This Wheel's on Fire - guitarchords and comments
Lyrics without distraction HERE
In the basement of a pink house in West Saugerties, New York - rented by Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel from February 1967 - a lot of good songs came to life. One day Dylan brought with him a brand new lyric, and Danko - at that time experimenting with electric piano - found a match with a tune that dumped down on him the night before. The original, rough recording is heard in the "Basement Tapes", a famous bootleg, many years later released as "official".
In 1968, The Band included it with the album "Music from Big Pink". Same year, Julie Driscoll & the Brian Auger Trinity caught it. Of course The Byrds, too. And later Siouxsie & the Banshees covered it without knowing who were behind it, they'd only heard the Driscoll version.
Best version? My own, of course, with a couple of beer-stuffed friends as a choir. Thanks heaven it's never been recorded. I once performed it in a club hometown. The line-up was stoned, I was half drunk and the mixmaster thought he was playing a game of snakes. All the cockroaches in that old building perished; I guess that's why we were payed.
But "His Bobness" gave it to the public somewhere i '98 ... jeez; sometimes that crow can sing, too.