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.
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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.)
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| 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.
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