He's Gone
Lyrics: Robert Hunter
Music: Jerry Garcia
Copyright Ice Nine Publishing; used by permission.
Rat in a drain ditch, caught on a limb
You know better, but I know him
Like I told you, like I said
Steal your face right off your head
Chorus
And now he's gone
Now he's gone, Lord he's gone
He's gone
Like a steam locomotive rolling down the track
He's gone, gone, and nothing's gonna bring him back
He's gone
Nine mile skid on a ten mile ride
Hot as a pistol but cool inside
Cat on a tin roof, dogs in a pile
Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile
[chorus]
Going where the wind don't blow so strange
Maybe off on some high cold mountain range
Lost one round but the price wasn't anything
A knife in the back and more of the same
Same old
Rat in a drain ditch, caught on a limb
You know better, but I know him
Like I told you, like I said
Steal your face right off your head
[chorus]
Ooh, nothing's gonna bring him back
Ooh, nothing's gonna bring him back
Ooh, nothing's gonna bring him back
[etc]
Dr. Paul Smith writes:
Well, there's always the risk that in my ignorance, I'm rehashing something
that's been mentioned countless times already, but... I'm surprised to see
that in the discussion of the line "Steal your face right off your head" in
He's Gone, there's no mention of French director George Franju's 1959 Cinema
fantastique classic "Les yeux sans visage" ("Eyes without a face"). It's
about a doctor who, yes, steals faces from young women in order to graft them
onto the destroyed face of his daughter. She was terribly disfigured in an
accident that he caused.
It's a particularly timely film right now in light of last week's apparently
successful face transplant by French doctors.
Dr. Paul Smith
Alverno College
Milwaukee
Wasn't there a Billy Idol song called "Eyes without a Face"?
