Up on Cripple Creek

Robertson wrote it, Helm sings it, and it was finished at the Hit Factory in New York. The narrator is a truck driver who stays with Bessie in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and one verse has the two of them listening to Spike Jones, whom Robertson admired. Robertson said ideas for it began in Woodstock during the Big Pink period, and that he thought of the song as following a man who drives trucks across the whole country, as a camera would.

Hudson played a Hohner clavinet through a wah-wah pedal, one of the first uses of that combination on record. The critic Bill Janovitz compared it to Stevie Wonder's keyboard playing on Superstition, and Pitchfork's Steven Hyden called the riff pre-Superstition and pointed to Helm's half-time backbeat, which Gang Starr sampled in the early 1990s. The single came out in November 1969 and reached 25 on the Hot 100. The group played it on The Ed Sullivan Show that month. Live versions appear on Before the Flood, in The Last Waltz and on the expanded Rock of Ages.