The Grateful Dead song inspired by Paul Simon
As the Grateful Dead moved away from their blues and psychedelic early years, new genres profoundly influenced their sound. 1970 saw the introduction of country music, showing up most notably on Workingman’s Dead, and later years saw everything from the jazzy fusion of ‘Weather Report Suite’ to the mystic Middle Eastern scales of ‘Help on the Way > Slipknot!’.
The Dead weren’t above a little bit of reggae, either. One of the band’s most potent jams from the mid-70s onward was ‘Scarlet Begonias’, the Jamaican-infused track that first appeared on 1974’s From the Mars Hotel. While it was a crowd-pleasing live track from the very start, it was only when ‘Begonias’ found its forever partner in another reggae-influenced track, ‘Fire on the Mountain’ that the Dead found one of their most exciting improvisational vehicles.
“Musically, it has a little Caribbean thing to it, though nothing specific,” Jerry Garcia is quoted as saying in the oral history This Is All a Dream We Dreamed. “It’s its own thing. I wasn’t thinking in terms of style when I wrote that setting, except that I wanted it to be rhythmic. I think I got a little of it from that Paul Simon ‘Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard’ thing.”
When put side by side, ‘Scarlet Begonias’ and ‘Me and Julia Down by the Schoolyard’ do have some passing resemblances. Both songs use roughly the same chords (‘Begonias’ is mostly a B Mixolydian tune while ‘Julio’ is mostly in A major with some Mixolydian flavour), but as Garcia pointed out, the major connection comes in the bouncy rhythm that both songs employ.
Simon wasn’t the only inspiration that Garcia pulled from while composing the music. “A little from Cat Stevens – some of that rhythmic stuff he did on Tea for the Tillerman was kind of nice. It’s an acoustic feel in a way, but we put it into an electric space, which is part of what made it interesting. We really worked on it a lot.”
Lyricist Robert Hunter didn’t have the Caribbean on his mind when he wrote the lyrics: his head was fully in the frosty winter of England, dreaming about his British wife, Maureen. “It was called ‘Bristol Girls’ at the time – ‘Look all around this whole wide world / You’ll find nothing stranger than a Bristol girl,'” Hunter explained. “In the song the character flees… But it didn’t end the way the song ended; I’m still with her. I have to say, that’s her special song.”
Check out the studio version of ‘Scarlet Begonias’ down below.
