RC wine inspired Grateful Dead song
When I wrote last month about Filippi Winery in Rancho Cucamonga, which may transition to a new owner in the coming years as part of new development, I didn’t go into one of the winery’s claims to fame.
But along came reader/ Deadhead William Hill to plug that gap.
From 1946 to 1969, Filippi produced a cheap wine named Pride of Cucamonga, sold with a white screw cap. The locally sold wine somehow came to the attention of the Grateful Dead, who recorded a song titled “Pride of Cucamonga” in 1974.
“Oh oh, the pride of Cucamonga/Oh oh, silver apples in the sun/Oh oh, I had me some lovin’/ And I done some time,” goes one chorus of the somewhat elusive song, in which the narrator is hitchhiking from Oregon to Mexico to escape some sort of trouble.
Pride of Cucamonga was an ironic name for a low-end wine, but the song gave the product a splash of pop culture immortality and may have led the winery in later years to revive the name, this time for a better wine.
A giant reproduction of the Pride of Cucamonga label is part of a mural on the winery building at 12467 Base Line Road on the north-facing wall next to the sidewalk. Put on a tie-dyed shirt and go pose for a selfie. Also, a Dead cover band in the 909 is named Pride of Cucamonga.
I once asked Gino Filippi, then the winery’s vice president, about the wine’s legacy.
“Perhaps Pride of Cucamonga helped put Cucamonga on the map and helped the boys on the long road trips,” Filippi mused in 2005. “Keep on truckin’!”
Hill tells me that although he attended more than 100 Dead shows, which may have left him dead on his feet, he never heard the band play the song, despite requests. At least one Dead fan site says the song never was performed live.
This is where we get into some Dead lore that had never come to my attention. It involves member Phil Lesh, who wrote the music to “Pride of Cucamonga” to go along with poet Robert M. Petersen’s words.
“At shows it was often fun sport to yell out to the band ‘Let Phil sing’ and then in a later-year evolution ‘Make Phil sing.’ It was also on T-shirts and such,” Hill explains. That’s because bass player Lesh sang only a few songs,
“Box of Rain” among them and, you guessed it, “Pride of Cucamonga.”
“Within this subgroup of Let-Phil-Sing promoters,” Hill continues, “we would sometimes yell out