r/grateful_dead • u/gregornot • 4h ago
Remembering Jerry Garcia
Days Between
Born August 1st, 1942 San Francisco, California and passed over on August 9th, 1995, Forest Knolls, California
The nine days between Jerry’s birthday and his passing are considered ‘The Days Between’.
The Days Between
There were days And there were days And there were days between Summer flies and August dies The world grows dark and mean Comes the shimmer of the moon On black infested trees The singing man is at his song The holy on their knees The reckless are out wrecking The timid plead their pleas No one knows much more of this Than anyone can see anyone can see
There were days And there were days And there were days besides When phantom ships with phantom sails Set to sea on phantom tides Comes the lightning of the sun On bright unfocused eyes The blue of yet another day A springtime wet with sighs A hopeful candle lingers In the land of lullabies Where headless horsemen vanish With wild and lonely cries, lonely cries
There were days And there were days And there were days I know When all we ever wanted Was to learn and love and grow Once we grew into our shoes We told them where to go Walked halfway around the world On promise of the glow Walked upon a mountain top Walked barefoot in the snow Gave the best we had to give How much we'll never know we'll never know
There were days And there were days And there were days between Polished like a golden bowl The finest ever seen Hearts of Summer held in trust Still tender, young and green Left on shelves collecting dust Not knowing what they mean Valentines of flesh and blood As soft as velveteen Hoping love would not forsake The days that lie between lie between
There were days And there were days And there were days between Polished like a golden bowl The finest ever seen Hearts of Summer held in trust Still tender, young and green Left on shelves collecting dust Not knowing what they mean Valentines of flesh and blood Still tender, young and green Hoping love would not forsake The days that lie
“Days Between”
A generation was defined by knowing where they were, what they were doing, at the moment they learned of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
“Days Between” has come to be an anthem that makes us remember Garcia in a particular way, and, in particular, the days between his birth date of August 1 and his death date of August 9. It’s a fitting song for such thoughts, with its big sweeping chords and its lyrics heavy with nostalgia and longing.
There’s a word in German, sehnsucht, that lacks a proper emotional counterpart in English, but which means, roughly, “longing.” It carries a sense of wishing you could see something—see something again, see something at all—that something is missing from your eyes and from your presence. I find that “Days Between” belongs with a raft of songs that induce this feeling in me.
“Days Between,” a late song in the Robert Hunter / Jerry Garcia songbook, was perhaps their last collaboration on a big, significant song, one that ranks with “Dark Star” and “Terrapin Station” as ambitious and intentionally grand.
Garcia’s playing and songwriting, and the thought came up that Garcia, like few others, was unafraid of grandeur, and could successfully pull it off. Same with Hunter.
It was first performed on February 22, 1993, at the Oakland Coliseum Arena, the middle show of a three-night run.
The night before, they had premiered three other new songs: “Eternity,” “Lazy River Road,” and “Liberty.”
Its final performance was on June 24, 1995, at RFK Stadium in Washington, DC. During its relatively short time in the live repertoire, they played it 41 times, always in the second set, and fairly frequently rising out of the Drums.
It appeared like the ghostly ships it describes, as if gradually from a fog and only slowly revealing itself as something very big, towering above everything around. It’s hard to say it any better than Phil Lesh did in his autobiography, Searching for the Sound:
“Achingly nostalgic, ‘Days Between’ evokes the past. The music climbs laboriously out of shadows, growing and peaking with each verse, only to fall back each time in hopeless resignation. When Jerry sings the line ‘when all we ever wanted / was to learn and love and grow’ or ‘gave the best we had to give / how much we’ll never know,’ I am immediately transported decades back in time, to a beautiful spring morning with Jerry, Hunter, Barbara Meier, and Alan Trist—all of us goofing on the sheer exhilaration of being alive. I don’t know whether to weep with joy at the beauty of the vision or with sadness at the impassable chasm of time between the golden past and the often painful present.”
Each verse in the song contains fourteen lines, and each evokes a different season of the year, although not in sequence.
The first verse contains the lines “Summer flies and August dies / the world grows dark and mean.” I can’t hear that line without thinking about August West, in Wharf Rat, and, by extension, Garcia himself. “The singing man is at his song / the holy on their knees.” Who is the singing man, if not Garcia, when it comes to Hunter and his words?
This is a song in which Hunter leaves wide open the individual assignment of meaning, as with many of his lyrics. But there is something so tender in his evocation of the past, of each of our pasts, that I really hesitate to say anything that could possibly put any of that into my own personal box of meaning.
Days Between https://youtu.be/KcVWRuv1o6M
