‘Let there be songs to fill the air’

     
In my music tastes, I long ago left behind, but sometimes revisit, the sounds I enjoyed in my youth, and last night was one of those time-travel occasions. Robert Hunter, lyricist of the Grateful Dead, performed at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester. This is not the same as seeing the Dead, which I had on a dozen or more nights between 1983 and, maybe, 1991. Mr. Hunter is not dynamic; his performance: a man and his guitar. Never a powerful vocalist, his singing today is that of an elderly man who battled cancer and who wants to enjoy playing his music to audiences while he still can.

Robert Hunter at the Capitol Theatre
in Port Chester, New York last night.

It is unfortunate that his music and the entire Grateful Dead experience were made synonymous in most people’s minds with seedy hedonism: the rampant drug consumption, poor hygiene, and general annoyance of the locusts who followed the band around the country and even outside the country. (I make a distinction between genuine music-lovers who, however they made it possible, toured with the band in some culture of idealist escapism, and those who came along around the time that I did, but who were determined to become part of a world they didn’t understand. They were a “believing is seeing” kind of folk, born too late to be hippies and figuring they had to capture a lifestyle from an earlier time, to put it as gently as I can.)

Projection upon the theater walls last night.

Or maybe my grasp of that situation is lacking, but the point of this edition of The Magpie Mind is the spiritual content of Hunter’s music, something that doesn’t get a lot of attention. (I think it funny that the iconography of the Grateful Dead, which is dominated by enough skulls and roses to make a Rosicrucian’s head explode, seems never to spark any conversation in esoteric circles.) Let me cite this tiny article from the Summer 1994 issue of Gnosis magazine, the painfully missed quarterly periodical on spiritual and esoteric subjects, to lead into some samples of Hunter’s lyrics from the songs he performed last night. Excerpted:


Robert Hunter is primarily known as the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, but he has also recorded many albums of his own, and his songs have been recorded by the likes of Bob Dylan. While never quite identifying himself as an esotericist, Hunter has written a whole corpus of visionary verse to rival Coleridge, outlining way stations between death and rebirth (Terrapin Station), celebrating the breaking through of gnosis (St. Stephen, Scarlet Begonias), or warning the seeker of unrealistic expectations of the afterlife (One Thing to Try, Stella Blue). His lyrics, which he readily concedes as sometimes being the work of his muses, have weird ways of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies (Uncle John’s Band, Playing in the Band), and there’s no doubt that his songs have launched thousands of peak experiences, with our without chemical enhancement. His most famous work, Ripple, details the sweet electric shock of suddenly knowing that the Unnamable Presence is in the room:

If my words did glow

with the gold of sunshine

and my tunes were played

on the harp unstrung

would you hear my voice

come through the music

and hold it near

as it were your own?

Without preaching, without dogma, Hunter has provided the voice of the Spirit to a generation, many of whom could no longer find it in their received traditions. References to Christ are multidimensional:

What you gonna call that pretty baby?

You must call it one thing or another.

This one parted water

that one walked upon

Perhaps I’ll call this child

a Rose of Sharon.

While I’m at it, might as well explain the name Grateful Dead. From Funk & Wagnall’s New Practical Dictionary of the English Language, Britannica World Language Edition, Volume One, 1955. Click the image to enlarge.


Grateful Dead – The motif of a cycle of folk tales which begin with the hero’s coming upon a group of people ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts. He gives his last penny, either to pay the man’s debts or to give him a decent burial. Within a few hours he meets with a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task, gets him a fortune, saves his life, etc. The story ends with the companion’s disclosing himself as the man whose corpse the other had befriended.

But about the lyrics, just a few songs to consider:

Dire Wolf

In the timbers of Fennario

the wolves are running round

The winter was so hard and cold

froze ten feet neath the ground

Don’t murder me

I beg of you don't murder me

Please 
don’t murder me

I sat down to my supper

T’was a bottle of red whiskey

I said my prayers and went to bed

That’s the last they saw of me

Don’t murder me

I beg of you don’t murder me

Please
don't murder me

When I awoke, the Dire Wolf

Six hundred pounds of sin

Was grinnin at my window

All I said was “come on in”

Don’t murder me

I beg of you don’t murder me

Please
don’t murder me

The wolf came in, I got my cards

We sat down for a game

I cut my deck to the Queen of Spades

but the cards were all the same

Don’t murder me

I beg of you don’t murder me

Please
don’t murder me

In the backwash of Fennario

The black and bloody mire

The Dire Wolf collects his due

while the boys sing round the fire

Don’t murder me

I beg of you don’t murder me

Please
don’t murder me

Brokedown Palace

Fare you well my honey

Fare you well my only true one

All the birds that were singing

Have flown except you alone

Goin to leave this Brokedown Palace

On my hands and my knees I will roll roll roll

Make myself a bed by the waterside

In my time - in my time - I will roll roll roll

In a bed, in a bed

by the waterside I will lay my head

Listen to the river sing sweet songs

to rock my soul

River gonna take me

Sing me sweet and sleepy

Sing me sweet and sleepy

all the way back back home

It’s a far gone lullaby

sung many years ago

Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come

since I first left home

Goin home, goin home

by the waterside I will rest my bones

Listen to the river sing sweet songs

to rock my soul

Goin to plant a weeping willow

On the banks green edge it will grow grow grow

Sing a lullaby beside the water

Lovers come and go - the river roll roll roll

Fare you well, fare you well

I love you more than words can tell

Listen to the river sing sweet songs

to rock my soul

Ripple

If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine

And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung

Would you hear my voice come through the music?

Would you hold it near, as it were your own?

It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken

Perhaps they’re better left unsung

I don't know, don’t really care

Let there be songs to fill the air

Ripple in still water

When there is no pebble tossed

Nor wind to blow

Reach out your hand if your cup be empty

If your cup is full may it be again

Let it be known there is a fountain

That was not made by the hands of man

There is a road, no simple highway

Between the dawn and the dark of night

And if you go, no one may follow

That path is for your steps alone

Ripple in still water

When there is no pebble tossed

Nor wind to blow

You who choose to lead must follow

But if you fall, you fall alone

If you should stand, then who’s to guide you?

If I knew the way, I would take you home

All lyrics Copyright © Robert Hunter.