The 1967 Grateful Dead song that Jerry Garcia wanted you to forget: “Embarrassing”
It was a match made in heaven: the endless well of musical knowledge that was Jerry Garcia combined with the bottomless wealth of literary references absorbed by Robert Hunter.
Before the Grateful Dead formed in 1965, Garcia and Hunter were old pals from the days of the early 1960s Palo Alto folk scene. The two shared an interest in Jack Kerouac, traditional Americana, and demented science fiction, but when Garcia began to more fully realise his musical ambitions, Hunter was nowhere to be found.
When the Grateful Dead formed, there was at least an outside chance that Hunter could have been in the band had he been around San Francisco at the time. He had played bass and mandolin in various Garcia bands throughout the early part of the decade and was even briefly a member of the band that immediately preceded the Dead – Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions.
Instead, Dana Morgan Jr got the job thanks to his dad owning the music shop where Garcia and drummer Bill Kreutzmann taught lessons. Meanwhile, Hunter was off on a personal journey of discovery and drug addiction that would eventually land him in New Mexico.
In the meantime, Morgan was given the boot as Garcia pressured his avant-garde composer friend Phil Lesh to take over bass duties. Lesh was a trumpet player, but his vast musical knowledge and boundary-pushing ideas enticed Garcia. It wasn’t long before Lesh joined the ranks of the Grateful Dead, solidifying their first lineup along with Garcia, Kreutzmann, guitarist/vocalist Bob Weir, and keyboardist/vocalist Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan.
The band’s early repertoire mostly consisted of cover songs, with an emphasis on old-school blues (‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’), jug band stompers (‘Beat It On Down The Line’), and even Motown (‘Dancing in the Streets’). Most of the group’s early original compositions didn’t last long, with only minimal evidence to account for tracks like ‘Carboard Cowboy’ or ‘You Don’t Have To Ask’. By the time the group stumbled into RCA’s Studio A in Los Angeles to record their self-titled debut in 1967, only two original songs made the final cut.
The album’s first track, ‘The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion)’, was a group composition that was largely written by Garcia. However, the other original was fully credited to Garcia, the one and only time that would ever happen. ‘Cream Puff War’ is a slice of heady psychedelia that lives and dies off of its frenetic energy. When the Grateful Dead appeared on the local KPXI television show The Maze in April of 1967, he confirmed that he was the sole composer of ‘Cream Puff War’.
At that early stage, the Grateful Dead were still discovering what kind of band they wanted to become creatively. Their live performances already stretched songs into unpredictable improvisations, but their songwriting had yet to fully catch up with the ambition of their concerts. ‘Cream Puff War’ captures a group caught between beatnik folk traditions, psychedelic experimentation and garage rock energy, offering a fascinating glimpse into the Dead before the arrival of the lyrical sophistication that Hunter would later bring.
Hunter’s eventual partnership with Garcia became so essential to the Grateful Dead’s identity that it is difficult to imagine the band without it.
Together, they developed a songwriting style rooted in myth, Americana and surreal storytelling that elevated the Dead far beyond their acid-rock contemporaries. In hindsight, Garcia’s embarrassment over ‘Cream Puff War’ likely reflected how dramatically his standards evolved once Hunter entered the picture, giving him a collaborator capable of matching the expansiveness of his musical imagination.
“I wrote this particular song!” Garcia enthused to Ralph Gleason. “The only time I’ve ever written completely all the way, it’s my song.” Garcia shared more details about ‘Cream Puff War’ to KMPX DJ Larry Miller a month prior. “The title came after the song,” Garcia explained. “I already developed the idea – this is the only song that I claim totally – this is mine from beginning to end! I actually wrote it.”
“We were down in LA, I was writing, I had the changes worked out and the bridge and the first verse,” Garcia added. “The whole thing was just meandering along. Pigpen said let’s call it…’Cream Puff War’. (WEIR – No, I said it.) Or you did, somebody did. At any rate, the title doesn’t really mean anything particularly…it was a name that happened to be around, and then later on I happened to work it into the lyric as the last line.”
Despite Garcia’s initial enthusiasm for the track, ‘Cream Puff War’ only saw 11 public performances before being retired from the band’s repertoire permanently. Not long after, Hunter was officially sworn in as the band’s lyricist, freeing Garcia from the responsibility. In later years, Garcia felt that the song didn’t live up to the standards he and the rest of the band had put in place for themselves. “That’s one of those tunes that’s so old it’s totally embarrassing,” Garcia told Steve Marcus in 1986. “I’d just as soon everybody forgot about it.”
Check out the studio version of ‘Cream Puff War’ down below.
