RIP Robert Hunter

[Drunk Monk]

SEPTEMBER 24, 2019 1:30PM ET


Robert Hunter, Grateful Dead Collaborator and Lyricist, Dead at 78
One of rock’s most ambitious and dazzling lyricists was literary counterpoint to the band’s musical experimentation
By 
DAVID BROWNE 

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Robert Hunter, the poet and lyricist best known for his collaborations with the Grateful Dead has died at 78.
Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images
Robert Hunter, the poet and writer who provided the Grateful Dead with many of their vivid and enduring lyrics, died Monday night. He was 78. No cause of death was provided.
“It is with great sadness we confirm our beloved Robert passed away yesterday night,” Hunter’s family announced in a statement. “He died peacefully at home in his bed, surrounded by love. His wife Maureen was by his side holding his hand. For his fans that have loved and supported him all these years, take comfort in knowing that his words are all around us, and in that way his is never truly gone.  In this time of grief please celebrate him the way you all know how, by being together and listening to the music. Let there be songs to fill the air.”


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Considered one of rock’s most ambitious and dazzling lyricists, Hunter was the literary counterpoint to the band’s musical experimentation. His lyrics — heard in everything from early Dead classics like “Dark Star” and “China Cat Sunflower” and proceeding through “Uncle John’s Band,” “Box of Rain,” “Scarlet Begonias,” and “Touch of Gray”— were as much a part of the band as Jerry Garcia’s singing and guitar.
Born Robert Burns in California in 1941, Hunter met Garcia in 1961. Garcia asked Hunter to play in a jug band, but Hunter passed, instead seeing a future for himself as a writer. At Stanford, Hunter took part in early LSD experiments and dabbled in Scientology before leaving for the Southwest, where he battled drug issues. There, he sent several lyrics to the Dead in San Francisco before moving to the Bay Area to reunite with Garcia. When the band was working up an instrumental at a show north of San Francisco, Hunter listened and began writing lyrics to accompany the music; the result, “Dark Star,” was both a landmark for the band and also the official start of Hunter’s new role as the band’s lyricist in residence.

The role completely recast Hunter’s life goals. “What we were doing was almost sacred. The spirit of the times. … there was a time I felt this was the way the world would be going in a spiritual way, and we were an important part of that. I didn’t feel we were a pop music band. I wanted to write a whole different sort of music.” He told RS that his favorite line was in “Ripple: “Let it be known there is a fountain that was not made by the hands of men.”
Hunter was also a proudly irascible member of the Dead scene, sometimes nixing requests to use Dead songs in commercials or similar licensing deals. He rarely gave interviews. “There are things I have to do, like get a good picture, and I don’t take a good picture,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013. “I don’t know if it’s because I’m ugly or the camera doesn’t like me.



Like everyone in the Dead community, Hunter was shaken by Garcia’s death, although he told RS he felt it wasn’t completely unexpected:  “I always saw it coming, but seeing it coming is not the same as seeing it. I didn’t get the feeling he intended to live for very long. There are things about Jerry I just don’t understand. Or maybe am not capable of knowing.”
Hunter’s work didn’t end with Garcia’s death. In the years after, he wrote songs with Elvis Costello, Bruce Hornsby, country singer Jim Lauderdale and Dead drummer Mickey Hart. His best-known collaborator after Garcia, though, was Bob Dylan. Starting with “Silvio,” the two co-wrote many songs on Dylan’s Together Through Life in 2009.

“He’s got a way with words and I do too,” Dylan told Rolling Stone. “We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting.” Hunter told RS:  “He’s the only guy I work with who I give the liberty to change things. After all, he is who he is.”
Hunter, who is survived by his wife Maureen (whom he married in 1982), recorded several albums in his own and occasionally toured. In 2013, he went on his last solo tour as a result of medical bills; the year before he had had a spinal abscess and, by his own admission, hit the road to help pay his medical bills.
“I’m always glad that people are still out there performing the stuff, and the closer they are to the origination, the better,” he told RS in 2013. “There will be a time when there aren’t any of the originators left.”

As a writer, I poached so many of his lyrical phrases to break through blocks, especially in my early years of writing.  Hell, I just paraphrased his 'summertime done come and gone' line for an article I just put out this morning.  

Saw him play several times.  He wasn't my cup of tea live.  Some deadheads worshiped his singing style, but for me, it was his writing.  One of my all time favorite lyricists.

