Robert Hunter (78) – the Grateful Dead – was born on June 23, 1941 in Arroyo Grande CA. Hunter’s father was an alcoholic, who deserted the family when Hunter was seven, according to Grateful Dead chronicler Dennis McNally. Hunter spent the next few years in foster homes before returning to live with his mother. These experiences drove him to seek refuge in books, and he wrote a 50-page fairy tale before he was 11. His mother married again, to Norman Hunter, whose last name Robert took. The elder Hunter was a publisher, who gave Robert lessons in writing. Hunter attended high school in Palo Alto, learning to play several instruments as a teenager. His family moved to Connecticut, where he attended the University of Connecticut. He played trumpet in a band called the Crescents. Hunter left the university after a year, and returned to Palo Alto. He enlisted in the National Guard, and spent six months training, before doing a six-month tour of duty.
Upon his return to Palo Alto, in 1961 he was introduced to Jerry Garcia by Garcia’s then-girlfriend, who had previously been in a relationship with Hunter. Garcia was 18 and Hunter 19. The duo began to perform together, spending their time in “what passed for Palo Alto’s 1961 bohemian community”, including a bookstore run by Roy Kepler. They formed a short-lived duo called “Bob and Jerry” that debuted at the graduation ceremony of the Quaker Peninsula School on May 5, 1961.
According to McNally, the group did not last because of “Hunter’s limits as a guitarist and Garcia’s ravenous drive to get better,” but the two remained friendly. Garcia became involved with bluegrass groups in the area such as the Thunder Mountain Tub Thumpers and the Wildwood Boys; Hunter sometimes played the mandolin with these groups, but was more interested in writing. By 1962, he had written a book, The Silver Snarling Trumpet, described by McNally as a roman à clef. McNally writes that it shows Hunter’s “skill at storytelling and his fantastic ear for dialogue”. Recordings of folk and bluegrass bands that included Hunter and Garcia were later released on two albums – Folk Time (2016) and Before the Dead (2018).
Though he’d never play onstage with the Grateful Dead, he became not only a genuine band member but its secret Ace in the hole. Most of the band’s early verbal efforts would not count or stand the test of time; it was Hunter’s work that would elevate their songs from ditties to rich, complete stories set to song.
Try explicating some of Hunter’s early lyrics for the songs he wrote with Jerry Garcia, and pretty soon into your exegesis you’re going to fall back on a sort of “you had to be there” argument. Explaining “China Cat Sunflower” or “Dark Star” was like explaining an acid trip to someone who’s never taken acid. No surprise to learn that Hunter wrote a lot of those early lyrics while he was tripping.
Of course, if you can write a song, any song, while you’re tripping, that puts you way out in front of most everyone else. In this respect, it helps to know that Hunter was not just some hippy-dippy poet (although he was reportedly the great-great-grandson of Robert Burns). He was also an actual musician—he partnered with Garcia long before the formation of the Dead, when both were part of California’s bluegrass/coffee house scene, and what he didn’t know about how songs worked, Garcia was there to teach him. He was a fast learner.
Even before the Dead entered their folky/country phase with Workingman’s Dead, Hunter was writing songs that drew on traditional music in the best way. “Dupree’s Diamond Blues” does not flat out copy songs like “Frankie and Johnny,” but Hunter had plainly put in his time absorbing old blues and folk songs that told stories about thieves, jellyroll, wayward lovers, and betrayal. In the same way, “Mountains of the Moon,” which is simply one of the most haunting, mysterious songs written in the last century, tipped its hat to old English balladry and then went its own way. Hunter plainly loved traditions, but he wasn’t bound by them.
Probably the best example of this is “Cumberland Blues,” off Workingman’s Dead. The story has circulated for years about the kid who played the song for his grandfather, who didn’t give a hoot for rock and roll but said that old traditional bluegrass song the Dead played was the real deal, having no idea that the tune was a Hunter/Garcia original. (Extra bonus [no lyrical content]: listen to how the song begins played on electric instruments and morphs into an acoustic version by song’s end.)
Hunter, so far as I know, never appeared on stage with the Dead, but his lyrics are as much a part of their identity as anything actually played by the other musicians. His words, which managed to be both concrete and elliptical, force a listener to become part collaborator: you finish what he started in your head. Your version is your own, and yet you are part of something larger. Robert Hunter was the master when it came to creating songs that are intensely personal and communal.
When the Grateful Dead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Hunter was included as a band member, the only non-performer to ever be so honored.
After Garcia died in 1995, Hunter went on to collaborate with any number of other songwriters, but none as famous as Bob Dylan, who respected Hunter so much that he was the one writing partner who Dylan allowed to change things. “He’s got a way with words and I do too,” Dylan told Rolling Stone. “We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting.” Indeed.
The Dead never entirely escaped their Haight Ashbury, hippie origins, but anyone who’s ever listened closely knows that’s merely where they started. There was always more to the music, some solid core that bespeaks joy, intelligence, and a full-throated love of rock and roll, and no one had more to do with that than Hunter. There was nothing sentimental or mushwitted about anything he wrote “New Speedway Boogie’s” conjuring of Altamont and its fallout is as dark as songs get. At his best, and he was at his best more often than not, he and Garcia wrote songs that sound as old as time and shone as bright as a new dime. They stick in your head in the best way possible: you can’t forget them and you wouldn’t want to—they’ll see you through life.
Robert Hunter, the principal lyricist for the Grateful Dead died on Sept. 23, 2019 at the age of 78, in his own bed, surrounded by family, who have not released a cause of death. So, peaceful, but with a little unresolved mystery, exactly like a Hunter lyric in other words.
