Dead Songs: "When I Paint My Masterpiece" (1971)

Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia, Letterman show, September 17, 1987; song by Bob Dylan

Hat tip to Paul Matulic, with whom I saw the Grateful Dead perform at Madison Square Garden two nights before. (You were perhaps wondering about the set list that night?) I remember thinking that the boys looked old. Yet in this video, they look relatively young (Weir more than Garcia, of course, who never looked exactly young).

I was President Nixon's chief of staff at the time. When he called my home that evening (to "check a few things," as he often did) and was told I was at a Grateful Dead concert, he may have concluded that I was at the funeral of an unpleasant person.