Steve Silberman essay on the song.
A note on the song's structure.
Lyrics omitted. The annotations below are reproduced by permission of David Dodd; the song lyrics themselves are copyrighted and are not reproduced here. Read them at the official source: dead.net/songs.
First performance: February 22, 1993, at the Coliseum Arena, Oakland, California. "Days Between" appeared in the second set folling Drumz and preceding "Throwing Stones." It appeared regularly thereafter, always in the second set.
"Days Between" joined the Grateful Dead oeuvre right at the time-- 1993--when old-time Deadheads were asking themselves if Garcia and Hunter were still capable of creating art that had a primordial, frightening intensity: the beauty at the edge of terror that Rilke described.
As the other songs written roughly in the same period seemed to mine well-worn images and attitudes--almost reveling in their seasoned facility to create One More Time an archetypal mood, like "Lazy River Road" - "Days Between" slipped between your clothes and your skin like a chill wind out of a grave.
It had none of the arrogant retreat to a juvenile mode of pranksterish defiance that "Liberty" had; it turned the Rockwellian nostalgia of "Lazy River Road" inward on itself, almost against itself, in an inquiry into the tenability of idealism and sentimentality in a universe where, as another song has it, "You always hurt the one you love."
The most uncompromisingly adult lyric Hunter ever wrote, the verses present a panorama or mandala of existence in which each thing is in its place, but no place is completely safe. Hunter does his all to resist the tidal pull of sentimentality, seeing, as Blake did, that even the rose at the heart of the world has a devouring worm at its heart--the "black infested trees" on which moonlight shimmers exquisitely.
The world is presented with unrelenting exactitude, a world where both the sighs of young passion in springtime and the lonely horseman, leaving only his torn song in the world as he vanishes (as the singer himself was about to vanish), co-exist, inform one another, together creating a universe of joy and horror side-by-side. Only children would have it any other way, but in the Deadhead milieu where blithe rip-offs could excuse their own shadows with a funky "It's All Good," it was an important statment, at a time when the groupmind knew something was off-kilter, decaying, galloping away from the original joy-spring, but no one could quite put their finger on it.
In their last perfect marriage of form and insight, Garcia gave Hunter's meditation a setting that recollected "Dark Star" in its uncanny, irreducible simplicity. Garcia's little figure opens like a door... and who walks out? Prospero, the aged mage of "The Tempest," who drowned his power-book as Shakespeare himself surrendered the magic-making that had been his art.
Even the tormented tone Garcia was playing with at that time--the slurring headless-horseman's cry that sounded so jarringly out of place in a celebration of precision like "China Cat Sunflower"--was at home in "Days Between," as Weir strummed phantasmal chords behind him that flickered into clarity like moon-faces resolving in water.
"Days Between" was the final battlefield where the Dead dared to face the elementary questions of existence, and refused to flinch. It has the same fated, tragic majesty that bears witness to the life force in all truly great art.
Subject: "days between"
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 02:57:11 -0500
From: Wiccello@aol.comhi
first of all I really like your page of annotated Dead songs !! There are a lot of words and phrases I never fully understood until now, well done!! I've been a long time fan of the Dead and one thing I've noticed is Jerry sometimes changes Hunter's lyrics in concert. I don't know if he dose it on purpose or just forgets . I heard them play "Days Between" several times, it was a break from there usual stuff and I liked it. Of the shows I saw and and the tapes I have of those shows , it sounds to me like '......stood upon a mountian top, walked barefoot thru the STARS....." (not snow). I personally like stars because it reminds me of the LSD days. Keep up the good workbill