Single and Album History
The song was taken from the American Beauty album and edited down in length from five to three minutes for release as a single. In addition to being shorter, the single version had some audible differences compared to the album version: it featured sections of lead guitar in places where it's faded down on the album version, and has a strongly processed verse vocal, different vocal track for the "Sometimes the lights..." portion, and is missing the album version's organ part.
The single reached number 64 on January 27, 1971 on the U.S. Pop Singles chart and stayed there for eight weeks. "Truckin'" was the highest-charting pop single the group would have until the surprise top-ten performance of "Touch of Grey" 17 years later.
The song was influenced by a dance from the twenties called "jiggeln'". It was more influenced by underground comix artist R. Crumb's drawing "Keep on Truckin'" that appeared in Zap Comix #1, released in San Francisco in 1968.
Read more about this topic: Truckin'
Famous quotes containing the words single, album and/or history:
“You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“What a long strange trip it’s been.”
—Robert Hunter, U.S. rock lyricist. “Truckin’,” on the Grateful Dead album American Beauty (1971)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)