Tales of the Great Rum Runners 50

Summary

GOOD OL’ GRATEFUL DEADCAST — "Tales of the Great Rum Runners 50"

Date: June 13, 2024
Hosts: Rich Mahan & Jesse Jarnow
Guests/Contributors: Barry Melton, Nicholas Merriweather, Ted Claire, John Perry, and others

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Episode Overview

This special bonus episode marks the 50th anniversary deluxe reissue of Tales of the Great Rum Runners, Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter’s first solo album (originally released in 1974). The episode explores the album’s origins, Hunter’s journey as both a lyricist and burgeoning singer-songwriter, overlooked corners of Dead history, and the winding creative paths that led to this underappreciated record. With a blend of interviews, musical outtakes, and lots of storytelling, Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarnow illuminate Hunter’s creative voice and the evolution of Rum Runners from concept to cult favorite.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. Hunter’s Emergence as a Solo Artist

• Rum Runners was Robert Hunter’s assertion as a performer, transitioning from the Dead’s shadowy lyricist to an artist in his own right.
  • “It was a powerful but humble statement from a familiar but new voice.” (Jesse Jarnow, 04:40)
• The album became the first release on the Dead’s new label, Round Records, mixed by Jerry Garcia and financed by Hunter himself.

2. Hunter’s Life Before the Album

• Hunter’s early folk days: sang and played with Jerry Garcia in the early ‘60s Palo Alto folk scene.
  • "When he sang, he sometimes also yodeled." (Jesse Jarnow, 12:39)
• Psychedelic pioneer: volunteered for early LSD trials at Stanford in the ‘60s, an experience that deeply influenced his worldview and lyrical perspective.
  • "Here I was...finally realized the full truth about just what was going on and the powers of the mind. And I had to tell the world." (Robert Hunter, 13:28)

3. The Secret Bands and Early Recording Sessions

• Hunter adopted the pseudonym “Lefty Banks” while playing clandestinely with the Liberty Hill Aristocrats (later Roadhog) in San Francisco clubs.
  • “He was so used to being a solo performer where you can get away with that kind of stuff. But when there’s a band chugging behind you and you go off into outer space, everybody would look at each other...He’d rearrange songs in the middle of the song, which only a solo performer can really do.” (Ted Claire, 28:33)
• The earliest drafts of Rum Runners were recorded with various configurations, including American bluegrass players and a British band.

4. “Rum Runners” Recording Process: Chaos & Craft

• First sessions took place at Mickey Hart’s experimental Barn studio in Nevada—a casual, off-grid space that fostered creativity (and technical messiness).
  • “We were just playing and ended up somewhere that was great. And if it didn’t, that was great.” (Barry Melton, 34:07)
• $25,000 production budget (huge for the time) came out of Hunter’s own pocket.
• Tracks featured member-rotating bands, contributions from Dead alumni, and Hunter’s community of folk and roots musicians.
  • Donna Jean Godchaux, Keith Godchaux, Mickey Hart, and others contributed to various tracks.
  • “He wasn’t really a musician per se…he played great pipes, Scottish pipes. He played really well.” (Mickey Hart, 07:27 & Barry Melton on Hunter’s style, 38:48)

5. Songwriting, Lyrics, and the Rose Muse

• “Must Have Been the Roses” originated for this album, later entering the Grateful Dead’s live sets and becoming one of Hunter’s most beloved works.
  • “[It] came out. Out of the head of Zeus, full born, clad in armor.” (Hunter, 49:13)
  • Hunter reveals it was partly inspired by Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily.” (53:44)
• Hunter saw himself as channeling “muses”—forces that delivered vivid imagery like roses and barrooms.
  • “I had to put the roses in or [the muse] goes away for a while.” (Hunter, 49:38)
• Literary ambitions: also pursued pure poetry, not just lyrics; some of his unpublished poems and a roman-à-clef novel about the Palo Alto scene are discussed.

6. The British Detour & Lost Versions

• After initial US sessions, Hunter traveled to London, cutting another version of the album with British musicians (Over the Hill, featuring John Perry), even using Jerry Garcia’s famed “Live/Dead” Gibson SG guitar.
  • The guitar was later stolen, becoming the subject of Deadhead sleuthing. (74:33)
• Some tracks and versions never saw the light of day due to technical incompatibilities and tapes getting scrambled, leading Hunter to start over back in California.

7. Final Release and Reception

• Jerry Garcia mixed the final record, sorting through technical “monstrosities” to deliver a coherent album.
  • "Good luck. You used every misrecording technique known to man on that album." (Garcia to Hunter, 87:44)
• The album was criticized, even by Hunter himself, for being rough-hewn and noncommercial but gained a devoted following for its raw honesty and folk spirit.
• Rick Griffin designed the cover, cementing the record’s mythic visual atmosphere.

8. Legacy: Songs, Impact, and Influence

• Songs like “It Must Have Been the Roses,” “Boys in the Barroom,” and “Keys to the Rain” became staples for Hunter and entered the Dead’s orbit.
  • The Dead debuted “It Must Have Been the Roses” live months before the album’s release (90:42).
• The album is now recognized for its importance in the Dead’s solo orbit and for establishing Hunter as an essential American songwriter.
  • “It stands as perhaps the most interesting solo album to emerge from the Dead’s ambit.” (Rolling Stone review, 89:38)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Hunter's Stage Anxiety & Identity:
  “I want to be able to go into someplace and not have anybody know who I am. And I can dig it. He’s real paranoid about it for sure. He doesn’t want it in his life.” (Jerry Garcia, 06:00)

• On Songwriting vs. Lyricism:
  “I’m rather a stiff poet. I don’t get the flow going that I get going lyrically. I’ve got the knack for lyrical poetry, but the other stuff…” (Hunter, 15:32)

