Listen to Jerry Garcia’s Amazing Isolated Guitar Track for ‘Casey Jones’

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Like most of Grateful Dead’s songs, “Casey Jones” was a collaborative effort between Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. The story follows a railroad engineer whose train is going to fast and is on the verge of a train wreck. It’s loosely based on an actual person with the same name. Casey Jones was an American railroader and locomotive engineer who died when his train collided with a stalled freight train. His train was approaching Vaughan, Mississippi at high speed and he didn’t notice a train that broke down directly in his line.

Garcia was once asked whether it grates on him whenever he hears the song.

“Sometimes, but that’s what it’s supposed to do,” he said. “It’s got a split-second little delay, which sounds very mechanical, like a typewriter almost, on the vocal, which is like a little bit jangly, and the whole thing is, I always thought it’s a pretty good musical picture of what cocaine is like.”

“A little bit evil. And hard-edged,” he added. “And also that sing-songy thing, because that’s what it is, a sing-songy thing, a little melody that gets in your head.”

Listen to Garcia’s isolated guitar for this track below.