Grateful Dead – The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)

This catchy 1967 song was on the Grateful Dead’s self-titled debut album. This is not one of the songs that they would play for years. According to Songfacts the Dead only performed it eight times, six during a roughly four-month span in 1967. In the 1990s Vince Welnick lobbied for them to play it because he played it in some of his own bands. The last time they played it was in 2015 at Chicago’s Soldier Field on a reunion tour.

The song fit the Summer of Love in which it was born. This was before they jelled into what they became. You can tell this was influenced by the British invasion bands. The song’s title is said to have been inspired by Aldous Huxley’s groundbreaking book, The Doors of Perception. The Doors of Perception explored the idea of inner consciousness and claimed that there was a way to transcend the everyday world and access heightened experiences. The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) is seen by some as a nod to Huxley’s ideas and philosophy.

They hadn’t found their identity yet and would soon start improvising on stage into jams. This song clocks in at around two minutes…that would change. They had the album recorded and the record company said they needed a single. They went home and wrote this song and thought…this would fit the bill. It IS a catchy song and I have to wonder if it was pushed at all by the record company?

The band’s grasp of spontaneity and jamming can be seen in the music of other jam bands like Phish and Widespread Panic. The album peaked at #73 on the Billboard Album Charts in 1967. The song was credited to the entire band. From wiki… The band used the collective pseudonym “McGannahan Skjellyfetti” for their group-written originals and arrangements. The name was a misrendering of “Skujellifeddy”, a character in Kenneth Patchen’s comic novel The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, plus the name of then-frontman Pigpen’s cat.

Jerry Garcia: “After we recorded the album they said, ‘We still haven’t got anything here that’d be a strong single.’ So we said, ‘Ah, a strong single, sure!’ So we went home and wrote a song.’Wow, this’ll be a good single.'”

“This was recorded after we recorded the body of the album, and [it’s] a new song; we were thinking specifically of a single, so we just played around, and came up with some nice changes and cooperated on the entire thing, and came up with the Golden Road, which is a good song; I mean it’s like really fun to sing and fun to play … and it seems like a good single, whatever that is – we thought it could be a single.”

The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)

See that girl, barefootin’ along,
Whistlin’ and singin’, she’s a carryin’ on.
There’s laughing in her eyes, dancing in her feet,
She’s a neon-light diamond and she can live on the street.

Hey hey, hey, oh, by the way, come and (party every day)
Hey hey, hey, oh, by the way, come and (party every day)

Well everybody’s dancin’ in a ring around the sun
Nobody’s finished, we ain’t even begun.
So take off your shoes, child, and take off your hat.
Try on your wings and find our where it’s at.

Hey hey, hey, come (party every day)
Hey hey, hey, come (party every day)

Take a vacation, fall out for a while,
Summer’s comin’ in, and it’s goin’ outa style.
Well lite up smokin’ buddy, have yourself a ball.
Cause your mother’s down in Memphis, won’t be back ’till the fall.

Hey hey, hey, come right away
Come and join the (party every day)

Hey hey, hey, come right away
Come and join the (party every day)

Hey hey, hey, come right away
Come and join the (party every day)

Hey hey, hey, come right away
Come and join the (party every day)

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Author: Badfinger (Max)

Power Pop fan, Baseball, Beatles, Alternative music, old movies, and tv show fan. Also anything to do with pop culture in the 60s and 70s... I'm also a songwriter, bass and guitar player. Not the slightest bit interested in politics at all.

21 thoughts on “Grateful Dead – The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)”

  1. Weir’s friend Sue Swanson from back in their Warlock days decided to organize a fan club, and she called it The Golden Road to Unlimited Devotion. From 1984 to 1993, Blair Jackson and his wife Regan McMahon ran a popular and well-produced Dead fanzine called Golden Road, named after this song.

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  3. another one I’d never heard before. Certainly short and snappy enough as a single for it to have been played on radio. I would assume the band didn’t really like it and that’s why they seldom played it live?

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  4. Snappy tune and captures “the scene” I imagine in my head of what it was like. That attitude of stop worrying, take a break. Timothy Leary and his whatever he said, “drop out, tune in” (?) I know singles had to be short back then because the 45 vinyl could only hold so much, but nowadays with digital formats, it doesn’t have to be; but I think the average attention span isn’t long enough to sustain more than a few minutes (unless you’re dropped out and tuned in on big fluffy cushions somewhere.)

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      1. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a drop out – tune in room. Big cushions in psychedelic fabrics, lava lamps, a hookah in the center with cherry brandy in it, and a kickass quadrophonic stereo system.

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      2. Oh yes it would! I think he was on to something good there! Just cutting off from the world…no phones, computers, nothing….

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  7. Well away from the later Dead doodling, but what a single for them, ‘reach out to the the moon, the stars the universe Psychedelic 60s.’ It has the title, a bit of danceability and it ran out at two minutes. THAT’S a single.

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    1. Yes I watched The Beatles, Bill Wyman, and O’Conner’s videos with no problem. Are they in the UK? I’ve had recent problems with people in the UK

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  9. Wow, you totally could have sold me that song as a tune by some British Invasion band. It’s great! I never would have guessed it’s the Dead.

    Also, less than 2 minutes…that’s like 1-2-3-4 the Dead going Ramones. Soon 2 minutes wouldn’t even account for the average length of a Dead solo, especially when rendered live!

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