What was the first Grateful Dead song Bob Weir wrote with John Perry Barlow?
In January 1971, a familiar face joined the Grateful Dead’s touring party as they embarked on another set of seemingly endless live performances across the United States. It was a 23-year-old hippie poet who had a history of heavy LSD use, violent mental illness, drug dealing, cattle-ranching, and Mormonism. He was also a Harvard dropout who’d previously introduced the Dead to the leader of the psychedelic movement, Timothy Leary.
This fresh-faced young writer from rural Wyoming was particularly well-known to the Dead’s co-lead vocalist and guitarist Bobby Weir, who first met him at high school in Colorado. His name was John Perry Barlow, and he was about to begin an 18-year songwriting collaboration that would change the future of his childhood friend’s band.
Weir was already working with an in-house lyricist for some of his compositions, in the form of Jerry Garcia’s longtime collaborator Robert Hunter. But one fateful night at a gig in suburban New York, Hunter snapped at Weir’s continual ad-libbing of the lyrics he’d written for the song ‘Sugar Magnolia’ from the band’s latest studio album, American Beauty. After a furious argument between the pair backstage, Hunter stormed off and told Barlow, “He’s yours”.
Barlow took him at his word and began working on a solo album with Weir as a side project to the latter’s obligations to his band’s music. The result was Ace, A record released under Weir’s in May 1972 that was as good as Dead. It had Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and the Godchauxs all on it, and every song on the tracklist, barring ‘Walk in the Sunshine’ was reappropriated as a Grateful Dead number within a couple of years.
So, which song came first?
If we count this album as essentially one of the band’s, then the upbeat country-and-western song ‘Mexicali Blues’ was the first Grateful Dead song Weir and Barlow wrote together. Weir based the track on the 1959 Marty Robbins country tune ‘El Paso’, which the Dead had already been covering for several years, and asked Barlow to come up with a suitable “cowboy” escapade to match the song’s style.
The fact is, though, ‘Mexicali Blues’ didn’t officially become a Grateful Dead song until its appearance on their compilation album Skeletons from the Closet in 1974. By then, the Dead had already released the ‘Weather Report Suite’, co-written by Weir, Barlow and singer-songwriter Eric Andersen, on their 1973 studio album Wake of the Flood.
Before either of these two releases, however, the Grateful Dead had already debuted another Weir/Barlow composition at the Empire Pool (now the Wembley Arena), during their European tour in April 1972. The song was yearning ballad ‘Looks Like Rain’, which has since featured on anniversary addition’s of the Dead’s tour album Europe ’72.
While Barlow had already contributed lyrics to ‘Mexicali Blues’ by the time he and Weir came to write this catchy track, it marked the first time he’d written something with the Grateful Dead specifically in mind. And it shows as the song’s two verses and single bridge leave plenty of room for group improvisation. As of its first performance, John Perry Barlow was officially one of the Dead’s two full-time wordsmiths.
