The acid trip that created one the Grateful Dead’s best songs
The Grateful Dead might be the hardest band to define on the planet. If someone who had never listened to the band and had no idea what it was that appealed to people about them, trying to put them, their live show and their ethos into words in a way that doesn’t sound insane is near impossible.
Really, what you have with the Grateful Dead is one of the most authentic bands on the planet. Never before have a group of musicians connected with each other on such a deep level and used that connection as a means to make music. This applies to studio work and live performances, as they bounced off one another, using each other’s energy to influence what they made.
As a band who relied on the moment and one another so much when making music, it’s hardly a surprise that memories with their friends also came into the writing process. This is precisely what happened when they penned the track ‘Alligator’, which would become a huge turning point for the band as it saw them not only make radio-friendly, upbeat, fun music but also reach for something deeper. At the heart of that was lyricist Robert Hunter, as well as a trip, both the physical and psychedelic kind.
A friend of drummer Bill Kreutzmann, John Warnecke, invited the band out to the Russian River in Northern California. His father had built a house and some cabins there that all the band stayed in for some weeks. While out there, they took copious amounts of acid, used their speakers to try and make passersby think 40-foot bullfrogs were in the forest, and experimented with music.
One of the songs they started playing around with would eventually become ‘Alligator’. The notes were there, and there was a rhythm in place, but the real turning point when the band realised they had a song rather than just a jam was when Jerry Garcia remembered some lyrics that Robert Hunter had sent him.
Hunter was an interesting person, as he spent much of his time on a Rimbaud-inspired “vision quest”. While many people might find this method of creating controversial, there is no escaping that it did allow Hunter to dive deeper into his own psyche, pulling out phrases that might seem abstract in isolation but surmount to something beautiful when paired with the work of the Grateful Dead.
His words resonated so much with the band and what they were trying to achieve that they took Hunter on as chief lyric writer. The Grateful Dead’s ability to connect with so many people who listen to them is a direct result of the sweet and profound nature of their lyrics, which took a new form and truly found their inspiration during acid trips in North California.
