The Genius Behind the Grateful Dead

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/opinion/grateful-dead-robert-hunter.html

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It was the first time he’d ever been to England, a place he’d been dreaming of his entire life. Now Robert Hunter, the poet and Grateful Dead lyricist, had been left alone in a London hotel room with a whole case of retsina, a resinated Greek wine with the color of sunlight and the taste of turpentine.

“Mind you,” Mr. Hunter said later, “I only drank about half a bottle of the retsina. But it was having the whole case there that was important.”

This was back in 1970. He sat down at a desk and wrote the lyrics for “Ripple,” one of the Dead’s sweetest songs, a piece that includes the line, “Let it be known there is a fountain that was not made by the hands of men.”

It concludes, “If I knew the way, I would take you home.”

Later that same day he wrote the words for “Brokedown Palace” and “To Lay Me Down,” two more songs that became classics, at least to a certain demographic.

Some bands have a horn section; the Grateful Dead had their own poet. Mr. Hunter — who died on Sept. 23 at the age of 78 — never sang on record or played an instrument with the band. But he wrote the words for their most iconic songs: “Truckin’,” “Uncle John’s Band,” “Friend of the Devil” and more.

Mr. Hunter refused to explain what his words meant, preferring to let the songs speak for themselves. In making the 2017 documentary “Long Strange Trip,” Amir Bar-Lev managed to get the reclusive Mr. Hunter on film. In that interview, Mr. Hunter recited the inscrutable lyrics to “Dark Star,” (“Glass hand dissolving in ice petal flowers revolving,”) and then simply stated, “It says what it means,” as if this were self-evident. And who knows? Perhaps it was.

It takes a particular form of genius to sustain an artistic collaboration, a relationship that may have more in common with a marriage than a business. John Lennon and Paul McCartney brought out the best in each other — for a while, anyway. So did Gilbert and Sullivan, and Simon and Garfunkel, and the Everly Brothers. It’s not always clear where Gillian Welch’s songs end and David Rawlings’s begin; Mr. Rawlings has described himself as “being one half of a group called ‘Gillian Welch.’”

Robert Hunter would have bristled if anyone had the gall to suggest he was half of a group called “Jerry Garcia.” But he did possess an uncanny ability to find the words that expressed the heart of his friend. They’d met as teenagers in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1961, at a local production of the musical “Damn Yankees,” and it is lovely to think of those two young men sitting side by side, listening to the song “Heart”: “You’ve gotta have heart/ All you really need is heart/ When the odds are saying you’ll never win /That’s when the grin should start.”

In their long years as partners, the two would do a lot of grinning. They would weep sometimes, too.

Once, when arguing about directions, Mr. Hunter told Mr. Garcia, “For the time being, I’m just following you following yourself.”

“Then we’re both lost,” Mr. Garcia replied.

If they were both lost, there was surely some solace in having a partner to whom each was so finely attuned. Mr. Hunter wrote the lyrics for “Terrapin Station” one night in a single sitting, as a lightning storm crackled across San Francisco. At that same moment, Mr. Garcia had been driving across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and got an idea for a ballad. He hurried home to capture the melody. “When we met the next day,” said Mr. Hunter, “I showed him the words, and he said, “I’ve got the music.”

We should all be so lucky in romance as they were in song.

It’s hard to imagine what Mr. Hunter’s creative life was like after Mr. Garcia’s death in 1995. Sure, he occasionally performed a few of their songs on his own. But as the years went on, he often seemed like a widower.

“So I’ll just say I love you,” he wrote, after Mr. Garcia died, “which I never said before. And let it go at that, old friend. The rest you may ignore.”

The Grateful Dead were, at times, a mess. But at their best, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter showed us what it meant to love another soul.

“Oh, oh,” Mr. Hunter once said, remembering that day of inspiration, back in London. “Would those days but come again.”

He ruefully shook his head and added: “Oh, they will, they will. But not for me.”

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