• Writers: Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, Phil Lesh, and Bob Weir
• Producer: The Grateful Dead
• Recorded: Spring and summer 1970 at Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco
• Released: November 1970
• Players:
  Jerry Garcia — vocals, guitar
  Bob Weir — vocals, guitar
  Phil Lesh — bass
  Ron “Pigpen” McKernan — vocals, keyboards
  Bill Kreutzmann — drums
  Mickey Hart — drums
• Album: American Beauty (Warner Bros., 1970)
• Also On:
  Europe ’72 (Warner Bros., 1972)
  Skeletons From The Closet: The Best Of The Grateful Dead (Warner Bros., 1974)
  What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been (Warner Bros., 1977)
  The Very Best Of The Grateful Dead (Rhino, 2003)
  and many live collections…
• Until “Touch Of Grey” in 1987, “Truckin’” was the Grateful Dead‘s most successful single, peaking at Number 64 on the Billboard Hot 100.
• The American Beauty album peaked at Number 30 on the Billboard 200, and is one of only six Dead albums to sell a million or more copies.
• The song’s autobiographical, on-the-road quality comes from lyricist Robert Hunter, who spent several months on tour with the band.
• Hunter’s actual plan for the song was to keep writing stanzas to reflect various changes in the band. He wrote several other verses for the song but never seriously introduced them to the Grateful Dead.
• The song’s lyrics gave fans a bit of insight in the group’s world: “You’re sick of hangin’ around and you’d like to travel/Get tired of travelin’, you want to settle down.”
• The song also coined the motto “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
• Among the guests on American Beauty are members of one of singer-guitarist Jerry Garcia‘s side bands, New Riders Of The Purple Sage, who released an album of their own in 1971.

FAST FORWARD:

• “Truckin’” also shows up a number of times on the Dick’s Picks series, which are live albums from the Grateful Dead’s vault. They’re named after the late Dick Latvala, who was the official keeper of the archives.
• Garcia, who had been through a number of substance problems and rehabilitations, died in his sleep on August 9th, 1995, at the Serenity Knolls drug-treatment center in Forest Knolls, California.
• On December 6th, 1995, the band issued a statement announcing that “the long, strange trip… is over.”
• The surviving members have kept busy — Weir with his group RatDog, bassist Phil Lesh with Phil Lesh & Friends, and Hart with a number of groups, as well as with writing books and other projects. Percussionist Bill Kreutzmann hasn’t exactly been invisible, but he’s been the quietest of the bunch. One of his main pursuits in recent years has been his own artwork, which he’s exhibited on occasion.
• They’ve also toured, in varying configurations, as the Other Ones, and more recently as the Dead.
• The Grateful Dead was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1998 and carried a life-size cardboard likeness of Garcia to the podium.