[Drunk Monk]

My social media is still echoing with remembrances of Robert Hunter.  

NPR has encapsulated it best so far.

Robert Hunter's Words Helped Bring Life To The Grateful Dead

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September 25, 201912:49 PM ET

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[img=586x0]https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2019/09/24/gettyimages-461060460_wide-a1369e9545502838dc72f5055f6fe2edda3f9c48-s1200-c85.jpg[/img]
Robert Hunter, photographed at the Grateful Dead's rehearsal studio, Club Front, in Nov. 1977 in San Rafael, California.
Ed Perlstein/Redferns
Let's get the obvious out of the way: If Grateful Dead wordsmith Robert Hunter had never written another lyric after "Truckin'," the rock radio staple off 1970's American Beauty immortalized by the refrain, "what a long strange trip it's been," chances are good that the headline writers of America would still have voted him into their hall of fame. A powerful, all-purpose line that hit the sweet spot of subversive clichés, it made speakers appear smarter than they are.
Yet Hunter, who passed away on Monday evening at the age of 78, did indeed keep writing, most often and fruitfully with his Dead songwriting partner Jerry Garcia, though also with other band members (and, in the years since Garcia's 1995 death, with the likes of Bob Dylan and Jim Lauderdale). The uncertain depth that famous line provided generations of pop-culture trainspotters — a line from a potentially typical, rock-band-on-the-road song, birthed during one of Hunter's rare and loathed accompaniments of the Dead on tour — was hardly an aberration, engaging as it did not just the weariness of the lifestyle, but of life itself. (Even as "Truckin' " acknowledges that the pedal must continue to be pressed, till it can be pressed no more.)
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If the Grateful Dead's improvisational music created one framework for exploring what it means to be in a community, it was Robert Hunter's words that provided members of that community with a set of ethical guideposts on which to hang those notes upon. Or to give it, potentially, meaning — which, when mixed with psychedelics, as of course many of the members of the Dead's community did while experiencing the band over its 30-year lifespan, is not just a "strange trip" but a robust and fragmented one.
Hunter's trip was weighty long before the Dead came to life. Born Robert Burns in California, he was a Navy brat scarred by divorce who'd spent time at foster homes, before his mother's marriage to McGraw-Hill Publishing executive Norman Hunter brought stability and a literary sensibility to his life. After dropping out of the University of Connecticut, Hunter fell in with Garcia in Palo Alto in 1961, bonding over folk and bluegrass music — most prominently, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, which Hunter would crib from for the rest of his days — and by playing together in a variety of string-band incarnations. (Their sessions as Hart Valley Drifters have been released in the past few years.)
Soon enough, they were also bonding over LSD. In 1962, Hunter was among the first of the future Grateful Dead/Merry Prankster crowd to participate in Stanford University's CIA-sponsored LSD tests, documenting them in string-of-consciousness "rhapsodies" — By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to be insane -- on the typewriter he'd bring along."His ability to articulate hallucinations would serve him well," wrote Dead biographer Dennis McNally in 2002's (obviously titled) A Long, Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. Around the time members of the Dead were first coming together as an electric jug-band, Hunter moved to Los Angeles, where he pursued spiritual enlightenment (including a flirtation with Scientology) and did a stint in the National Guard (which he quit after being ordered to police South Central in the wake of the Watts riots).
[img=586x0]https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2019/09/25/gettyimages-113640236_wide-6174848e37f58ac947a22413698e96a6bc146d05-s1200-c85.jpg[/img]
Robert Hunter, performing at Red Rocks Amphitheater on Aug. 9, 2002.
Larry Hulst/Getty Images
It was upon his 1967 return to the Bay Area that Hunter first began composing the lines that would become Dead classics. Many of the more famous ones reflected the mystical flavors of the time, as well as the writer's engagement with beat and modernist poetry, from the T.S. Elliot reference in the chorus of "Dark Star" ("Shall we go, you and I") to the kaleidoscopic visions that adorn every inch of "China Cat Sunflower" ("A leaf of all colors plays a golden string fiddle to a double-e waterfall over my back"). Yet, even as Hunter's words throughout Aoxomoxoa (released in June of 1969) matched Rick Griffin's incredible cover, the song "Dupree's Diamond Blues" — about a lover craving "jelly roll," robbing a jewelry store and receiving a life sentence for his trouble — took a different tack, bookending the old-timey blues tropes popular with the day's white rock musicians with philosophical point and penance. The move