1 9 4 1 -2 0 1 9 Robert Hunter
Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart remembers the band’s longtime lyricist
Iremember the day my young son asked, “Who is Hunter?” Hunter was reclusive and anti-social. So many people wanted a piece of him, but he didn’t want publicity and didn’t want to be part of the machine. But I said to my son, “Look around you — he’s everywhere. He helped build this house you live in. He spun the greatest stories and songs and images that could ever be. He turned the Grateful Dead from a blues band into mythic status.”
In the beginning, Jerry [Garcia] called him and asked him to come up and write some words for us. Jerry couldn’t write words, nor did he try. But he and Hunter were the voice of each other. In the studio, I would sit off to the side while Jerry plunked around on a keyboard and Hunter would do his little dance. He got up on one foot and did a little jig, with one foot firmly on the ground and the other bouncing up and down. Once you saw him do that, you knew he was on to something.
If you listen to his words, you can hear our struggles. Hunter was turning those moments into prose and poetry. The night we were busted in New Orleans was an infamous night, and Hunter made it into a song, “Truckin’.” I had a water pump at my ranch that I had recorded and I said, “Here, write something to this.” He wrote “Playing in the Band,” which was basically: No one can tell us what to do or how to do it. When he wrote “Touch of Grey,” we were struggling, but it became an anthem to us. It perked us up.
Losing Hunter was quite a shock. Speaking for myself, a part of us died with Hunter. The payoff is when I see all those kids in front of me at Dead and Co. shows. They know all the lyrics. Hunter was very modest, but I would tell him about that and he would have that little smile and say something like, “I told you they were good.”