I turned twenty-one in prison doin' life about the road.

The story:

It wasn't I, but a co-worker in 1981 who got this one wrong. In our brewery QC lab we shared a desk that had one of those tear-off monthly blotter-size calendars on which, when one or the other of us was out on the bottling lines collecting QC samples, we'd each pen lyric snippets we thought were cool, that would impress each other. I came back with some beer samples and read my friend's misheard lyric and I almost died laughing, so I said to him, "The line's about PRISON! What's prison got to do with 'life about the road'?!" When I told him - and, unlike me, he was a total Deadhead - the correct lyric he blushed so vividly I thought his face was going to spontaneously ignite. (The song, by the way, was a Marty Robbins original covered by the Dead.)