• Reflecting on "Must Have Been the Roses":
  “As to beauty, delicacy, and short-livedness, there is no better allegory for—dare I say it—life than roses.” (Hunter, 49:38)
  “That’s a ten minute thing. I sat down, got hit by a muse and put it on paper. Ask me what it means…I don’t. But it seems, still when I sing it, very solid.” (Hunter, 50:48)

• On Technical Messiness:
  “You used every misrecording technique known to man on that album. I know where it all is because I went through the hell of mixing it.” (Garcia, 87:44)

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Timestamps and Segment Guide

• 03:37 - Hunter's debut single, origins of Rum Runners
• 06:16–07:27 - Hunter’s low-key press presence and ambivalence about fame
• 12:04–14:32 - Folk era, LSD experiments, and early creative worldview
• 21:07–30:05 - The Liberty Hill Aristocrats, "Lefty Banks," and Roadhog era
• 31:14–35:01 - Sessions at Mickey Hart’s Barn, recording logistics, and All-Star contributors
• 39:38–44:01 - Early drafts, communal songwriting, and the evolution of album tracks
• 48:27–56:41 - Creation, meaning, and literary influences driving "Must Have Been the Roses"
• 64:23–73:03 - Hunter's London sojourn and the British recording sessions
• 80:35–83:08 - Final recording phase and the Dead's community musicians shaping the album
• 86:51–88:18 - Album mixing, Garcia’s involvement, and Hunter’s self-critique
• 89:25–93:45 - "Roses" legacy, being covered by Garcia, Dead, and Elvis Costello
• 94:33–96:33 - The album’s closing place in Hunter’s solo sets and the Dead’s world

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Listener Takeaways

• Tales of the Great Rum Runners was more than just a solo debut; it was Hunter’s deeply personal shift from the Dead’s backstage poet to an artist forging his own mythos.
• The record’s rough edges, far-flung recording sessions, and circuitous genesis make it a rich tapestry within the Grateful Dead’s extended universe.
• Iconic songs like “It Must Have Been the Roses” blossom from literary strangeness and spiritual openness and would outgrow Hunter’s original intention—embodying the yin-yang of individual vision and collective legacy.
• The new deluxe reissue finally brings lost versions and outtakes into the light, offering a much fuller view of Hunter’s creative ambition in this pivotal moment.

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For links to referenced interviews, rare tracks, and bonus materials, as well as ongoing listener engagement, visit dead.net/deadcast.

Transcript

[Rich Mahan]

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[Barry Melton]

Foreign.

[Rich Mahan]

The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to Season nine of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. In this special bonus edition of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast, we take a 1974 side trip to explore Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter's first solo album, Tales of the Great Rum Runners. And Rhino has just released the deluxe edition of Hunter's Tales of the Great Rum Runners. It's remastered and expanded with unreleased music in celebration of its 50th anniversary, and there are an additional 16 tracks on the bonus discs that contain alternate versions of six songs that made the album, plus 10 gems that did not. Tales of the Great Rum Runners Deluxe Edition is available as both a 2Lp set and a 2 CD set. More info and orders are happening now [e-mail] and while you're there, remember to check out the 50th anniversary edition of the Deads from the Mars Hotel, also on sale. Now head over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1 8. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platforms so you can listen how and where you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing sharing us with your friends on social media, hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Thank you very much. We have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast-index and check them out. And friends, were you at any of the Wall of sound shows in 74? If so, we have a mission for you. Leave us your recorded [e-mail] and tell us your experiences hearing the Wall of Sound we want to hear from you and we do use them in the Dead cast when we get something that fits Record your Wall of Sound tour [e-mail] Robert Hunter was as important of a member of the Grateful Dead as any of the other folks in the band. His lyrics have become a part of so many of our lives that we find ourselves quoting them almost daily. Tales of the Great Rum runners, released in 1974, was Robert's first solo record. And the story behind it is just as fascinating as the beautiful songs it contains. Here's your friend and mine, Jesse Jarno.

[Jesse Jarno]

In the spring of 1974, members of the Deadheads mailing list received a promotional 7 inch record in the mail.

[Robert Hunter]

Turn on the bright lights what a fool I have been.

[Jesse Jarno]

On the first side was what we just heard from the then forthcoming Jerry Garcia solo album. Garcia hadn't put out an album outside the Dead in like a whole five months. But on the other side of the sampler was a voice that almost certainly would have been new to anybody listening.

[Robert Hunter]

Hammer and ripsaw the waves Keep horizon Step up Tell us the name of your poison I took a step forward and it fell out of my hat at the sign in the window saying take what you lack I went to inquire just about how much pain was needed to purchase the keys to the ring. I mean who you think is gonna believe it when you tell em you got the keys?

[Jesse Jarno]

Robert Hunter's solo debut, Tales of the Great Rum runners, issued in June 1974 was RX101, the first release in the catalog of Round Records, the independent label co owned by Jerry Garcia and Ron Rakow, financed by Hunter himself and mixed by Garcia. It was a powerful but humble statement from a familiar but new voice.

[Robert Hunter]

Annie laid her head down in the roses. She had ribbons, ribbons, ribbons in her long brow. I don't know, it must have been the roses. All I know I could not leave her there.

[Jesse Jarno]

Four years earlier, after the best selling Working Man's Dead, Hunter had gone on salary as the Grateful Dead's full time on call lyricist, writing mainly with Garcia, but also occasionally with Phil Lesh, Bobby Weir, Mickey Hart and even Pig Pen. But except for a few brief flashes, Hunter mostly stayed in the shadows. Here's Jerry Garcia talking to Ben Fongtoris on Khe San in 1975.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

You've seen the rest of us blunder. You guys make those mistakes.

