Terrapin Station

I took a break from analyzing the Grateful Dead while working on other things, but now it’s time to resume, with a tune that is deeply loved by Deadheads and not of conceivable interest to anyone else.

Terrapin Station is a weirdly disjointed album, reflecting the conflicted motivations behind its creation. After their record label collapsed, the Dead signed with Arista, and both the band and the label wanted to move some units. Clive Davis hired Keith Olsen to produce, in the hope that he would bring some of that Fleetwood Mac magic to the table. However, the band brought in all kinds of odd material: Bobby’s reggae song in 7/4, Phil’s sarcastic parody of slick LA rock, Donna’s first original song ever, and Jerry’s 16-minute orchestral prog-rock suite with impenetrable lyrics. That did not add up to a recipe for heavy radio airplay.

My snarky tone notwithstanding, I do actually love most of the album. Bobby’s 7/4 reggae song is excellent, my favorite thing he ever wrote with John Perry Barlow. (I’ll probably do a future post on it.) Bobby also contributed a bumping arrangement of “Samson and Delilah“, a song he learned from the great Reverend Gary Davis. 

Anyway, the point of this post is to examine the suite that occupies the record’s entire second side. The Deadheads almost universally prefer live versions. Here’s a nice 1978 performance; the pace is leisurely, but the band members are enjoying themselves, and their enthusiasm is infectious.

What, if anything, are the lyrics about? Robert Hunter talks about receiving the phrase “Terrapin Station” completely out of the blue while watching a lightning storm, and he never seemed to have a literal meaning in mind for it, or for any other part of the song. Turtles have all kinds of symbolic importance in many world religions, but who knows what they meant to Hunter. He wrote many more parts to the suite than the ones Jerry set to music, and he recorded the whole epic himself. Be warned that he isn’t much of a singer.

The opening segment, called “Lady with a Fan”, is based on a traditional folk song, “Lady of Carlisle.” Here’s a recording by Fairport Convention.

There’s also a Gustav Klimt painting called Lady with a Fan, but I don’t know whether Hunter knew about it, or was thinking about it.

The rest of the suite doesn’t have any single clear lyrical reference point. All Hunter has ever said is that he was inspired by a big lightning storm. The Deadheads have speculated endlessly about what it could mean. Is Terrapin a place, an imaginary place, a state of mind? I find that when I think about it with a critical mindset, I get irritated, but if I just enjoy the song as a collection of phonemes decorating Jerry’s melody, then it works fine.

Hunter was not overjoyed about all the orchestration on the recording, and some of the band members grumbled too, but Jerry said in a 1977 interview that he was very satisfied with it. I tend to side with Jerry, but it’s definitely controversial among the Deadheads. You can hear how the whole suite might have sounded without the orchestration in this cover by Joe Russo’s Almost Dead:

That Jerry interview is a wistful read for a fan like me. He talks about how interested he is in the orchestration process, how he studies guitar books and Art Tatum and is “getting more interested in harmony as an idea, more interested in the formal ideas of composition.” But meanwhile, what he’s not saying is that his growing heroin addiction will prevent him from moving forward on any of it. “Terrapin Station” was Jerry’s last large-scale original work. He wrote half a dozen solid tunes after that, but nothing very ambitious or adventurous.

I’m going to be examining the studio recording, but will only be talking about the parts that the Dead played live, the first nine minutes or so. Here’s my transcription.

Terrapin Station

Here’s an annotated listening guide to the studio recording.

