Truckin'

All four of the band's main writers, Garcia, Weir, Lesh and Hunter, share the credit. The words refer to a drug raid on the band's rooms in a New Orleans hotel earlier in 1970, and the refrain, what a long, strange trip it's been, has entered everyday use. Lesh said the band took their experiences on the road and made them poetry, and that the last chorus defines the band itself. Weir credited the band's 1967 stint backing the vocalese singer Jon Hendricks with helping him enunciate the tongue-twisting verses.

It was edited down from about five minutes to three for a single, which reached 64 on the US singles chart and stayed on it for eight weeks. It was the group's highest-charting single until Touch of Grey. Pitchfork called it perhaps the band's most identifiable song. The Europe '72 version runs 13:08 and segues into Epilog and Prelude.

Live

It was the first song of the first set on 18 August 1970 at the Fillmore West, the show where many American Beauty songs were first played. The band played it 520 times, their eighth most performed song. For Pitchfork, Mark Richardson chose a 1974 show in Dijon, France, in front of a few hundred people, where he found the song at its jazziest.