How The West Was Won

The Garden Tapes » How The West Was Won » That's The Way

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That's The Way

This one's from LA. In this performance, Jimmy made a mistake by going into the second chorus too early, straight after "All you do is stand and cry", thereby cutting off the last verse. Taken by surprise, Robert took a couple of seconds to realise what was happening and was forced to mumble along for a moment before falling into step with Jimmy. This has been tidied on the official release by taking the words "That's The Way" from the beginning of the first chorus and reusing them at 3:56.

Jimmy would certainly have considered using the Long Beach version, or at least using the last verse to "complete" the song. He would have rejected this idea, though, because of Robert's spontaneous lyrics:

I don't know what to say about it,
With some people throwing flares in the night,
But now's the time to look and look again at what you see,
Babe, would they say that that's all right?

Fascinating to hear on the bootlegs, but not really suitable for the official release. Presumably he was reacting to yet another firecracker incident, unless the excitable Californians had taken to removing their fashionable legwear and propelling it at the stage or at each other.

There's one more curiosity on the official version. The "Sure don't think so" in the first chorus at 2:25 is not on the LA bootleg recording. Something that might be "Sure don't" is audible but it's certainly not the same. It doesn't sound quite as though the words from a couple of seconds earlier have been reused, so possibly a fragment was taken from the second Long Beach chorus during which Robert sings similar ad-libs. Not too sure about this, though, as I couldn't identify anything as a definite, exact match.

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