[Robert Hunter]

Not me, man.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I want to be able to go into someplace and not have anybody know who I am. And I can dig it. He's real paranoid about it for sure. He doesn't want it in his life. Working Man's Dead by the grateful dead.

[Robert Hunter]

Steal one.

[Jesse Jarno]

There was Hunter doing an advertisement in 1970 when he did a little bit of press around Working Man's Dead, where he was depicted but not identified on the front cover. Besides that one image, Dead fans largely had no idea what Robert Hunter looked like. That didn't change when Tales of the Great Rumrunners came out in June 1974. He wouldn't consent to press photos. Even still, the lyricist embraced a role he would play for the rest of his life, a singer songwriter.

[Robert Hunter]

You set my soul on fire, you set me on my moan broke down car but the wheel still rolled down Dry, dry, dusty road.

[Jesse Jarno]

On the occasion of Robert Hunter's 80th birthday in 2021, we did an episode called Keys to the Rain, giving a broad overview of his work outside the Grateful Dead. And we might repeat a point or two we've linked to [e-mail] deadcast Musically, Hunter's outside body of work began with Tales of the Great Rum Runners. He had plenty of help from the inside, though. Mickey Hart was credited as co producer. We made the Hunter records.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I was producer of Tales of the Great Rum Runners with the first one. Hunter had just a charming musical sensibility. He wasn't really a musician per se. Like he wasn't like a great player. I mean, he played great pipes, Scottish pipes. He played really well.

[Robert Hunter]

When a child is being born, cut the cord entire.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

No, but he made do. It was just a wonderful time.

[Barry Melton]

I just loved Hunter's versions of songs.

[Jesse Jarno]

Here's Hunter discussing Tales of the Great rum runners on WLIR in 1978.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I love the songs on them on this record. It's a lyrics of sound. There's some of them that come off pretty well.

[Robert Hunter]

I like Rum Runners Slinking down, down, down upon the sand, upon the sea on the hills in liquid green Their eyes could fall, they rise again, their dreams a tattered sail in the wood.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Must have been the Roses Art which remains just about the favorite thing I've written.

[Robert Hunter]

I don't know. It must have been the roses. The roses are the ribbons in her long brown hair. I don't know. It must have been the roses all in those. I could not leave her there.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

This has got some fine tunes on it. It's a pity that it's so rough and ready, although a lot of people like that quality about it. It's got. Certainly doesn't have any pretension on it, because we weren't capable of pretension.

[Jesse Jarno]

Count me among those severely charmed by the rough edges I've got my own origin story with Tales of the Great Rum Runners. It's not quite teenage David Lemieux getting his copy of Mars Hotel stuck in a tape deck, but when I was a budding teenage music head in junior high school, one of my dad's friends passed along some LPs, including television's Marquis Moon, the Sex Pistol's Nevermind the Bullocks, a new rider's bootleg from 73 with the dead sitting in, and Robert Hunter's Tales of the Great Rum Runners. Thanks, Howie. That was a hell of a drop. Rum Runners was warm and homespun in a way that felt adjacent to American Beauty in Working Man's Dead, which were both pretty new to me then, too, but with its own scrappy energy and quiet moments all its own. And all my own too, kinda. It felt like an obscurity within the dead universe I was just discovering. Reconnecting with it now, it feels like an unintentional counterpoint to the much slicker sounds of from the Mars Hotel and Wake of the Flood. It's a thrill to get to explore it.

[Robert Hunter]

That train don't run here anymore, not like it used to run before, when it brought landing to the city.

[Jesse Jarno]

When.

[Robert Hunter]

It brought stranger floods.

[Jesse Jarno]

Tales of the Great Rum Runners is pretty much how you'd probably expect a singer songwriter album recorded in Marin county in 1974 to sound. But as you might suspect from the fact the reissue features a scrapped first draft of the album, the road to Rum Runners was anything but direct.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I went over to Mickey's and said, could I have a couple of days in the studio? I'd like to. And about four or five months later, I emerged with this monstrosity.

[Jesse Jarno]

Before Hunter arrived at the final version, there would be two full drafts of the album, one with an American bluegrass band, another with a British rock group. But here's what's remarkable to me about Tales of the Great Rum Runners. Despite Robert Hunter's folk roots and what he did with his subsequent career, it wasn't a given that he ended up becoming what's easily compartmentalized as a singer songwriter. He did have some pretty folky roots. That was Robert Hunter singing oh Mary don't yout Weep with Jerry Garcia in 1961, a performance now on the before the Dead box set. A majority of the songs from that performance come from the repertoire of Pete Seeger, a key influence on both Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia. Here's how Hunter described it to Monty Deem in 1979.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

First time I saw him, I Helped get him to the University of Connecticut. I was president of the Folk music club there. That was very thrilling. I was really into Pete Seeger at that time. I was in 59. I guess he had a cold that night and a great red nose. It was such a thrill. I mean, he was it for me. Pete Seeger wild.

[Jesse Jarno]

If there's a single vocalist that Robert Hunter sounded like, it was Pete Seeger.

[Robert Hunter]

Oh, Mary, don't you weep don't you moan oh, Mary, don't you weep don't you moan Pharaoh's army got drownded oh.

[Jesse Jarno]

Mary, don't you weep There aren't a lot of tapes of Hunter singing during his days in the Palo Alto folk scene. But when he sang, he sometimes also yodeled. This is also on the before the Dead box set.

[Robert Hunter]

Welcome.

