What Became of the Baby – Grateful Dead
The Annotated "What's Become of the Babe"
An installment in The Annotated Grateful Expressionless Lyrics.By David Dodd
Kraemer Family Library, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Copyright notice
What'southward Get of the Baby?
Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia
Copyright Ice Nine Publishing; used by permission.
Waves of violet get crashing and laughing
Rainbow winged singing birds fly round the sun
Sunbells rain down in a liquid profusion
Mermaids on porpoises depict up the dawnWhat's become of the baby
This cold Dec morning?
Songbirds
frozen in their flight
drifting to the earth
remnants of forgotten dreaming
Calling...
answer comes there none
Go to sleep you kid
Dream of never catastrophe e'er
Panes of crystal
Eyes sparkle similar waterfalls
lighting the polished water ice caverns of Khan
But where in the looking-drinking glass fields of illusion
wandered the child who was perfect as dawn?
What'southward go of the Baby
this cold December morning?
Racing
rhythms of the lord's day
all the world revolves
captured in the eye of Odin
Allah
Pray where are you at present?
All Mohammed's men
blinded by the sparkling water
Sheherazade gathering stories to tell
from key gilt fantasy petals that fall
Merely where is the child
who played with the sunday chimes
and chased the cloud sheep
to the regions of rhyme?
Stranded
cries the south wind
Lost in the regions of lead
Shackled past bondage of illusion
Delusions of living and dead
What's Become of the Baby?
Recorded on AOXOMOXOA, 1969. Due to an experiment in recording technology, this song is practically unlistenable, however it has always been intriguing to those who follow the Dead's lyrics. Personally, I retrieve spending hours attempting to transcribe this song from the album; picking up the needle and putting it dorsum down; consulting with friends who had their own theories. Garcia has been quoted every bit proverb that the key to listening to the song is to go some nitrous oxide. I don't know about that...Only operation known: (Thanks, Josh Frankel, for pointing this out): Apr 26, 1969, at the Electric Theater in Chicago. "What'southward Go of the Baby" appeared in a monster encore which included drums, "Viola Lee Blues," "Caution Jam," feedback, and "Nosotros Bid Y'all Goodnight."
What'southward become of the baby
Come across Sharp ballad 228: "What'll Nosotros Practise With the Baby?":"What'll we practise the with baby?
What'll we exercise with the baby?
What'll we do with the baby?
Oh nosotros'll wrap information technology upward in calico
Oh we'll wrap it upward in calico
And send it to its pappy, O."
At that place'due south besides the line in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, in which the Cheshire Cat asks Alice: "What became of the baby?" She replies that the babe turned into a pig and ran away.
Ice caverns of Khan
A reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan: a Vision in a Dream (1816). From The Dictionary of Imaginary Places :"Xanadu, a kingdom on the coast of Asia where Kubla Khan ordered a stately pleasance dome to be constructed, described every bit "a miracle of rare device." The caves of ice below the sunny dome are particularly enchanting. ... It was in the nearby, aboriginal forests, in a savage, holy and enchanted places where women can be heard wailing for their demon lovers, that a mighty fountain of water, flung up violently from a deep chasm, was revealed to be the source of the sacred river Alph." (p. 416)Coleridge received the vision of Xanadu, he said, while in an opium-induced trance. He awoke from the trance having been given the verse form, which he wrote down, but was interrupted, and only was but to commit a small portion of the poem to page. The introduction which Coleridge wrote for the publication of "Kubla Khan" included a part of another poem, which is mentioned in the annotation to "Ripple".
Kubla Khan (usually Kublai Khan) (1216-1294): Grandson of Ghengis Khan, ruled from Peking, which he founded. Marco Polo visited his court.
Looking-glass
The mirror makes two appearances in the AOXOMOXOA song cycle, showing itself in Rosemary equally well. The evocations are many: amid them, Alice Through the Looking-glass; The album-cover'southward own palindromic nature; and the film "Orphee" (1949) past Jean Cocteau. In Cocteau's vision, Orpheus, who is a candidate for the identity of the "baby", disappears into a looking-drinking glass world.Odin
Co-ordinate to Bulfinch's Mythology :"Odin. The Scandinavian proper noun of the god called by the Anglo- Saxons Woden; the god of wisdom, verse, war, and agriculture. He became the All-wise by drinking from Mimir's fountain at the cost of one eye. His remaining eye is the Sun. [!] ... His two black ravens are Hugin (thought) and Munin (retentivity)."Mimir seems worth a expect too:
"Mimir. In Norse mythology, a giant water demon. He dwells at "Mimir'south Well," the source of all wisdom."
Allah
"The word presented in Islam every bit the proper name of God." (Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 6, p. 27)Appears to exist etymologically derived from the ancient Semitic root, el, meaning God.
Used in this song, it seems to refer back to the Khan character, who is of non-specific Asiatic derivation.
The other reference to Allah in the Grateful Expressionless universe is the "Blues for Allah" lyric by Hunter.
Scheherazade
The storyteller of the Arabian Nights . Co-ordinate to Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, :"Arabian Nights' Entertainments, The A drove of ancient Western farsi-Indian-Arabian tales, orginally in Standard arabic, arranged in its nowadays form about 1450, probably in Cairo. ... Although the stories are discrete in plot, they are unified past Scheherazade, the supposed teller; she postpones her execution by telling her husband, Schahriah, a story night after night, without revealing the climax until the following session." (p. 42)Hunter also refers to the Arabian Nights in "Blues for Allah", with the line, "The thousand stories have come round to 1 once again."
Where is the child
Could it be that the infant who is lost is the same child who was wrapped in scarlet colors in St. Stephen?" If so, then this child could be Orpheus, the child of Calliope and Apollo. The tale of Orpheus appears a few times in the grade of Hunter's career, most notably in "Reuben and Cherise."keywords: @babe, @mirror, @Allah
Outset poste: March 15, 1995
Terminal revised: March 26, 1997
Source: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/gdead/agdl/baby.html
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