Truckin' - Live at Portland Memorial Coliseum, Portland, OR 5/19/74

The '60s was a time for traveling and discovering your place in the world. Sometimes what you found was an empty existence that just keeps repeating itself day to day. Having to deal with everyday life when you were always waiting for some kind of revelation to expand your consciousness was often depressing. In this song, The Grateful Dead deal with the banality by continuing their search for epiphany. They just keep truckin' on.

"Truckin'" is the Grateful Dead's coming-of-age story. In Anthem To Beauty, a documentary covering the making of the American Beauty album, Dead guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir talks about the romance of striking out on the road. He says it was a rite of passage for young people in the 1960s - as it perhaps still is to some degree today, though the internet has robbed much of the mystery of the road. "Truckin'" covers the Dead's navigation through that rite of passage. "We were starting to become real guys," Weir says, "and really enjoying the hell out of it." For the Dead, that rite became a way of life. The band never made a ton of money from record sales, and their unique legacy was made by touring. Also in Anthem, Phil Lesh talks about how the Dead's touring in 1970 preceded the "rock and roll bubble," when groups were isolated from fans and regular folks. The Dead were flying coach, riding busses, and staying in modest hotels. There were no handlers to protect them from the public or from the authorities. That manner of living was exciting in its way, but it could also get downright boring after a while, with long hours spent in hotel rooms and waiting for transportation to the next show. This is why the song has a line going, "Get tired of travelin' and you want to settle down." Even though the song is autobiographical for the Dead, it also means a lot to the lives of many Deadheads and children of the '60s in general. Part of what defined that generation was the thirst for freedom and adventure, which led to lives on the road (and some people staying there too long).

Grateful Dead members Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir are the credited writers on this track along with their lyricist, Robert Hunter. During recording, Hunter fed Weir one line at a time.