So many roads I know… So many roads to heal my soul...
After seeing this video, I wrote the passage below to a few good friends and show buddies. It took about five minutes — the words just came flowing out of me.
Sometime around 2013.
This is such a huge version of a song, at the last really good show, October 1, 1994. I know I'm imputing a lot of meaning to things that are probably random (not like a Deadhead to do that, obviously), but I've always thought that the simple error, "So many roads to heal my soul" — instead of the line as written, "to ease my soul" — was sort of prophetic, a doorway into this song that he'd never actually contemplated, the way literally to heal his soul before his time was up. I always imagined that on some level he knew his ride was coming to an end, that he had aged so drastically over the preceding few years, and he just seemed so TIRED, and when he sang "heal my soul" by mistake, something in him just rode that as hard as he could, a dying man taking one last stab at glory in the face of the inexorably decaying grandeur and the maddening inability to grasp all that made it so great despite everybody's trying so hard to grasp it just once more.
And you know how he used to grin slyly whenever he broke into something like this and the crowd went wild? I don't think he's grinning in this one. I think he's really just alone among 20,000 people, contemplating the one thing he knows he'll have to do by himself, and soon, and the irony that for the past 10 years all he's really wanted was to be left the fuck alone, without people hanging on his every word and without having to carry a hundred employees and four million rabid fans and with just his guitar and some guys he could hang out with and shoot pistols and play Motown tunes when he felt like it and not have to answer the fucking journalists' interminable questions about drugs and gate-crashing and his responsibility to be a role model — a fucking role model! — which was so completely antithetical — antagonistic — to his entire world view.
And then, right after that short guitar break near the end, when he comes back to sing "So many roads to heal my soul" a few more times, it's like he's even more defiant, more resolved to show that he can stare at his fate without blinking, the hell with anybody who says he can't, and the hell with all the screaming going on all around him, and then there is one little piano glissando (at 6:45 if you're keeping score at home, surely among the best two seconds Vince ever contributed), and right after that he suddenly just settles down and sings much more quietly. And yes, I know this is absurd, but that little piano figure sort of makes me wonder if he thought of the sun rising out of the darkness, and the realization that even though nothing can alter the course, somehow it will all be all right anyway, kind of a metaphor for the hole he's left in his wake, but reassurance that carrying on is not only the only course, but that it’s actually okay too.