[Jesse Jarno]

That was Hunter singing Mule Skinner Blues with Jerry Garcia and David Nelson in the wildwood boys in 1963. But even in the folk era, Hunter began to cultivate his reputation for wise inscrutability.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I heard from Heath Moon that they were doing tests with LSD and mescaline and whatnot at Stanford. And he had the phone number. And I called up and volunteered. And they paid me $140 for the four tests, which lasted one a week over a period of a month. I tried to escape the first time that, like, I have never had better acid than they gave me or better mescaline or better psilocybin. Boy, they have the stu. Here I was, this stuff came on for the first time on this earth, you know, of all men. Finally realized the full truth about just what was going on and the powers of the mind. And I had to tell the world.

[Jesse Jarno]

I mean, how are you gonna keep them down on the farm once they've realized the power is in the mind?

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I opened my door and I looked around, you know, and I started sneaking down the hall. And this nurse saw me and tried to steer me back into the room. And, boy, was she scared, you know, because she thought I was a frothing loony. I was only an enlightened man. And I saw how upset she was. And I went back in because I didn't want to upset her anymore.

[Jesse Jarno]

Though Robert Hunter didn't succeed at escaping from the VA Hospital during his first trip. He would, in fact, get to tell the world of the power of the mind in many forms over the years.

[Robert Hunter]

You and I, while we can.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

3. I brought typewriter along for these. Not having such things as cassette machines in those days. And I wrote down what was happening while it was happening on my first trips. I got those stashed away somewhere.

[Jesse Jarno]

You can read some of Hunter's early trip reports in Dennis McNally's A Long, Strange Trip. A few years later, on May Day, 1965, when Jerry Garcia and Hunter's other friends dosed for the first time, it was Hunter they visited when things seemed awry. Hunter played in the bluegrass bands, but he was predominantly a writer.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I used to write short stories years ago. I even wrote a couple novels. They weren't very good. I'm not really a very good poet. I sit down and write poetry once in a while for myself, and there's none of it I would want to let out. I'm rather a stiff poet. I don't get the flow going that I get going lyrically. I've got the knack for lyrical poetry, but the other stuff, I'm just too. I'm a hard poet to read. I just pack things.

[Jesse Jarno]

One of those novels is set to be published for the first time in the fall by Hachette. Titled the Silver Snarling, it was a romanoklef about the early Palo Alto folk scene that is a memoir of sorts, with names changed. We've posted a [e-mail] deadcast and can't wait to read it. Only a few months after returning from New Mexico to join up as the Dead's lyricist, Hunter made his only appearance on a Dead record, very quietly, during the outro to the Dark Star single. We've posted a link to the [e-mail] Deadcast Hunter did occasional press but didn't perform. Though he was the Dead's lyricist, he never totally put away his guitar. It was part of his collaborative process with Jerry Garcia, even if they didn't exactly play together.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

When we lived together over in Larkspur, the way we'd write a song is I'd sit upstairs banging away at my three chords for days and days working something out. And by the time I had it worked out, you know, through the thin walls, he'd heard everything I was doing. And I'd come down and hand him this sheet of paper and say, oh, that's interesting. And he'd play the full arrangement of it right away because he'd heard what I was doing and heard where it was going off. And I never took any great care to compose very well because I knew that he was going to handle that.

[Jesse Jarno]

Between the end of his original performing career in 1964 or so and the release of Tales of the Great Rum Runners a decade later, Robert Hunter's public creative activity outside his lyrics was fleeting. In 1969, in the hyperlocal journal the Oracle of Larkspur, he published a metaphysical prose poem with the enticing title Starship Grateful An Instruction Manual. We've posted a link in the usual place. And in 1971, when the Grateful Dead did a series of radio broadcasts, this uncredited track appeared on at least one of them.

[Robert Hunter]

Roger, we tried to warn you. You should not pull that Negro. You're out now. Out in time, boy. You may never be here again.

[Jesse Jarno]

With those odd starting points, the road to tales of the great Rum Runners began probably in mid-1972. Please welcome back to the Deadcast, founder of the Grateful Dead Studies association, Nicholas Merriweather Europe.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

72 was this powerful experience for Hunter. Enormously powerful. And right after that, he starts picking up the guitar and wanting to play in public again. All of it kind of plays out with the sense of, who is Robert Hunter? The writer. The guy who knew that he was a writer before the Dead got started. The guy who knew he was a writer, you know, with a capital W, before he became a lyricist. And he's trying to figure out how to integrate all of these different ambitions and Personas into something that is not going to be distorted and taken away from him or become a distraction and a burden, the way that he's already seeing that play out with his friends.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter co authored Ultra cryptic emissions from St. Dilbert alongside Alan Trist and Jerry Garcia, but also began publishing his own poetry for the first time in the Dead heads newsletters in October 1972.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

His poems for Deadheads. Just those eight poems from 1972 to 1973 in the dead Heads newsletter, if those are in fact his first published poems, then what we're seeing is, even though he is resolutely being private, even though he's sure that he doesn't like the impact that he sees fame as taking on his friends and his artistic peers and collaborators, he's also thinking about how best to nurture and develop his own writing. He doesn't publicly take credit for those poems in Deadheads, and yet he does. He appends that little glyph, that very distinctive glyph that's his.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter found his own way. Maybe unsurprisingly, the path to Tales of the Great Rum Runners runs through the Palo Alto folk scene of the early 60s, but in ways that I certainly wouldn't have guessed. Sometime in late 1972, probably a loose San Francisco bluegrass group called the Liberty Hill Aristocrats welcomed a new member to their lineup, a guitarist who called himself Lefty Banks on and off for the next few years, Fans might have stumbled onto Robert Hunter playing secretly in the vicinity of the Haight Ashbury. Not that they probably knew what he looked or sounded like. Please welcome back Ted Claire, who would play on a few songs on Rum Runners, but was part of Hunter's career in a way that's gone almost entirely unexamined.

