Truckin’ on: Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead’s 10 best recordings

‘Let your life proceed by its own designs’ … Bob Weir performing in 2023. Photograph: ExclusiveAccess.Net/Shutterstock

The Grateful Dead – The Faster We Go, the Rounder We Get / The Other One (1968)

The Dead’s love for the road is in evidence on this segment from That’s It for the Other One, the four-part opening track of their second LP, Anthem of the Sun. A rare Bob Weir-penned lyric details the Dead’s youngest member being busted by the cops “for smiling on a cloudy day” – referencing a real-life incident when Weir pelted police with water balloons as they conducted what he took to be illegal searches outside the group’s Haight-Ashbury hangout. It then connects with the band’s spiritual forebears the Merry Pranksters by referencing Neal Cassady, driver of “a bus to never-ever land”. The song later evolved into The Other One, one of the Dead’s most played tunes and a launchpad for their exploratory jams – as in this languid, brilliant version at San Francisco’s Winterland in 1974.