Street Cleaning Top Ten: Shakedown Street (#4)

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Oh, if you thought the Joni Mitchell song was a curve ball, do I have a shock for you! Today’s song on my list of favorites with “street” in the title may be a gigantic surprise to a lot of people. I hope you can stand the shock. #4: Shakedown Street - Grateful Dead What’s the shock? A Dead song? A Dead song higher on the list than Boz or Elton? A disco Dead song? I guess. I didn’t know until looking it up that Lowell George of Little Feat produced this album. Hey, that’s a bonus point! This sounds way out of line in the world of the Grateful Dead. In fact, if you take that quote of Jerry Garcia’s in the Bill Monroe box set (“I wanted to be a Blue Grass Boy in the worst way”), it’s beyond “way out of line.” But that’s part of the charm of the Grateful Dead: this is a band that would do everything from a cover of “Werewolves of London” (I’m not kidding!) to “Wake Up Little Susie” to long jam versions of their own songs. So dance a little to the Dead. Shakedown Street Written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter Recorded by the Grateful Dead From Shakedown Street, 1978 Maybe you had too much too fast: