.” We laughed, and we told him, “No, we had no drugs.” At least, we had none left. So my mom and uncle drove two hours from Yonkers to come pick us up. That two-hour ride home was fun… not. This was my very first show, and it's still the best “Eyes of the World” I've ever heard. And I still listen to it often on Dick’s Picks 15.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 15, 9/3/77] (11:35-12:05) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: If you glance at Grateful Dead setlists from early 1977, you might note “Estimated Prophet” and “Eyes of the World” starting to bump against one another and then, eventually, segue into one another. It happened for the first time on May 15th, 1977 in St. Louis, now on the May 1977 box set, and around 175 times after, thanks JerryBase.
AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [May 1977, 5/15/77] (11:20-11:32)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [May 1977, 5/15/77] (0:00-0:15)
JESSE: In 1988, Garcia explained to Blair Jackson why he loved the transition from “Estimated Prophet” into “Eyes of the World” in an interview conducted in 1988 for the sadly out-of-print book, Goin’ Down the Road: A Grateful Dead Traveling Companion. Garcia said, “They have an interesting key relationship to each other. You can play an E-major seventh scale against the leading F-sharp minor in ‘Estimated Prophet’ without changing a note. So it’s the same intervals exactly; it’s just in different places on the scale. That makes it so you can play through a lot of places. And while we’re making that transition we go from, like, B-minor to C-sharp seventh, to a little E-minor, or a little C-major. There are all these possible changes, so that by just changing one or two intervals, all of a sudden they'll work, but sometimes we have to discuss them because they’re not all that obvious. It’s not obvious what the leading tones are. Also, the rhythmic relationship is very ‘off.’ So I can find a pulse in there that’ll be just a perfect tempo for ‘Eyes of the World’ regardless of what tempo ‘Estimated Prophet’ was at, and that makes it interesting for me ’cause it’s wide open.
DARK HELMET [Spaceballs]: Ludicrous Speed — GO!
AUDIO: “Estimated Prophet” [Download Series 7, 9/4/80] (10:00-10:29) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Download Series 7, 9/4/80] (0:00-0:20) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That version of the transition was from September 4th, 1980, now Download Series Volume 7, with the tempo coming in extra briskly, around 130 bpm. The tempo varied incredibly, and still does, depending who is playing it. We’re going to follow the “Eyes” groove a little bit further. Let’s reset our ears slightly. This is from November 5th, 1977 in Rochester, now Dick’s Picks 34. Notably it’s not played coming out of another song, which it seems like sometimes resulted in slower versions. The double-drummers are playing a more pronounced backbeat, but the tempo and feel are pretty close to the original 1973 versions.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 34, 11/5/77] (0:03-0:26) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But some funny things happened with all the tempo shifts, to the point where there are a few different arrangements of “Eyes of the World” that almost sound like different songs. In this version from May 14th, 1978 in Providence, now on the 30 Trips Around the Sun box, Garcia barely even states the feel and rhythm of “Eyes,” going into it around 134 bpm and treating it more like a mode of soloing than a song with a form.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 5/14/78] (0:00-0:30)
JESSE: But then in the spring of 1981, Garcia basically rewrote his guitar part entirely, and played it that way for most of the year and occasionally in years thereafter. This version is from Hartford, April 18th, 1982, where it’s easy to hear it.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [4/18/82] (0:05-0:35)
JESSE: I think of it as the ‘81 arrangement of “Eyes,” even though it lasted a while longer, on and off. As Shaugn O’Donnell points out, it’s like a fusion of Weir’s rhythm parts for “Eyes of the World” and “The Music Never Stopped.” What’s funny is that I think, after playing it so many ways for so many years, with the rest of the band coming up with new parts to match, Garcia more or less reverse-engineered Weir’s feel from the Wake of the Flood era. Here’s what Weir’s part sounds like for reference.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Guitar 2, Wake of the Flood] (0:59-1:16)
JESSE: The tempos shifted, the jams extended, the feels were all over the place. If you pick a random Dead show from the early 1980s that includes “Eyes of the World,” it’s almost impossible to know what it’s going to sound like. No other Dead song varied as widely from version to version, even if the jams contracted a bit. David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: As the ‘80s go on, those are the ones that I sometimes am not so keen on — ‘85, ‘86, those really fast ones. The ones that clock in at six minutes, the tempo is really fast. But Jerry’s playing really fast, is the other part. Yes, it’s really fast, but they’re hitting their changes perfectly; they’re not blowing it because it’s so fast. So they're hitting their changes, and Jerry is still able to play incredibly quickly on them.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dave’s Picks 36, 3/27/87] (1:32-1:57)
JESSE: That was Hartford ‘87, aka Dave’s Picks 36.
DAVID LEMIEUX: ‘87, I saw a couple of versions that were, again, very, very fast. And then it was like ‘88, ‘89, they were good, I thought they were very good. When they played in Hartford in the spring of ‘90, it was still a faster version. It came out of “Playing in the Band,” which I love. “Playing” / “Eyes” — what a combo.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Spring 1990, 3/19/90] (3:28-3:43)
DAVID LEMIEUX: But then on 3/25, that was the day they decided: let's slow this song back down, let's bring it back to the 1974 tempo, which they did.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Spring 1990 (The Other One), 3/25/90] (5:36-5:53) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That version on March 25th, 1990 at the Knickerbocker Arena in Albany opened the second set, which it didn’t often do. There’d been slow versions of “Eyes,” almost all happening when the song came out of a quieter song or a pause in the action. It might not even have been planned to slow the song down until Garcia started playing it, but the Knickerbocker version set the stage for what to many Dead Heads was a pivotal early ‘90s moment.
