They saw it coming

I just finished 6 Dead & Company shows; Eugene OR, Mountain View CA, Albuquerque NM, and Boulder Colorado. More on that to come.

I love and adore The Grateful Dead – their story, music, what they’re about.

I’ve got 1200 Dead songs, 100 Dead shows. I can listen to the Dead for months straight.

Today I heard “We Can Run” differently, pulled over and read the lyrics. Lyrics they wrote in 1990 were prescient. They sang songs then, about what’s happening now – how we’re destroying the planet and the world we live in.

Have a listen to We Can Run from the Spring 1990 boxset – The Other One.

Here’s a piece David Dodd wrote about the song on dead.net:
http://www.dead.net/features/greatest-stories-ever-told/greatest-stories-ever-told-we-can-run

We Can Run
– The Grateful Dead
— Lyrics by Brent Mydland and John Barlow

We don’t own this place, though we act as if we did
It’s a loan from the children of our children’s kids
The actual owners haven’t even been born yet

But we never tend the garden and rarely we pay the rent
Most of it is broken and the rest of it is bent
Put it all on plastic and I wonder where we’ll be when the bills hit

Chorus:
We can run but we can’t hide from it
Of all possible worlds we only got one we gotta ride on it
Whatever we’ve done
We’ll never get far from what we leave behind
Baby, we can run, run, run, but we can’t hide
Oh no, we can’t hide

I’m dumpin’ my trash in your back yard
Makin’ certain you don’t notice really isn’t so hard
You’re so busy with your guns and all of your excuses to use them

Well, it’s oil for the rich and babies for the poor
We got everyone believin’ that more is more
If a reckoning comes, maybe we will know what to do then

Chorus…

All these complications seem to leave no choice
I heard the tongues of billions speak with just one voice
Saying, “Just leave all the rest to me
I need it worse than you, you see”
And then I heard
The sound of one child crying

Today I went walking in the amber wind
There’s a hole in the sky where the light pours in
I remembered the days when I wasn’t afraid of the sunshine

But now it beats down on the asphalt land
Like a hammering blow from God’s left hand
What little still grows cringes in the shade till the night time

Chorus…