[Ted Claire]

Peter Albon and his brother Rodney, they had a band called the Liberty Hill Aristocrats, which played a lot of kind of New Law City Rambler stuff and old timey country music. This would have been 63, 64. This is about the time I had a radio show on Stanford Radio kzsu. It was country music and bluegrass show. And I used to do recordings at the Tangent, which was a coffee house where Garcia played with Sarah there and Pigpen played there and all of that. And I used to record those things and then play them on the radio.

[Robert Hunter]

Keep on trucking, mama trucking My blue wing Keep on trucking mama trucking now.

[Barry Melton]

Till the break okay, well, you can.

[Robert Hunter]

Do what you do and you can't.

[Barry Melton]

Say what you say tonight.

[Jesse Jarno]

That was a recording Ted made of Pigpen in 1964. You can hear more of that and Ted's story in our Adventures of Pig Pen episodes from a few years back.

[Ted Claire]

I got drafted because I quit grad school because I couldn't stand it. So I was in the army for a couple of years and I knew Peter Albon and Rodney. They were good friends of mine before this. I came back on leave a couple of times and hung out with him. Rodney was running the house where Janice was living over at 1090 page in the Haight Ashbury. Peter got involved in Big Brother and he became the bass player for Big Brother.

[Robert Hunter]

I'm a caterpillar I'm a caterpillar Crawling for your love Crawling for your love Crawling for your love for your love.

[Ted Claire]

He was the guitar player with Rodney and the Aristocrats. And Rodney played fiddle and sometimes banjo, sometimes guitar. I came back and Peter was well ensconced as the bass player was Big Brother. So I took his place as the guitar player in the Liberty Hill Aristocrats. And we played for, I don't know, two or three years, mostly in clubs and restaurants and stuff like that around San Francisco, sometimes a little bit farther away. And then we started to branch out from our old timey bluegrassy folk music kind of iteration. We started to play electric music and sort of elided into a country rock A composite of kind of bluegrass, Cajun music and country rock. And Rodney then shifted to bass. Our banjo player, a guy named Jeff d', Ambro, was a really talented guitar player and he was a super banjo player. He kind of followed in the footsteps of Garcia, who started out being a banjo player and wound up being a rock and roll guitar player. And he was probably the best unknown guitarist in the whole Kate Ashbery scene.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Dead emigrated from the Haight to Marin by mid-1968, but the music scene continued onward there. In our Garcia 73 episode, we talked about how he ended up practicing in the basement of Merle Saunders family place in the Haight. Robert Hunter found his way back to the Haight too.

[Ted Claire]

Rodney. He owned the music store on Hit street for number of years. Haight Street Music. He played too, obviously. He was in the Aristocrats, but his day job was to run a music store. It was a little hole in the wall music store. He also made instruments, he made guitars. He made one of the first electric fiddles for David LaFlame.

[Jesse Jarno]

I remember the Liberty Hill Aristocrats could be a loose band, especially as they morphed into an electric combo.

[Ted Claire]

Often we had two women singing Kathy later on she was called Veda Vaughn. She was from North Carolina. And then there was Shelly Ralston, who was another singer. She kind of flitted in and out of our gigs.

[Jesse Jarno]

The timelines are hard to totally align, but I think it was sometime in mid to late 1972 that the Liberty Hill Aristocrats added a new guitarist to their lineup, introduced to the crowds as Lefty Banks.

[Ted Claire]

He had that pseudonym, Lefty Banks. He used that quite often at various times he didn't use his name because that was when, I think when we were just putting an actual act together, he was just being anonymous.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ted's memory of this period is a bit longer than I think is possible. Robert Hunter was on the road with the Dead through much of 1971 and traveled with them on the Europe 72 tour, after which he began to stay home more frequently. I think it was probably in early fall 72 that he approached the Liberty Hill Aristocrats about joining their weekly gig at the Holy City Zoo in San Francisco's Inner Richmond.

[Ted Claire]

Hunter decided he wanted to have a band behind him and he and Rodney Albin were really good friends. And so we started playing with him. We went up to China Camp to his place and rehearsed any of the songs that he wrote. He had to teach us one of the first songs he did when we played Together was a song called Roadhog. And it was a loud, kind of flat out rock and roll, which I sang, actually.

[Robert Hunter]

I'm a straight a driver I'm a neon mark Gotta make a fire I'm a roadhog I got hood made I'm a half hour late Gotta make a date with a dead dog I'm a roadhog Road hog Gonna tell you something when my thyroid's puffing well my heart gets jumping like a bullfrog Just pulled out of a driving movie I'm wound up tight and I'm feeling groovy Rock.

[Barry Melton]

Car and cruise the strip Drink a.

[Robert Hunter]

Few beers have a good old trip I'm a roadhog yeah I'm a roadhog.

[Jesse Jarno]

Roadhog became the band theme song. At a certain point, they took it on as their band name.

[Ted Claire]

Liberty Hill Aristocrats elided into Road Hog.

[Jesse Jarno]

I don't think that happened officially until sometime in 75, but memories are blurry. They worked up a number of songs for Hunter to sing with the band.

[Robert Hunter]

Put down a bloody bottle, you know a second son See the water rats will you know you better run up Pick your lucky number Divide it how you may don't hang on no tighter Cause you're only in the way Ooh, reeling a reeling and a.

[Ted Claire]

Hunter was very difficult to play with. You had to be really on your toes with him. He's really a poet, not a musician. He's like Dylan. He's a poet first and a musician quite a bit behind that.

[Jesse Jarno]

It could be a reason he preferred to perform as Lefty Banks until he got his stage legs back.

