New York to San Francisco, so many roads I know
All I want is one to take me home
From the high road to the low
So many roads I know…
So many roads to ease my soul.
It was fifteen summers ago now that this track was recorded at Soldier Field in Chicago. It was the last stop of the Grateful Dead’s ‘95 summer tour, a fact which granted a certain poignancy to this performance, since after twenty-seven shows across thirteen states on two coasts in just over a month—a journey shared by band and fans alike—no song could better describe that particular moment of life on the road.
The end of a tour was always bittersweet: it was a momentary reprieve from the stress of the life—the 500-mile overnight drives on dark, lonely interstates, the hustle of the “shakedown street”, the constant, looming uncertainty of scraping together enough gas money to reach the next stop (or score a ticket once you were there), the failing alternators and broken-down carburetors, the friends stuck in lock-up at the last show, the constant checking over your shoulder for local police, hired PDs hunting down absentee children, BCI, FBI, DEA, or whoever else had taken up an interest in that given tour—but it was also an end, the last show, a time for goodbyes, the moment when wanderlust was bottled up and friends dispersed to homes all across the country, homes that never felt much like homes so much as temporary domiciles where the road-weary would rest before loading up a few months later to start it all over again.
So many roads to ease my soul. All I want is one to take me home.
This performance achieved a mythical status among fans, seeing as Jerry Garcia was dead a month to the day after this show at Soldier Field, and everyone, without knowing it at the time, had gone home for good. Yet in this recording one finds reason to suspect that there was perhaps one person in the stadium that day who knew otherwise, for in an uncharacteristic freestyle towards the end of the song Jerry ad-libbed two lines that had never been heard before: “I’ve been down them roads”, he said. “Lord I’ve been walking them roads.”
~
After I left the road and cut-my-hair-and-got-a-job and started working in New York this song remained an emotional staple, a daily ritual: I’d start playing it on my discman as soon as I stepped on the subway, early in the morning, 6:30 or so seeing as my boss and I had this healthy competition to see who’d get to his desk first each morning, and each morning I’d step off the subway, head up the stairs into the still-gray dusk of the city at daybreak, the lights of those two towers the only relief against the dark downtown sky, Jerry howling over and over again about those roads, those roads that still felt more like home than this city did.
It had been years since I last heard “So Many Roads” before iTunes shuffled it my way this morning, and hearing it again was both nostalgic and somehow markedly unfamiliar—and in a good way. Because ten years later this song can finally inspire fond memories of my time on the road apart from any longing to return to it—and after so many years on so many roads it’s an enormous comfort to finally feel home at home.
