2/16/2024 0 Comments Grateful dead font generatorThe move was prescient even in the moment. Yet, even as Hunter's words throughout Aoxomoxoa (released in June of 1969) matched Rick Griffin's incredible cover, the song "Dupree's Diamond Blues" - about a lover craving "jelly roll," robbing a jewelry store and receiving a life sentence for his trouble - took a different tack, bookending the old-timey blues tropes popular with the day's white rock musicians with philosophical point and penance. Eliot reference in the chorus of "Dark Star" ("Shall we go, you and I") to the kaleidoscopic visions that adorn every inch of "China Cat Sunflower" ("A leaf of all colors plays a golden string fiddle to a double-e waterfall over my back"). Many of the more famous ones reflected the mystical flavors of the time, as well as the writer's engagement with beat and modernist poetry, from the T.S. It was upon his 1967 return to the Bay Area that Hunter first began composing the lines that would become Dead classics. Robert Hunter, performing at Red Rocks Amphitheater on Aug. Around the time members of the Dead were first coming together as an electric jug-band, Hunter moved to Los Angeles, where he pursued spiritual enlightenment (including a flirtation with Scientology) and did a stint in the National Guard (which he quit after being ordered to police South Central in the wake of the Watts riots). "His ability to articulate hallucinations would serve him well," wrote Dead biographer Dennis McNally in 2002's (obviously titled) A Long, Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. In 1962, Hunter was among the first of the future Grateful Dead/Merry Prankster crowd to participate in Stanford University's CIA-sponsored LSD tests, documenting them in string-of-consciousness "rhapsodies" - By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to be insane - on the typewriter he'd bring along. Soon enough, they were also bonding over LSD. (Their sessions as Hart Valley Drifters have been released in the past few years.) After dropping out of the University of Connecticut, Hunter fell in with Garcia in Palo Alto in 1961, bonding over folk and bluegrass music - most prominently, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, which Hunter would crib from for the rest of his days - and by playing together in a variety of string-band incarnations. Born Robert Burns in California, he was a Navy brat scarred by divorce who'd spent time at foster homes, before his mother's marriage to McGraw-Hill Publishing executive Norman Hunter brought stability and a literary sensibility to his life. Hunter's trip was weighty long before the Dead came to life. Or to give it, potentially, meaning - which, when mixed with psychedelics, as of course many of the members of the Dead's community did while experiencing the band over its 30-year lifespan, is not just a "strange trip" but a robust and fragmented one. If the Grateful Dead's improvisational music created one framework for exploring what it means to be in a community, it was Robert Hunter's words that provided members of that community with a set of ethical guideposts on which to hang those notes upon. (Even as "Truckin' " acknowledges that the pedal must continue to be pressed, till it can be pressed no more.) The uncertain depth that famous line provided generations of pop-culture trainspotters - a line from a potentially typical, rock-band-on-the-road song, birthed during one of Hunter's rare and loathed accompaniments of the Dead on tour - was hardly an aberration, engaging as it did not just the weariness of the lifestyle, but of life itself. Yet Hunter, who passed away on Monday evening at the age of 78, did indeed keep writing, most often and fruitfully with his Dead songwriting partner Jerry Garcia, though also with other band members (and, in the years since Garcia's 1995 death, with the likes of Bob Dylan and Jim Lauderdale). A powerful, all-purpose line that hit the sweet spot of subversive clichés, it made speakers appear smarter than they are. Let's get the obvious out of the way: If Grateful Dead wordsmith Robert Hunter had never written another lyric after "Truckin'," the rock radio staple off 1970's American Beauty immortalized by the refrain, "what a long strange trip it's been," chances are good that the headline writers of America would still have voted him into their hall of fame. Robert Hunter, photographed at the Grateful Dead's rehearsal studio, Club Front, in Nov.
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