{Thread hijack}
A question for you Dead fans:
Is there a song called "The Wheel?"
One night, years ago, I heard it on the radio WNEW FM.
It had to be at least 15 minutes long, great instrumental parts. (I know, that's no help)
The Wheel was performed just over 250 times by the Grateful Dead between 1976 and 1995.
The Wheel was composed spontaneously in the studio during the recording of the second side of Jerry Garcia's first solo LP. Garcia spoke about it in an interview;
...that side was really almost one continuous performance, pretty much. When a song would come up in there, or just a progression, we'd play with it and work it through a few more times. And The Wheel came out of that. It wasn't written, I didn't have anything in mind, I hadn't sketched it out.
The engineer on the recording session, Bob Matthews, spoke in an interview about the addition of the lyrics;
As we were playing it back and doing some of the overdubs, Hunter was there and he had a big piece of paper and he was writing on it up on the wall. He was writing words while we were listening to one of the playbacks and it turned out to be perfect. It was The Wheel. That song came from nowhere and just happened like that.
A track named Study For The Wheel was also included on the 2004 Garcia box set and on the subsequent expanded CD release of the Garcia album.