• 0:00 “Lady with a Fan” begins with a bright, swinging groove in F Lydian mode, that is, F major with B-natural instead of B-flat. Jerry only rarely used Lydian. The main gesture is an alternation between F and G chords. This is easy on guitar; you just play F while occasionally lifting your fingers up to allow the open G and B strings to sound. It’s unclear whether the tempo is 140 beats per minute with eighth note swing or 70 beats per minute with sixteenth note swing. I opted for 70 so the snares would fall on the backbeats.
• 0:15 “Lady with a Fan”, verse one, which has a jaunty sea shanty feel. Like all of Jerry’s best melodies, this one is easy on the ears, but it reveals a lot of eccentricity when you sit down to try to learn it. The chord changes don’t align with the barlines, making for a pleasant metrical disorientation.
• 0:25 The little instrumental tag at the end of the stanza is twelve eighth notes long. Wikipedia says that it’s two bars of 6/8. If you want to hear every accent as a downbeat, then it’s a bar of 3/8, a bar of 4/8, a bar of 3/8, and a bar of 2/8. My own preference is to count it as a bar of 7/8 and a bar of 5/8. Bill Kreutzmann said in his autobiography that he and Mickey Hart helped Jerry work all this out, and I believe it.
• 0:32 The second half of verse one reprises the intro groove.
• 2:35 Jerry’s solo. He leans even harder into the sea shanty feel by simplifying the syncopations and playing squarely on the beats. His guitar is double-tracked, and he harmonizes with himself in thirds, a technique that he didn’t use often. At the end, he’s harmonized in sixths.
• 3:38 The intro groove on the end of the final verse loops under a new repeated melody. That strange timbre on Jerry’s lead part is actually a primitive guitar synth, prefiguring his later experiments with MIDI guitar. According to Grateful Dead Gear, it’s either a Slavedriver or a Zetaphon. I find it to be a pretty annoying sound, but I appreciate the spirit of experimentation.
• 3:58 There’s a subtle shift from 4/4 to 6/8. 
• 4:03 We shift from F Lydian to E minor via a completely unexpected B7 chord. This is the first appearance of Paul Buckmaster‘s orchestral arrangement. It becomes intrusive in the later parts of the suite, but I find it to be tasteful and effective here.
• 4:11 There’s a bar of 7/8 before the transition back to 4/4. This is very tricky, and Jerry did not often nail it live.
• 4:14 This two-bar passage on C7 is the only part of the suite that shows any blues influence. 
• 4:21 “Since the end is never told, we pay the teller off in gold” is a bar of Fmaj7, a bar of C9, and a bar of Fmaj7. It’s impossible to tell whether it’s I-V-I in F major or IV-I-IV in C Mixolydian; the previous six or seven bars have completely reset my memory of where the tonic is.
• 4:31 The melodramatic riff on E7b9, alternating E and F, G-sharp and A, and B and C. The sixteenth notes straighten out, so the feel changes from jazzy country to classical-flavored rock.
• 4:38 The grandiose Terrapin riff. We are still on E7, but it no longer feels like the V7 chord in A minor like it did a second ago; now it sounds like the I chord in E Mixolydian.
• 4:51 “Inspiration, move me brightly.” That E7 chord turns out to have been the V7 chord in A major, and now we land on that A with a big string swell. Paul Buckmaster was laying it on a little thick there, but it does certainly give a lift to the word “inspiration.” The harmony is going to be plain vanilla diatonic A major for a while.
• 5:08 “Faced with mysteries dark and vast.” Jerry turns this into an elegant bit of text painting by having the music get mysterious. It’s sung over a bar of 2/4 that interrupts the steady 4/4 pulse, and the chords are C#m/G# to Gmaj7 to D/F#. That is so cool! The chord root rises from C-sharp up to D, but the bassline descends, and that transition from C#m to Gmaj7 is sweet Neo-Riemannian voice leading.
• 5:13 “Statements just seem vain at last.” This is on a bar of 3/4, another metrical disruption. The word “last” is on a D chord that moves to D#ø7, the vii chord in E major. We then resolve to E on “Some rise.” That kind of classical-style functional harmony is out of character for Jerry, and it’s a direction I wish he had explored further.
• 5:35 “Counting stars by candlelight.” The Deadheads love this lyric. It’s formally identical to the “Inspiration, move me brightly” section, but the chords are a little different. I’m sure that makes the tune hard to remember, but it gives the composition more of a shape than straight repetition would.
• 5:52 “Brand new crescent moon” is on a bar of 2/4.
• 5:57 “Crickets and cicadas sing” is on a bar of 3/4. I have never heard anyone pronounce the word “cicadas” like Jerry does. Maybe it’s a west coast thing.
• 6:20 “Terrapin, I can’t figure out.” This is a classic Jerry-ism: sit on the V7 chord for so long that it turns into the I chord in Mixolydian.
• 6:33 “TERRAPIN.” We resolve from E7, not to A like you would expect, but down to D7, and then we stay in D Mixolydian for the rest of the tune. Surprise!
• 6:36 Three bars of 3/8. The band is already playing a neat contrapuntal line, and then Paul Buckmaster’s woodwind countermelody suits it perfectly.
• 8:44 The final D chord. On the album, this leads into the rest of the suite. Live, this is the entry point for an open-ended jam, a segue into another song, or Drums/Space. Ulf Olsson calls this kind of improvisational launchpad a “trap door”, which is a perfect description of its function. My affection for the Dead’s actual music waxes and wanes, but the idea of a trap door as a compositional feature of a rock song is bottomlessly inspiring to me.

As a teenaged Dead obsessive, I had no music-theoretic insight, no context, no inside knowledge. I thought this music pointed to a world of secret meaning that I just wasn’t hip to. Now that I have more cultural knowledge, broad musical understanding and access to Wikipedia, I find that there are sometimes secret meanings, but more often it’s just Jerry and Hunter pulling together threads from things they read or heard. I am still impressed by their ability to pull those threads together; everyone has influences, but not everyone can synthesize those influences into something resonant and effective. Knowing about Hunter’s folkloric sources and Jerry’s approach to guitar does add new dimension to the listening experience for me, but it just pushes the mystery somewhere else. Okay, now I know that “Lady with a Fan” gets its sense of jaunty adventure from ambiguous half-time swing in Lydian mode, but… why does ambiguous half-time swing in Lydian mode create a sense of adventure? Maybe we will never know! But I feel peace whenever I can work on trying to figure it out. 

By the way, you may enjoy these remixes of “Terrapin Station” I made.