was prescient even in the moment. The week Aoxomoxoa dropped, the Dead was already performing as a more traditional acoustic-minded ensemble, beginning to roll out songs that would aid their transition from psychedelic volcano to Workingman's country-rock storytellers, covering George Jones and "Wabash Cannonball" months before the rainbows of Woodstock and the darkness of Altamont realigned the margins and purpose of their community. While it's impossible to gauge whether it was Hunter's reunion with Garcia that re-centered the songs away from utopian possibilities to IRL responsibilities, it was his words and characters that gave the transition a sense of the past being re-lived in a contemporary setting. Just how clearly the open-endedness of Hunter's gaze continues to speak to our time is a testament to the rich, enduring images he began collecting in the Dead's songs.
Hunter's storytelling and his protagonists were unmistakably American, just as his set of central tenets was universal. This was not blue-collar, postwar Americana, but it required the grit and craft and character of the frontier spirit, a certain knowledge of the country's dark, violent history (including its Nixon/Vietnam present), but also an impulsive trust in the absurd as espoused by the Pranksters. Blind hope was for those who'd never see it come to fruition, like the beggar August West (a name clearly meant to evoke a sun-setting frontier) in "Wharf Rat"; or it was for suckers who believed a "last fair deal in the country" could still exist — "don't you let that deal go down" they're warned. And if, after the psychedelic experience a sucker they remain, well, then this was probably not a trip designed for them.
The virtue of kindness was something to fight for and treasure, and it could be found in love as a full-hearted affair ("Lord you can see that it's true," goes the joyous chorus of "They Love Each Other"), as a philosophical quest (the divinely titled "Help on the Way"), or as a lonely agrarian pleasure ("Eyes of the World"). When the band came up, they and the community were one and the same — the preachers or the congregation ("Uncle John's Band"), united or divided ("Playing in the Band"), or just as lost as everyone else (the sublime "Franklin's Tower" command, "if you get confused, just listen to the music play" always seemed equally directed at the players as at the audience).
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Through much of the Grateful Dead's career, Hunter, like the narrator calling upon the muse in "Terrapin Station" (the most first-person song of his work for the band) tried to keep a distance, "to shed light, not to master." But as the years grew shorter, and the relationship with Garcia continued — with the legendary guitarist's myriad of drug, health and family-life issues becoming increasingly public — one could see Hunter's characters receding, and the real men and women behind the words coming into focus. One of these sets of words, "Touch of Grey," a song written at sunrise after a cocaine bender in the early 1980s, became the Dead's biggest hit and a Top 10 single in 1987, on the strength of a lyric about aging and survival — and rejuvenation, after Garcia made a comeback from a diabetic coma. By the time the pair wrote "Days Between," an eerie 1993 ballad that was never set to studio tape but can be found on recordings of many of the band's later shows, Hunter was clearly operating with a different compass, looking back not at an allegorical past but at his own mortality. Or, more precisely, that of the singer of his words.
How different, on a fundamental level of individual understanding, is it to look at the past of a world and the past of a person? The one thing that changed was the perspective and the vessel of Hunter's ideas. After all, as primary lyricist of a band whose very name welcomed — no, demanded — respectful obligation towards non-living souls, Hunter had been engaging death throughout his professional life, using lessons brokered by the psychedelic experience. That was the secret ingredient. Some of these deaths were real; others were metaphorical. They were and are strewn across many of his best compositions — "Dire Wolf," "Black Peter," "Box of Rain," "Bird Song," "Ripple," "Brokedown Palace," even that headline-happy line in "Truckin' " hints at it — so certainly the audience had long known how these songs go, and how it's supposed to gracefully end. He was even engaging death as public performance a year after Garcia's passing in August of 1995, by still writing him letters. (Great, funny ones too.) This should not make Robert Hunter's passing any easier to bear, but it does reinforce one of his central ideas: Some ends are not quite what they appear to be, and we should rejoice that they were present to begin with. To quote one of his last Dead-era masterpieces, "Silvio" (which he wrote for Bob Dylan), "let the echo decide if [he] was right or wrong" — it understands far better than we.

[King Bob]

Going where the wind don't blow so strange.

[King Bob]

And a nice tribute in The New Yorker. (I also found a good article about the Dead and their music archive on the same site.)