Everyone was glad to have a lyricist at work because they weren’t doing much writing themselves.ĭid those original songs you wrote and were performing have any resemblance to the versions we know, or did Jerry write new songs with the same lyrics? They were working on “Dark Star” and I wrote the lyrics to it right then. And he wrote back and said, “Why don’t you come back to California and be our lyricist?” So I hitchhiked back to San Francisco and met up with them in Rio Nido. 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. Stephen,” and I was playing them at parties, so I had something to impress the ladies with. I had written “Alligator,” “China Cat Sunflower,” “St. I got into writing lyrics just to perform myself. He handed me a jug and said, “You want to play this?” and I couldn’t get a tone out of it. I kind of dropped out when it moved on to the next phase, jug bands. We were doing our folk thing and moved into old-timey music and bluegrass. We started a folk duet called Bob and Jerry. That was when we were 18 and 19 respectively he was a year younger than I. How did your very unique working relationship with Jerry Garcia begin and when did you realize his words and your music went together so beautifully? It’s impossible to imagine the Grateful Dead without him. His work has always been lyrically ambitious, deeply poetic and simultaneously redolent of both fantasy worlds and toes-in-the-mud Americana. Many of Hunter’s finest songs tell novelistic tales in just a few pages worth of verse. A master lyricist, Hunter wrote the words to virtually every Jerry Garcia song, including most of the band’s best-loved songs, including “Ripple,” “Uncle John’s Band,” ”China Cat Sunflower,” “Friend of the Devil,” “Casey Jones,” “Truckin’,”“Wharf Rat,” and “Dire Wolf.”
Robert Hunter was a non-performing member of the Grateful Dead, as important as anyone else to the group’s musical legacy.
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