What was the first Grateful Dead song Jerry Garcia wrote with Robert Hunter?
Robert Hunter might never have joined the Grateful Dead as a full member, but he was as integral to the band as anyone who did. After all, it was often Hunter’s words that Jerry Garcia, Bobby Weir and others would be singing over their music, whether on stage or in the studio.
The band’s collaboration with Hunter went back to their inception, as he and Garcia had been friends and artistic collaborators since their teenage years in Palo Alto. “We started a folk duet called Bob and Jerry,” Hunter told Alan Paul in a 2015 interview for the Wall Street Journal. They were just 19 and 18 years old at the time, and Hunter didn’t feel as comfortable moving with the times musically as Garcia did.
Hunter moved away from California to the New Mexican desert, taking three songs with him that would make it onto future Grateful Dead albums Anthem of the Sun and Aoxomoxoa. After Hunter had sent the song lyrics to Garcia by post, he adapted ‘Alligator’ into the track Deadheads now know and love. But this wasn’t the first Garcia-Hunter song to be released by the Dead.
That song would come into being when Hunter hitchhiked his way back to San Francisco. “Why don’t you come back to California and be our lyricist?” Garcia had asked him. The wordsmith didn’t need a second invitation to join up with his old friend again creatively, especially without the burden of having to learn an instrument himself. The moment he arrived at the first Grateful Dead rehearsal he attended in the riverside town of Rio Nido, Hunter contributed his first lyrics to an original Dead composition.
So, what was the composition?
As Hunter entered, Garcia, Weir, Pigpen, Phil Lesh and Bill Kreutzmann were jamming to some chords the bandleader had come up with. “They were working on ‘Dark Star’, and I wrote the lyrics to it right then,” Hunter recalled. “It just started working immediately.” With Garcia’s acid-soaked guitar hook, echoed in a celestial organ part by Pigpen, and Hunter’s transcendent lyrics, the band felt they had a single in the works.
‘Dark Star’ went on to be the Dead’s fourth non-album release in April 1968, three months before Anthem of the Sun came out and just a year after their debut LP. It didn’t make much impact at the time outside of the group’s nascent West Coast fanbase, but in retrospect, the song is unquestionably up there among the pinnacles of their early acid rock period.
And it cemented Hunter’s place alongside Garcia as one of the key elements in the Dead’s songwriting. Their partnership was responsible for every song on the band’s third studio album, Aoxomoxoa. It continued through their 13th and final record with original material, 1989’s Built to Last. A fitting title, named after one of the last songs they wrote together, is about a friendship that began three decades earlier and would remain unbroken until Garcia’s sudden death five years later.
