Grateful Dead Music Forum

“Wield to the storm and fly”
or
“Wheel to the storm and fly”?

A search finds both appearing at numerous places.

Bill, tgo

it's always been "Wheel to the storm and fly" for me and any other person or band I've played with...never came across "Wield to the storm and fly" which doesn't make sense to me as a phrase...that's my take

Wheel

The song has a bunch of car/road trip/"On the Road" references. Wheel to the storm is turn towards it, meaning take on whatever life sends you head on.

yup agree, and more specifically, it's "flight of the seabirds, scattered like lost words, wheel to the storm and fly"..so I think of it as the seabirds moving toward the grey storm clouds and flying up and scattered around...YMMV

funny, I went to validate if it is "flight of the seabird" or "flight of the seabirds" and the first google search result has "wield".....I think the wield thing is coming from some non-deadhead website of song lyrics which made the mistake and all the other music lyric website copied that (like that copy song arrangements from site to site and you find the same mistakes from site to site)

The Annotated Grateful Dead has wheel. That's good enough for me.

I also found “wheel” in the UC Santa Cruz Dead archives. I sang “wheel” at our gig last Saturday night. Just wanted to be sure.

Bill, tgo