[Ted Claire]

He'd drop measures, he'd go to the bridge at funny places. He was so used to being a solo performer where you can get away with that kind of stuff. But when there's a band chugging behind you and you go off into outer space, everybody would look at each other and in a measure or two, we'd pick it up and go with it. I don't know how obvious as it was to people, but it was sure obvious to us. He'd rearrange the songs in the middle of the song, which only a solo performer can really do.

[Jesse Jarno]

The gist of it is that while the Grateful Dead were growing into one of the most popular bands in the country, Robert Hunter had a secret performing career in San Francisco in late 1972, usually in the vicinity of the Haight. And he did so without anybody in the Dead apparently coming to see him. The kinds of rooms that the Liberty Hill Aristocrats played were small Enough to see everybody in them.

[Ted Claire]

I would have remembered. I mean, I knew Garcia. I knew him from Palo Alto.

[Jesse Jarno]

It's an almost wholly forgotten endeavor, and there don't seem to be any surviving live tapes of the band in action in this era, though I'd love to hear some. It was probably sometime in the early part of 1973 that Robert Hunter began to record what became Tales of the Great Rum Runners. To repeat what Hunter said before from his 1978 WLIR interview.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I had been working with Roadhog. I went over to Mickey's and said, can I have a couple of days in the studio? I'd like to play on an album real quick. And about four or five months later, I emerged with this monstrosity.

[Jesse Jarno]

It was a little messier than that. Even a lot messier, if we're being honest. And also a much more interesting story.

[Robert Hunter]

I can bring you mountain water I can tell you all the spinning news Got no feeling about it Never dream about it Gone for broken that's all she wrote.

[Jesse Jarno]

When the album came out, Hunter told the Oakland Tribune that the Grateful Dead as a whole was more important than any one of our solo careers. He said, when I'm writing for me, I'm speaking for me. And when I write for the Dead, I must take a more universal stance. It must, within limits, of course, speak for all of us, the community and the equipment guys, too. When I give someone else the word I to sing, it has a different meaning than when I give it to sing to myself.

[Ted Claire]

The only studio stuff we did was we went in and we recorded the Rum Runners album. That was done at Mickey Hart's studio up in Marin.

[Jesse Jarno]

Mickey Hart had moved on to state owned land in Nevada in 1969, and within a few years began building a studio in the barn, anchored around an Ampex MM1016 track he procured in the tangled course of making his own solo debut, 1972's Rol Thunder, released in September of that year. It was probably a few months after that that the Liberty Hill Aristocrats traveled to Nevada for their sessions.

[Ted Claire]

There were a lot of people that were hanging out, you know, people coming.

[Barry Melton]

In and out and all of that.

[Ted Claire]

It was a pretty busy place. The one thing I do remember about Mickey Hurt Studio was Taj Mahal was there in the control room hanging out, and I remember shaking his hand, and my hand was completely lost in his. He had the biggest hand that I ever saw in my life. That's something that really sticks out in my mind from that period.

[Jesse Jarno]

Along with Mickey Hart, the credited co producer of Tales of the Great Rum Runners is Barry Melton, also known as the Fish, as in Country Joe and the Fish. I wrote liner notes for the new Rum Runners reissue and interviewed Barry for it, which turned out to also be useful for today. Please welcome to the Dead cast, the great Barry Melton.

[Barry Melton]

This was recorded at Mickey's place in Nevada. And I could be wrong, but I think I met Hunter around that time. I was going through a divorce. I had a place to live in San Rafael, but I was spending a lot of time at Mickey's house. I engineered sometimes, Mickey engineered sometimes, and Healy was out there from time to time. But Healy didn't really bother himself much with a recording. He was more of a mix down kind of finished product. And a guy had one or two other people who were out there and did the recording.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Barn was as much an experiment in progress as it was a studio. It was a casual place to record without hourly rates. Home to sessions for a number of classic unreleased albums by Mickey and others.

[Barry Melton]

There was a 16 track there. For a long time. We had transducers of some kind plugged into the 16 track so that we could actually record directly to the machine without equalization or any of that. And it was cleaner that way.

[Jesse Jarno]

Direct to the 16 track was in fact the Grateful Dead live recording method. As Bob Matthews described to us about making both live dead and Europe 72.

[Barry Melton]

Oh, it's fairly sizable room, or was a sizable room. The Barn was divided. It had a studio on one side and on the other side was the mixing stuff, the control room. And then in back of the control room was a sort of kitchen area and bedroom and stuff like that. So it was fairly sizable.

[Jesse Jarno]

It was a pretty off grid project all around.

[Barry Melton]

I don't think we did any of our recording out there with commercial plans for them. I mean, we were just playing and ended up somewhere that was great. And if it didn't, that was great. That makes sense. It doesn't, but you know, we do know.

[Jesse Jarno]

And while there weren't specific commercial plans for the project, Hunter didn't enter into it casually either. In a crawdaddy piece in 1974, he estimated that he had made $50,000 in 1973 and spent about half of it making Rum Runners and paying the musicians. A $25,000 recording budget in 1973 is about $117,000 today, paid out of Hunter's pocket. He was committed to making an album, but it was at the Barn and documentation around Tales of The Great Rum Runners is a bit scarce, both session dates and the players who are credited in blurred form on the final lp, so we have to infer a fair bit.

[Robert Hunter]

I have found no pleasure, she said, but want no.

[Jesse Jarno]

That was Elijah, one of 10 songs on the bonus disc to Tales of the Great Rum Runners that didn't make the cut for the final sequence, and one of a few that are almost certainly the Liberty Hill Aristocrats, characterized by Rodney Albin's fiddle.

