Back in the twentieth century, there was no easy way to find out what a song was about unless its lyrics were self-explanatory. Grateful Dead lyrics are rarely self-explanatory. I always enjoyed “He’s Gone”, but had the feeling that it was a bunch of inside references that I wasn’t privy to. I turn out to have been right.
I now know that the song is about Mickey Hart’s dad, who managed the Grateful Dead for a few years until it was discovered that he had embezzled $155,000 from them, at which point he skipped town. This led to Mickey quitting the band for a few years out of embarrassment. Robert Hunter used Lenny Hart as a jumping-off point for a more open-ended lyric that could support all kinds of different interpretations. The Deadheads have tended to hear the song as being about Pigpen’s death, even though he was still alive when it was written. Even knowing the backstory, I still hear the song as being more of a backwoodsy mood piece than a specific narrative.
The version on Europe ’72 was recorded on 5/10/72 in Amsterdam. The band subsequently rerecorded the vocals in the studio, and rightly so; the original performance has a nice groove, but the singing is terrible. For the studio version, Jerry, Bobby and Phil layered on some extra backing vocals, and they also added the lovely “Oooh, nothing’s gonna bring him back” coda at the end. The recording is mastered a little fast, so it’s tuned about 30 cents sharp. This makes it extremely annoying to play along with unless you pitch it down in your DAW.
The band first performed “He’s Gone” on Danish TV. Jerry hadn’t written the bridge yet.
At first, the song ended by just kind of grinding to a halt. However, the ending soon opened up into a jam. The ending jam from 9/10/72 is especially good; listen at 9:12. Jerry does all kinds of cool volume swells and pinch harmonics and gets at the full timbral range of the guitar.
There’s another good ending jam on 9-8-73; skip the terrible vocal improvising and listen starting at 10:25. Dead Essays aptly calls Jerry’s descending arpeggiated line here “the trickle”. On 11-1-73, there’s a deft segue into “He’s Gone” from “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo“. From here, though, the song’s tempo starts slowing down from unhurried to comatose. Deadheads love the version from 9/3/77, but the tempo is too slow for me, and the vocal jamming is a bummer.
Here’s a nice gospel-inflected acapella arrangement of the tune by the Persuasions.
This country version by The Cosmic Carnival is okay; I am definitely feeling the pedal steel.
I am really only on board with the Europe ’72 version, so that’s the one I’ll discuss below. Here’s my transcription of key parts.
Intro
Aside from the bridge, the entire song uses only three chords: E, A and B, that is, I, IV and V in E major. (Sometimes there’s also an E7 leading into A.) The band dresses up those E chords in an interesting way, though. In the intro, while Jerry plays a single-note riff on E and B, Bobby plays syncopated chord riffs that slide from E to F#m to E/G#. You can see fingering here.
Verse
This seems like boilerplate country writing, but the timing is odd. The structure goes like this:
- “Rat in a drain ditch” (half-bar gap)
- “Caught on a limb” (half-bar gap)
- “You know better but I know him” (two-bar gap)
You would naively expect the pause after “I know him” to be one bar, which would be a symmetrical four-bar call-and-response. But there’s an extra bar on the end of it. Why? Maybe the two-bar pause is a complete hypermetrical cell, and Jerry liked its completeness? Maybe he wanted the phrase to be an odd length? Who knows. It’s a weird choice, but it works.
Chorus
The first phrase is regular country music: “Now he’s gooooone” is on A to B to E, IV to V to I in two bars. The second phrase repeats this, but after the bar of A and B, there’s a bar of 2/4 on E and E7, launching a new phrase: a bar of A, and then two bars of B. So that’s a two bar phrase, and then a four and a half bar phrase. That is not normal! It also seems unnecessary. Jerry is just repeating the words “he’s gone”, it’s not like he needs extra musical time to fit more lyrics in.
The second half of the chorus continues the hypermetrical weirdness. “Like a steam locomotive” is a bar of A. “Rolling down the track” is a bar of B. “He’s go-o-one, he’s go-one” is another bar of A. But then on “and nothing’s gonna bring him back”, it’s another of those bars of 2/4 on E and E7, then another bar of A, then two bars on the intro riff. So it’s another pairing of a two bar phrase and a four and a half bar phrase. This is just so weird. And it’s not like there’s anything weird about any other aspect of this tune so far, it’s straightforward country strewn across these super odd phrases.
Guitar break and solo
There’s a new chord in here, F#m, though it functions the same way as A and doesn’t really add new functional information. After alternating F#m and E a couple of times, the guitar solo proper is over the verse form. You can hear everybody seemingly get a little lost in the form at the end of the solo, but they all manage to land together on the bridge.
Bridge
Suddenly, a lot happens at once. There are only a few new chords here, but they imply several key changes. The first two lines are on B to D to A. It’s difficult to interpret these chords. Maybe we’re still in E and the D chord is borrowed from E Mixolydian mode? Or maybe we’re in B Mixolydian and the D is a bluesy borrowing from B minor? Who knows.
On the line “Lost one man but the price wasn’t anything”, the chords go D to A to G. I feel A as the tonic chord here, but it’s weak, so while we might be in A Mixolydian, we could just as easily be in D major. The line “a knife in the back, and more of the same” is the weirdest thing in the whole song. It’s a bar of 3/4, one beat each of D, Dm, and A. This is a “Beatles cadence” (plagal sigh) in A, with Dm coming from parallel A minor. It’s the only bit of chromatic voice-leading in the entire tune, in the only bar of that length. Then the final word, “same”, is on a long B chord, a hard pivot back to E major. Just to sum up, that’s two two-bar phrases followed by a two-and-three-quarter-bar phrase. Wild!
Ending
The final verse and chorus are the same as the first, and then there’s a tag, followed by that nice gospel-y vocal coda. The song fades out.
I love this tune for a lot of reasons, but on paper it isn’t obvious why that should be. You could easily be forgiven for finding its unhurried rambling structure to be infuriating. I mean, you could cut half the song’s length without eliminating anything structurally important. Or could you? I think the aimless rambling is the main point. This tune is not a narrative with a beginning, middle and end; it’s a vibe, a float downstream, with some unpredictable bends in the river and a few tricky rocks and eddies in the bridge. Jerry’s singing is essential to the vibe. It feels like a friend telling you a story, not a performer on a stage. Jerry has many shortcomings as a singer, but his rhythmic phrasing is elegant, and his warmth and good humor come through clearly.