She sang a little while and then flew on.

The year was 1970, my junior year of high school at Loara High School in Anaheim, California. It was the day of the All Western Band Review, the biggest, most significant high school marching band competition in the state. We had been working towards this moment for months, since the summer when band practice began a full three weeks before the first day of school. 

Even after classes began, the band was out there on the field at 7:10 every morning (if you weren’t standing at attention in your spot at 7:10 you were dismissed for the day), perfecting our halftime and street shows and getting prepared to win what we referred to as the B.T.I.T.S., which stood for Big Trophy In The Sky, despite the obvious alternative interpretation of that particular acronym.

It’s impossible to overstate how big a part of the culture of the school during those years was connected to the band, which had won the “Sweepstakes” award (the overall winner despite the class of competition, determined by the size of the school) at All Western during each of the previous two years (and six times between 1969 and 1977). Perhaps the best way to describe it is to recount that during home football games the crowd would head to the bathroom and concession stands early enough in the second quarter so as to ensure a timely return to their seats for the halftime show. (Yes, there was a time and place when the school music program was more highly esteemed than the football team.)

All Western was held on Ocean Boulevard in Long Beach on the day after Thanksgiving. This year, in an inconvenient and rare contradiction to Albert Hammon’s one-hit wonder, “It Never Rains in Southern California,” the skies had opened up the night before, the deluge continuing into the morning. Consequently, All Western was held indoors at the nearby Long Beach Arena. At the end of the day, Loara had won a third straight Sweepstakes (in a tie with rival Glendora High School), playing Thornton Barnes Boyer’s 1881 composition, “Joyce’s 71’s N.Y. Regiment March (you can watch a video with the audio of this performance here).

My three years playing the alto saxophone at Loara flew by in the blink of an eye, and I “flew on” to UCLA where my saxophone was found courtside for “a little while” in the jazz band at Pauley Pavilion during the Bill Walton basketball era. A few years later I “flew on” again, this time to Santa Cruz where I spent “a little while” learning to play the guitar and becoming a Deadhead, taking advantage of the opportunity to see as many Grateful Dead shows as possible in as many venues as I could.

At some point along the way I must have blinked, because the next time I “flew on” down to the Long Beach Arena ten years and 17 days had suddenly gone by, and I was attending a rare Southern California show on 12/14/80, which I am picking as T.W.I.G.D.H. (This Week In Grateful Dead History). While riding the sunny but wintry backroads of Colorado recently, I revisited this epic show, and quickly identified a certain theme, headlined by this lyric:

All I know she sang a little while and then flew on.

It is widely known that Robert Hunter wrote Bird Song as a tribute to Janis Joplin. More recently, before he “flew on,” Phil Lesh transitioned the gender-specific nature of the lyric to, “All I know he sang a little while and then flew on,” as a paean to Jerry Garcia. And therein lies the makings of a life lesson: We are all birds that sing a little while and then fly on.

Janis sang for just 27 years; Jerry for 53; Phil for 84. However, the 26- and 57-year differences notwithstanding, all three merely “sang a little while,” by any measure taking into account the very fleeting nature of the time we are granted on this “box of rain.” With that principle in mind, the song is not just a tribute to those of us who sing, but to all of us who “sing,” whatever form that takes.

As I rode along on this time-shortened December afternoon, my particular location on this “shining ball of blue” about as far away from the sun as it ever gets, a theme began to emerge. My first clue was the echoing of the words, “all I know,” from Bird Song to It Must Have Been the Roses: “All I know, I could not leave her there.” Taken literally, this phrase means that the speaker (or singer) knows just this one thing, and nothing else. Clearly, we know more about Janis, Jerry and Phil than the fact that they sang a little while for us and are not here any longer. 

Enter Annie (who “laid her head down in the roses” and “had ribbons, ribbons, ribbons in her long brown hair”), and we begin to understand the deeper meaning of the phrase, “all I know.” The narrator of this tale was so stricken with Annie for her roses and ribbons that nothing else really mattered. He was so enamored, in fact, that he “could not leave her there,” and any knowledge beyond that was unimportant. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.

Although not performed at this particular show, there is another spin on the phrase, “all I know,” in the song, Me and My Uncle:

Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know.

In this case, the protagonist of the tale attempts to provide an alibi for the wrong he has committed of stealing and committing murder by explaining simply that he is merely doing what the victim taught him to do. Because his uncle taught him all he knows, it is the victim himself who is to blame. Talk about your perfect crime.

Returning to this week’s show, the third song in the first set is Althea, in which we are told that the subject of the story, referred to as “Jim,” is “thinking a lot about less and less.” This foreshadowing of the “all I know” themes to come later in the show suggests that it’s time to put on our noise cancelling headphones and turn our attention to what’s really important. And finally, in the second set of this seemingly unintentional journey through a values clarification process, we are treated to a first-rate version of The Wheel, and the haunting lyric, “If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will.”

Given the at-times inconvenient truth that we are all merely birds that get to sing “a little while” but must soon “fly on,” we are guided within the lyrics of the Grateful Dead to identify the principles by which we live as those that are truly important (including that theft and murder are wrong, even if carried out against one who arguably had it coming). 

My times playing the saxophone in my high school marching band and the UCLA jazz band came and went in an instant, much like so many of the experiences we have as we navigate our way through the years. But I threw myself into them fully to the point where they have stayed with me throughout my life (I still get choked up when I hear Joyce’s 71st). Think back on the moments in your life that were truly meaningful. Did you savor them in the way you now wish you had, knowing how precious they were by virtue of their ephemeral nature? More importantly, what about the present? What can you do today that will ensure that you will look back on this time in your life free of regret?

Treat each aspect of your life – and your life as a whole – as if it could end at any moment. It will surely end soon enough, but if you live each moment to the fullest you will get the most out of each chapter of the book you are writing, that is for “your steps alone.”

And that’s all I know.