[Ted Claire]

It was our show repertoire. Basically.

[Jesse Jarno]

There's a version of the old fiddle tune Buck Dancer's Choice. Not sure which aristocrat is singing lead.

[Robert Hunter]

Call my rope and carve my pine say farewell to the hitching line Comes the time to lay me down First I'm gonna sing this song Play Buck dancers shout and sing make the halls and rafters ring when old George Buckcast dance gone who lives and sing this song?

[Jesse Jarno]

You may know Buck Dancer's Choice from a reference in a certain set of Robert Hunter lyrics.

[Robert Hunter]

It's a Buck Dancer's choice. My friends better take my advice, you know all the rules by now and.

[Jesse Jarno]

The buyer from the ice I'm pretty sure the version of Buck Dancer's Choice on the bonus disc to the New Rum Runners is a traditional fiddle tune with new lyrics by Robert Hunter. I haven't been able to find anything else to match them. If that's right, it puts it in a category, along with Direwolf and Casey Jones and Stagger Lee and a few other pieces. Adding to the folk tradition. The Greenbrier Song also fits into the folk tradition. It's one of a number of tunes with biblical references, but it's also, in part, probably an answer song to the Carter family.

[Robert Hunter]

Twas in the year of 92 in the merry month of June I left my mother and a home so dear.

[Barry Melton]

For the girl I loved on the.

[Robert Hunter]

Green bar she was.

[Jesse Jarno]

Later, in 1973, the Liberty Hill Aristocrats made their only studio recording on an educational LP put out by a subdivision of the Standard Oil Company of California for reasons Shirley left Best unimagined. We've heard some excerpts already. It was also through this LP that the Robert Hunter song, then called New Greenbrier Shore, got its first official release, sung by Rodney Albin. Maybe.

[Robert Hunter]

Walking in the mountain singing rock the vases Walking in the mountain where I belong Walking in the mountain singing glory glory now carillon back where it belongs I'm on my way I'm on my way to the green thrash oh, to the green thrash shore and I Don't expect and I don't expect I.

[Jesse Jarno]

Have to work no more. Some of these outtakes have circulated for a few years, and Briny Deep has long been my personal keeper among them, with, I think, Cathy Vaughn and Shelly Ralston drifting in and out of the mix and a guitar part that sounds almost Garcia like, but I'm pretty sure is probably Barry Melton. It sounds like a tale a rum runner might tell.

[Robert Hunter]

Cross the briny deep where the angels.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Weep.

[Robert Hunter]

Shed their smiles and flecked on waves.

[Jesse Jarno]

Barry echoes what Ted Claire told us about Hunter as a performer.

[Barry Melton]

He didn't think of himself as a performing entity, and quite frankly, his playing was fairly rough in those days. Undisciplined, perhaps. The rest of us needed absolute definite beat and melody and so forth, and Hunter was more flexible about those things. He was like a lot of folk singers, particularly solo folk singers, would bend the music to suit themselves. So if a phrase was 13 bars long or 14 bars long or 15 bars long, and it changed from time to time, it wasn't as crucial when you're playing by yourself.

[Jesse Jarno]

The original conception of the album apparently included showcases for all the band members. I think Boats feature Shelly Ralston on vocals.

[Robert Hunter]

It's not so much a question of not knowing what the answer is. I knew that much at least before I came. I just wondered what it might be like to live the life my mind contrived, knowing that the chance would not remain.

[Jesse Jarno]

Southern Fried Shuffle apparently went through a few iterations.

[Ted Claire]

Southern Fried Shuffle, that's an instrumental. Jeffrey wrote that too, but it gained vocals somewhere.

[Robert Hunter]

Southern Fried Shuffle Baby and me used to go downtown Spend all evening in a cabaret Check home, catch up then fly away again Stinging singing Sha da da da da da da.

[Jesse Jarno]

I think it's sung by Maureen Islet, the British spoon lady who never actually rehearsed with the band in Ted's memory, but just showed up and played.

[Robert Hunter]

I can bring you mountain water I can tell you all the city news Got no feeling about it Never dream about it Gone for broken that's all she wrote.

[Jesse Jarno]

Guessing this is Robert Hunter taking a rare trumpet break. Reelin in a pitchin seems to be the proto Roadhog electric lineup with both Shelly Ralston and Cathy Vaughn. Not sure who's on piano during these sessions, Hunter wrote a pair of new songs as he remembered a Steve Silberman in 1992.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I didn't have a song that seemed to properly kick in and get Run Runners going, so I wrote this short little chorale piece.

[Robert Hunter]

Lady Simplicity Bright like a ribbon Bow everything everywhere just for the show. Believe it implicitly. Love is tranquility. If you don't know that, then nothing is known.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

And I didn't have a piece that I felt ended the record satisfactorily, so I did Boys in the Barron Does.

[Robert Hunter]

God look down on the boys in the bar room? Mainly forsaken but surely not judged Jacks, kings and aces Their faces in wine Do Lord deliver our kind these were.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Written to begin and end an album, because the other pieces, none of them wanted to end the record. None of them wanted to start it. They all wanted to be in the middle.

[Robert Hunter]

So we're hanging on to each other for dear life.

[Jesse Jarno]

Something like that. In practice. The Boys in the Barroom let off side a of the 1973 draft of the album and let off side B on the final one. It was perhaps the purest version of Hunter as a bard, the kind of poet that might stand on a table and deliver his work both sung and orated at the same time. The early mix of the song included 20 seconds of acoustic guitar in the middle that was later removed, but I like how it highlights the totally acapella gang vocal outro.

[Robert Hunter]

Jack string fiddle to my song Tooth Bow who loves loneliness Loves it alone I love the dim lights like some love they do Only thing I wonder sometimes is Does God look down on the boys in the bar room?

