“Dolby’s Rupees: Grateful Dead – ‘Wharf Rat’”

There is no Wikipedia article on “Wharf Rat’; a song the Grateful Dead played 398 times between 1970 and 1995, the year Jerry Garcia passed away. Now, you might say, this is nothing peculiar as most people have never heard this song, which of course is true. It doesn’t appear on any of their studio albums — all of the versions available of it, online or anywhere else, are live versions. My favorite take, the one featuring on The Closing of Winterland (the band’s New-Year’s-Eve-1978), spans 11 minutes and eight seconds. Concision and pliability don’t look good on this song, in other words.

“Jack Straw”; another Dead favorite, saw over 450 selections by the band in concert, during the same time frame (these statistics are available on setlist.fm), and does indeed have its own Wikipedia page. Now, this is a sliver more than “Wharf Rat” was played, but get this: there’s a Wikipedia page on “wharf rats,” which according to the site are “a group of concert-goers who have chosen to live drug and alcohol free” and arose out of the environment around the rock group the Grateful Dead.”

So it is kind of tickling to see that this group of ostensible Jehovah’s Witnesses get press on Wikipedia, probably to spite real Deadheads as it were. Anyhow, the lack of mention of the song “Wharf Rat” on the site is probably an atrocity near the magnitude of Jethro Tull’s absence from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Well one reason I wanted to look on Wikipedia for “Wharf Rat,” anyway, was in order to ascertain that Jerry Garcia and any participating lyricists actually WROTE the song. As we know, cover versions were a huge part of the Grateful Dead’s live repertoire — they did Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” more than “Wharf Rat,” even.

And “Wharf Rat,” to be honest, at the risk of sounding trite or corny, is just a terrific phenomenon. It handles the subject matter of meeting a transient of sorts near San Francisco’s “wharf,” which is defined on Wiktionary as “a man made landing space for ships on a shore or river bank.” The homeless person, then, or “wharf rat,” balloons into a sort of mythical figure within Dead narrative, having spent “Half of (his)… life… Doing time / For somebody else’s crime” (a tidbit Garcia adamantly alters to “some motherfu**er’s crime” in the masterful, spirited Closing of Winterland version).

The song takes on an entirely surreal and spectacular discursive quality, then, when the wharf rat declares, delusionally, of course, that “Pearly’s been true / True to me / True to my dying day”, only for Garcia’s first-person narrator to then “wander downtown” and muse “I’ve got a girl / Named Bonnie Lee / I know that girl’s been true to me”. Garcia is obliterating the sociological chasm between the privileged middle-class, or the discursively sovereign, if you will, and the “rat” transients hanging around the wharf in his native Bay Area of California. No matter how many times we apparently validate our everyday lives, achieve things, acquire things, celebrate things, we ALL go through that state of uncertainty, the quandary of being faced with the potential for complete disaster and heartbreak. “Wharf Rat” will always occupy singular and optimum territory within the Grateful Dead catalogue for its penchant in lyrically taking destitution and sociological malaise and making them iconic and even beautiful.

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