Recommendations of the Editorial team
The Greatest Songwriters of All Time (36): Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter
The songwriting nucleus of The Grateful Dead was the psychedelic counterpart to the Broadway team Rodgers & Hart, which helped the model of equal composer and lyricist achieve a breakthrough almost a hundred years ago.
Early collaborations like “Dark Star” were still based in the vastness of the cosmos. But beginning with albums like “Aoxomoxoa” (1969), “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty” (1970), Garcia and Hunter explored a mythical America populated by scrappy fortune hunters, cocaine-snoring train drivers, talking crows, card-playing wolves and – not to mention – musicians striving for enlightenment.
The Grateful Dead – “Aoxomoxoa”:
“When we rehearsed, Hunter usually stood in the corner,” recalls drummer Mickey Hart of the time Hunter joined the band.
“He had developed this strange routine of standing on one leg while scribbling lyrics in his notebook. For him, this was his way of communicating directly with our music. Lo and behold: suddenly we had a song.”
Hunter’s storytelling was always gifted. But it was his cosmic, strange aphorisms that made Dead lyrics so ready for print and that entwined themselves like sparkling garlands around Garcia’s melancholic guitar lines. “Let there be songs to fill the air,” says “Ripple,” one of their unforgettable numbers. And voila: the songs didn’t take long to arrive.
Warren Haynes on Grateful Dead:
“As a band, they also managed to reposition the word “success”. They created a following that naturally grew and grew and grew. They survived in a world where there seemed to be no place for them. And they bucked the system and encouraged their fans to do the same: to be free and independent minds. Many of the Deadheads lived in a completely different world when they discovered the Dead cosmos and said goodbye to their old lives. And that is the message that the Grateful Dead still stand for today.
When I play with the Allman Brothers, the band lets me decide how much of Duane’s influences I incorporate. The Dead work the same way. They would never tell me, “Play more like Jerry” or “play less like Jerry.” It just says, “Play what you see fit.”