The Grateful Dead classics Robert Hunter wrote as a solo artist
Lyricists are often seen as the black sheep in any rock and roll outfit.
The biggest names in rock and roll could always tell coherent stories every time they played, but having someone set aside solely for writing lyrics would always be looked at as slightly less important than the rest of the group. But Cream would have been missing something without Pete Brown, Elton John would have been nowhere without Bernie Taupin, and the Grateful Dead needed that extra push forward that Robert Hunter gave them.
But being in charge of writing the words comes with its own hangups. There’s no right or wrong way for people to write a song, but if someone has a finished lyric before any music is put to it, it’s hard to see a band interpret your words in a completely different way than you intended or make music that might not do justice to the sounds that you hear in your head.
When it came to the Dead, though, they could twist lyrics into any shape they wanted, depending on what those words meant to them. Jerry Garcia had already been well-versed in nearly every genre that could be covered on the guitar, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to make songs that had a little bit of a bluegrass influence, a rock and roll stomp, or pulling a few pages out of the jazz playbook when they began improvising.
For Hunter, though, there were always pieces of his sound that leaned slightly towards folk music. He was already a songwriter years before the Dead became the biggest thing in the world, and when he wasn’t giving them the right lyrics to work with, he could normally be found woodshedding his material half the time.
How Robert Hunter gave the Grateful Dead their voice
And when working on his first tunes, Hunter remembered that a few Dead classics would be sprinkled in amongst his acoustic shows, saying, “I got into writing lyrics just to perform myself. I had written ‘Alligator,’ ‘China Cat Sunflower,’ ‘St. Stephen,’ and I was playing them at parties, so I had something to impress the ladies with. Then I moved to New Mexico and it occurred to me to send the lyrics to those songs to Jerry because the Dead had formed. And he wrote back and said, ‘Why don’t you come back to California and be our lyricist?’”
While tunes like ‘China Cat Sunflower’ have a very barebones structure that would have worked great in the context of a solo acoustic set, the whole thing would have felt a lot more anaemic compared to what The Dead do with it. The whole point behind their greatest tunes was about improvising, and even if Hunter had a brilliant skeleton for them to base a song around, hearing him try to match what Garcia, Bob Weir, and Phil Lesh could do on one acoustic guitar would have been one of the most boneheaded moves in the history of musical performances.
But there are more lines in these tunes that predict the kind of technique that he would use when writing songs for The Dead later. While not every line makes the most sense when heard out of context, Hunter always had a brilliant way with setting up a scene in the listener’s mind, and when he talks about being in the eagle wing palace, it’s impossible to not think of the vast expanse being painted all while wearing headphones.
Even for all the claims that the music came before anything else in The Dead, tunes like ‘China Cat Sunflower’ and ‘Alligator’ had the kind of size and scope that do justice to the band’s jamming. After all, every band needs a firm foundation to stand on, and while Garcia steered the ship throughout every piece of their career, Hunter gave them a certain grandeur whenever he submitted his tunes to them.
