Robert Hunter (lyricist)
Robert C. Hunter (born
June 23,
1941) is an
American lyricist,
singer songwriter, and
poet, best known for his association with
Jerry Garcia and the
Grateful Dead.
He was born
Robert Burns in
San Luis Obispo, California. An early friend of Jerry Garcia, they played together in
bluegrass bands (such as the Tub Thumpers) in the early sixties, with Hunter on mandolin and upright bass. They hung out in coffee shops, read poetry, learned about the
Beat Movement, and were generally the hip teenagers of
Palo Alto.
Around 1962, Hunter was an early volunteer test subject (along with
Ken Kesey) for
psychedelic chemicals at
Stanford University's research covertly sponsored by the
CIA in their
MKULTRA program. [McNally 42] He was paid to take
LSD,
psilocybin, and
mescaline and report on his experiences, which were creatively formative for him: "Sit back picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall unto the sea of morning creep-very-softly mist...and then sort of cascade tinkley-bell like (must I take you by the hand, every so slowly type) and then conglomerate suddenly into a peal of silver vibrant uncomprehendingly, blood singingly, joyously resoundingbells....By my faith if this be insanity, then for the love of God permit me to remain insane." [McNally 42-43]
The first lyrics he wrote for the
Grateful Dead were composed on LSD, and mailed to the band from
Arizona: a suite that would later become "
China Cat Sunflower"/"
The Eleven" (these were originally performed together for a short time). After battling moderate
drug addiction, he abandoned his
Joycean/Western
vision quest and joined his old friend's band, the Grateful Dead, on the first weekend in September 1967, at the small
Rio Nido, California gigs. The association was at first informal, but began on an auspicious note, as that weekend he wrote the first verse of possibly his best known song, "
Dark Star". It is perhaps not a coincidence that some
Deadheads argue that the Rio Nido gigs were the first in which the band accessed the full power of their psychedelic improvisation style.
Hunter's relationship with the band grew, until he was officially a non-performing band member. The majority of the Grateful Dead's original songs are Hunter/Garcia collaborations, where Garcia specified the music, and Hunter wrote the lyrics. Garcia once described Hunter as "the band member who doesn't come out on stage with us." Hunter also collaborated as a lyricist with the other voices in the Dead,
Bob Weir,
Phil Lesh, and
Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, although over time Weir, the other principal songwriter besides Garcia, switched to using
John Perry Barlow as a lyricist.
Hunter called 1970's "
Friend of the Devil" the closest he and Garcia came to writing a classic song. Hunter's most-known line is
What a long, strange trip it's been, from that year's "
Truckin'". Perhaps the apex of Hunter's lyricism came with two suites written in the mid-1970s, "Help on the Way"/"Franklin's Tower" (1975) and "
Terrapin Station" (1977).
In 1974 Hunter released the solo album
Tales of the Great Rum Runners featuring himself as a singer songwriter. It was followed the next year by
Tiger Rose. Neither attracted a large audience. Another of his solo efforts, the extremely rare recording
Jack O' Roses, containing the extended version of "Terrapin Station Suite" (sans the non-Hunter "At A Siding") and a solo rendition of "Friend Of The Devil", is available for download direct from his own
http://www.dead.net/RobertHunterArchive/hunterarchive.html Robert Hunter Archive.
Hunter has usually been the man who approves or denies song use permissions from the Dead's song catalog; his most famous rejection, according to
Skeleton Key, was denying
Muzak the right to cut an easy-listening version of "Estimated Prophet", with the pithy third-person response, "Hunter says NO!"
*Tales Of The Great Rum Runners (1974)
*Tiger Rose (1975)
*Alligator Moon (recorded but unreleased - 1978)
*Jack O'Roses (1980)
*Promontory Rider: A Retrospective Collection (1982)
*Amagamalin Street (1984)
*Live '85 (1985)
*Flight Of The Marie Helena (1985)
*Rock Columbia (1986)
*Duino Elegies (1988)
*Liberty (1988)
*Box Of Rain (1990)
*Duino Elegies/The Sonnets To Orpheus (1993)
*Sentinel (1993)
*Hunter, Robert.
A Box of Rain. Penguin Books, 1993. ISBN 0140134514. The complete lyrics of Robert Hunter to date.
*McNally, Dennis.
A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. Broadway Books, 2002. ISBN 0-7679-1186-5.
*The Grateful Dead Family Discography (Located at http://www.deaddisc.com/GDFD_RHPerformer.htm).
