Alabama Getaway

Alright, Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew is spinning a real rock and roller right now with Alabama Getaway by the Grateful Dead, pulled straight from their 1980 album Go to Heaven. This one kicks off that record with a greasy, four-on-the-floor drive that feels like Chuck Berry got loose on a southern highway. Jerry Garcia laid down the music while Robert Hunter handled the words, and the whole thing has that outlaw swagger mixed with old west pictures and a few biblical nods that keep you guessing. Hunter once explained in a 1981 chat that he originally wrote the lyrics as a delta blues style number and even performed it that way himself for a while. He figured his take was not quite hitting the mark, so he handed the words over to Jerry, who dressed them up proper and turned them into the rocker we know. That shift is pure Grateful Dead, taking something raw and making it ride the way the band always did.

The song first hit the stage on November 4, 1979, at the Civic Center in Providence, Rhode Island, where it opened the second set and rolled right into Greatest Story Ever Told. It stuck around as a regular in the early 1980s, getting played more than fifty times in 1980 alone and becoming one of those tunes that could open a set or light up the room when the band felt like stretching it. By the end of the decade it faded, then popped back up for a few shows in 1995. Live, it often carried a Minimoog solo from new keyboard man Brent Mydland, who was making his album debut on Go to Heaven after Keith and Donna Godchaux had stepped away. Some folks guessed the song was about that lineup change, especially since Alabama showed up in the title, but that was never the case. The lyrics paint a picture of a smooth-talking character with a big diamond ring who promises the world to the poor girls who fall for him, then faces trouble in the courthouse where the jury box rocks and the sister states have Alabama on their minds. Majordomo Billy Bojangles sits down for a drink and wonders what keeps coming back, a nod to the famous dancer Bill Bojangles Robinson who used to play the head of the staff in those old Shirley Temple pictures. Hunter weaves in the twenty-third psalm and the valley of the shadow, giving the whole tale a dark edge without ever spelling everything out. That ambiguity is what Hunter always did best, leaving room for the listeners to fill in their own road stories.

To push the album, the band rolled into Saturday Night Live on April 5, 1980, and laid down Alabama Getaway along with Saint of Circumstance right before the record hit the stores. It was their second and final visit to the show, and the single climbed to number 68 on the Billboard Hot 100, the first chart action for the Dead in years. Cashbox called it smooth sailing on the blues and rock boogie road south, while Rolling Stone noted how the short punch of the track stood out against some of the longer numbers on the album. Over the years the song stayed a favorite for the heads who caught those early 80s runs, and even Bob Dylan covered it plenty of times on his own stages. The Dead played it a total of around 141 times across the years, a solid run for a tune that started as Hunter’s blues idea and became a high-energy rocker that could shake a room when the lights went down and the dancing started.

The band that brought this one to life got its start back in the early 1960s around Palo Alto and Menlo Park, California. Jerry Garcia had been deep into traditional American music, teaching guitar and banjo and hanging around the local scene. He put together a jug band called Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions with some of the folks from the music store where he worked, including a young Bob Weir. They played folk, blues, and jug tunes, sometimes doing a Jimmy Reed number or a rock and roll tune just for kicks. Ron Pigpen McKernan, the blues-loving organ player and harmonica man, kept pushing them to plug in and start an electric band. By 1965 they did just that, calling themselves the Warlocks with Jerry on guitar and vocals, Bob on guitar and vocals, Pigpen out front, Bill Kreutzmann on drums, and soon Phil Lesh on bass. Their first shows were in little spots like Magoo’s Pizza Parlor and bars around the Bay Area, five sets a night for weeks at a stretch.

They had to drop the Warlocks name after finding out another group already had a record out under it. Jerry picked up an old dictionary one night and landed on Grateful Dead, a name drawn from an old folktale that shows up in stories from all over the world. In the tale, someone pays the burial debt of a stranger and later gets repaid by the spirit of the dead. It fit the freewheeling crew that was forming. They played their first show under the new name in December 1965 at one of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests in San Jose, those wild multimedia parties with the Merry Pranksters where the music stretched out and the lights and sounds mixed with the still-legal LSD scene. Owsley Stanley, the chemist and sound wizard known as Bear, helped bankroll them and built the gear that let them get louder and clearer. By 1966 they were living together in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, writing their own songs, and becoming part of the Summer of Love scene that drew people from everywhere. What started as a loose jug band of friends turned into a group that could play for hours, mix blues and folk with long improvisations, and build a traveling community of fans who followed them from city to city.

That same spirit is what keeps the music rolling for the Zoo Freaks listening in on THE ZOO. The Grateful Dead’s official site at dead.net holds the archives, the old artwork from Go to Heaven, and the full lyrics to Alabama Getaway along with stories from the years on the road. You can find them on Facebook at the official Grateful Dead page, where they share photos and updates from the vault. Their Instagram account at @gratefuldead posts live shots and rare images from the Haight days through the later tours. Over on X they keep the conversation going at @GratefulDead, dropping reminders about shows and new releases. For the heads who want to swap stories and keep the circle going, the Dead Head Forum lives right on the official site at dead.net/forum, a place where fans trade tales from the shows and talk about the songs that still move them. Alabama Getaway fits right into that long strange trip, a short sharp rocker that carries the band’s early energy into the 1980s and still sounds good when the needles drop and the speakers push it out across the airwaves for anyone who wants to get away for a while.