DAVID LEMIEUX: And then the very next version, Branford's in the house, they play “Eyes of the World” at that 1974 tempo and Branford just… I mean, we know what Branford did with the song.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Without A Net, 3/29/90] (0:00-0:35) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was Branford Marsalis hearing and playing “Eyes of the World” for the first time. The March 29th, 1990 version of “Eyes” would be released just six months later on Without A Net, the Dead’s first new live album in a decade. And it opened new doors. For starters, just the connection between Branford Marsalis and the Dead. Branford spoke with David Lemieux and Gary Lambert for the Shakedown Stream in May 2020.
BRANFORD MARSALIS [5/15/20]: As soon as I walked on the stage, first of all, they had tower lights, which I hadn't seen since the ‘70s. That’s already cool. The lights had become the Vari-Lites, and everything’s a machine, movin’ around. And I'm like, ‘Damn, tower lights! That's great.’ And then they didn't have a setlist? That was the greatest thing — no setlist! So, literally, anything could happen. And it was before they had the talkback system, so they would literally kind of stop and try to say, “Okay, what do y’all want to play?” “Let’s do this.” “Let’s do it!” “Hey, let’s do some Dylan, man!” “Yeah, that’s great!” I was like… man, this is… that’s my kind of thing. Yeah, I love that.
JESSE: He’d arrived at the show as a guest of Phil Lesh, who’d corralled his bandmates into having Marsalis join the band on stage.
BRANFORD MARSALIS [5/15/20]: They did exactly what I would do when I don't know someone. They said, “So look, we'll bring you up on the last song of the first set.” That way, if it sucks, you can say, ‘Yeah, thanks for playing. See you later.’ That’s exactly what I’d do. Either end of show, or right before the intermission, so I could say, “Yeah, man, thanks for coming. That’s it.” So, I can’t even remember, I think it was “Bird Song.”
AUDIO: “Bird Song” [So Many Roads: 1965-1995, 3/29/90] (8:37-9:06) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That version is now on the So Many Roads box.
BRANFORD MARSALIS [5/15/20]: They put me over there next to Jerry, and he started playing some things and I played off of him. He looked around and smiled. We had a little thing going, and I thought that was it. And I said, “Well, thanks for letting me play.” And they were all like, “No, stay for the second half! It'd be great!” And then everything after that was just… yeah, whatever that became. I definitely didn't expect that when I was driving down the New York Thruway.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Without A Net, 3/29/90] (9:09-9:39) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The collaboration opened the door for the Dead’s music in a bigger way. It seems like a given these days that the Dead’s music would be compatible with jazz musicians, and there are a few instances of that happening in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, even more in Garcia’s club bands with Merl Saunders. But the Dead’s shows with Branford Marsalis made it possible for them to undertake exciting collaborations with saxophone titan Ornette Coleman and younger lion David Murray, and set the tone for numerous developments in the years since Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995. The song has meant so many things to so many people, in part because it’s been so many things itself. There have been covers a-plenty but it’s a song that’s told its own story in so many ways that it’s fitting we do another supercut, starting with the demo, following the album form and moving through versions from each year up through 1995. There’s a full list of dates at dead.net/deadcast.
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” (Demo) [Wake of the Flood 50] (0:05-0:27) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 28, 2/26/73] (0:28-0:42) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Wake of the Flood] (0:10-0:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Road Trips Vol. 2 No. 3, 6/18/74] (1:23-1:33) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [One From the Vault, 8/13/75] (1:33-1:50) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [June 1976, 6/11/76] (6:41-6:58)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Get Shown the Light, 5/7/77] (3:29-3:45) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 5/14/78] (2:32-2:46)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Road Trips Download, 11/5/79] (7:11-7:26)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Download Series 7, 9/4/80] (2:30-2:51) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [5/15/81] (3:37-3:53)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [4/18/82] (3:16-3:31)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dick’s Picks 6, 10/14/83] (5:29-5:45) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [3/29/84] (4:51-5:06)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [4/8/85] (3:37-3:49)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [12/30/86] (3:38-4:00)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Dave’s Picks 36, 3/27/87] (4:59-5:14)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 7/3/88] (5:52-6:09)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Formerly the Warlocks, 10/8/89] (5:46-6:02)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Without A Net, 3/29/90] (12:42-13:01) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [Saints of Circumstance: Giants Stadium, 6/17/91] (13:36-13:52) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [12/11/92] (6:04-6:21)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 3/27/93] (10:20-10:40)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [6/26/94] (17:22-17:44)
AUDIO: “Eyes of the World” [7/6/95] (18:20-18:47)
JESSE: And if you’ve gone to see any of the post-Garcia Dead projects, it’s changed even further. Lately, with the Wolf Bros. and Dead & Co., in addition to sometimes singing Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” Weir seems to have added yet another new ending. We’ll let you track down the tapes, and leave you with this one final story about “Eyes of the World,” courtesy of Charlie Frazier, host of the Blues For Breakfast show on WIZN in Burlington, Vermont, and who plays in the band, Mr. Charlie.
CHARLIE FRAZIER: We are way up on the side of a mountain, playing a private party for friends that we did every year and having ourselves a grand old time with the fall colors and the beautiful day. We look over and there's four hikers, standing at the edge of the field. So we invite them over. Iit turns out they had been up on the Long Trail, which runs the length of Vermont, and had been taking a break and having a sandwich and talking Grateful Dead, specifically talking about “Eyes of the World.” One of them said, “Wait a minute: do you hear ‘Eyes of the World’?” And sure enough, they did. So they said, “Let’s go investigate.” So they came on down, joined our party, and had themselves a grand old time for the rest of the afternoon, shaking their bones. It's amazing how you play Grateful Dead music, and they will come.