Long Strange Golden Road

I was longing to be wooed I was ready to be humbled By the words that you had written By the syllables you mumbled Yeah, I was ready in my heart To have my heart invaded By the fervour of your passion Yes, I came to be persuaded But when I heard your ragged voice Something switched in my perception And I knew I was the victim Of a beautiful deception All my once exact beliefs Like tangled threads unravelled I walked out, stunned and liberated And so began my travels Keep the river on your right And the highway at your shoulder And the front line in your sights, pioneer Keep your eye on the road Remember what you told her This is all in code, my dear You better get yourself a coat Said the handsome taxi driver And he sighed like seven bridges Like a natural-born survivor As we drove into the night I could feel the forest jangling All the choices laid before me And their consequences dangling We came upon a stricken ship That must have once been splendid The captain as he died said "Boys, Our revels now are ended" I heard a wild holy band Playing jazz that was outrageous, That invoked the days of rapture When our love was still young and contagious Keep the river on your right And the highway at your shoulder And the front line in your sights, pioneer Keep your eye on the road Remember what you told her This is all in code, my dear In a dim-lit motel room Two sad lovers were discoursing On the dignity of exile And the merits of divorcing She said "all certainty is gone" But he leapt up, still denying, Cried "I won't believe the flame I lit Is dead or even dying" She left him drooling in the dust And with rucksack packed begun her Bitter journey to the border Which is where I wooed and won her She was Aphrodite, Helen, Thetis, Eve among the satyrs She was Venus in a v-neck sweater She was all that ever mattered Keep the river on your right And the highway at your shoulder And the front line in your sights, pioneer Keep your eye on the road Remember what you told her This is all in code, my dear Like Dean Moriarty's ghost I came in quest of secret knowledge In the winter of my journey To a crumbling Druid college There I read the books of lore And contemplated in seclusion But I took my leave embittered, Still in love with my illusions In the drizzling Irish rain As a tender dawn was breaking In a doorway I stood spellbound by The ancient music they were making I took my breakfast with the Gods On a blushing summer morning Till a wind blew them all away I had misread every warning Keep the river on your right And the highway at your shoulder And the front line in your sights, pioneer Keep your eye on the road Remember what you told her This is all in code, my dear Under cold electric light I watch the scenes mutating Like an old time frontier ballad Or a carousel rotating As if in a moment from a film With astonishing precision The camera zooms in close And a figure comes into vision I'm in Tokyo, it's dawn And it's raining hallelujahs Down the bright-lit neon canyons Along the sidewalks of Shibuya I'm trying to take a stance And rise above my contradictions But I'm just a bunch of words in pants And most of those are fiction Keep the river on your right And the highway at your shoulder And the front line in your sights, pioneer Keep your eye on the road Remember what you told her This is all in code, my dear