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter almost always used boys in the ballroom to close his live performances, which is where I think he might have been getting a little confused. Lady Simplicity would open the final version of the album, but was midway through side two on the early draft.

[Ted Claire]

As far as I know, the only song that survived that session that we did was Boys in the Bar Room, which was an acapella tune. One of my favorite songs, something that many, many times Does God look down.

[Robert Hunter]

On the boys in the bar room? Mainly forsaken but surely not Jacks, kings and aces Their faces in wine Do Lord deliver our kind.

[Jesse Jarno]

Besides Boys in the Barroom, I'm pretty sure Ted and the Liberty Hill Aristocrats are there in the chorus for Lady Simplicity as well as playing on the title track along with Maureen the Spoon lady.

[Robert Hunter]

Down upon the sand upon the sea on the hills in liquid green they rise to fall they rise again Their dreams are tied and sail in the wind Their dreams tide and sails in the wind.

[Ted Claire]

We weren't nearly as professional as, you know, the Grateful Dead. We weren't musicians of that caliber at all, and they talked him into redoing the whole album with different backup stuff.

[Jesse Jarno]

And that's only sort of true, too. While Hunter did scrap a number of tracks with the Liberty Hill Aristocrats lineup, the newly discovered early draft of Tales of the Great Rum Runners reveals that the scope of the album was more expansive all along. Children's Lament was a few years old. Robert Hunter wrote it in Barcelona at the same time as Tennessee Jed, probably in 1970 or 1971. He told David Ganz about it in an interview that tinned Conversations with the Dead.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I wrote a good deal there.

[Robert Hunter]

I wrote that.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Won't you sing, Melinda? Won't you sing for me?

[Jesse Jarno]

Like that.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Looking down into the street in Barcelona While the rain was falling and it was just really lovely. Good experience.

[Jesse Jarno]

Children's Lament is a solo recording of sorts, though required some experimentation. It's the only recorded example of Robert Hunter playing bagpipes.

[Robert Hunter]

When a child is being born. Cut the cord and tie enough.

[Jesse Jarno]

There is Melton.

[Barry Melton]

Recording bagpipes is difficult because they're not really in the Western, well tempered modality of tuning. You know, they're in their own zone, which I suppose could sound flatter sharp if you were being strictly Western in your approach. We had to tweak it a bit. We had to use the BSO a lot. The variable speed operation, I guess, or whatever you call it.

[Jesse Jarno]

Variable speed oscillation.

[Barry Melton]

I had to have my hand on the joystick or whatever for the vso.

[Jesse Jarno]

So you recorded it, then adjusted the speed of the tape to match Hunter's vocal.

[Barry Melton]

It was actually in the recording phase, in purest terms. Mickey didn't have, at least in those days, a real mixing facility out there. Much of it is recorded hot to the machine, but he did get mixing equipment in there. Later he bought a board.

[Robert Hunter]

Of the Rain.

[Jesse Jarno]

Two of the album's All Star cuts were recorded during the early 1973 sessions, including what Robert Hunter called his favorite of his own compositions.

[Robert Hunter]

Annie laid her head down in the rose she had ribbons, ribbons, ribbons in her long brown hair I don't know it must have been the Roses All I know I could not leave her.

[Jesse Jarno]

There It Must have been the Roses is the answer to a trivia question along with Easy Wind, one of only two songs the Grateful Dead performed in which Robert Hunter was credited for music as well as words. But it's more than trivia, arguably the centerpiece of Tales of the Great rum runners. In 1992, Steve Silberman asked Hunter about writing Standing on the Moon. And like so much else, it turned back towards Roses.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Like Must have Been the Roses, where I Just suddenly the whole picture just came to me and I just grabbed a piece of paper and got it down and that was it. No changes, no nothing. Just came out. Out of the head of Zeus, full born, clad in armor.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter believed in the muse, or more accurately, he believed in the muses, plural. This is from David Ganz's November 1977 interview.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

This one spirit that's laying roses on me. Roses, roses. Can't get enough of these bloody roses like that. If I didn't do one out. But it gives me a lot of other good lines too. But if I don't put the roses in, it goes away for a while. It's the most prominent image, as far as I'm concerned, in the human brain of anybody who knows about a rose. As to. As to beauty, delicacy and short livedness. There is no better allegory for, dare I say it, life than roses. But it never fails when you put a rose somewhere to do what it's supposed to do, if it belongs there at all. And there are certain jewels that will do that. Set a jewel here and there in the space, like a diamond here, like a ruby here. I like a rose here, like the Lord here. So stud these things with the certain kinds of buildings, certain kinds of vehicles and kinds of gyms and things like that. These things are all real. The word evokes the thing. And that's what we're working with is evocation.

[Jesse Jarno]

One day the rose muse came to Visit sometime in 1971, around the time Robert Hunter moved to China Camp and.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Wrote My muses are all very sweet, most of, well, except for the wharf rat muses and stuff like that, which showed us. Mostly they just sort of hang around my shoulder and crown my head with laurels and drop roses on my typewriter, whatever like that. Just make it a very, very pleasant place to be, a place to linger. And you think whatever thoughts that you think in those places you put down on paper. But that doesn't always occur and isn't always the case in the tune. Like a song. It must have been the roses. Yeah, that's a ten minute thing. I sat down, got hit by a muse and put it on the paper, asked me what it means. I could explain it to you in detail, but as know what it means. I don't. But it seems still when I sing it, very solid and I get the full impact from it, whatever it was telling me. A lot of your muses will hark back, they'll get ancient on you, they'll move back to 1800s or 1700s, like that. And all your imagery in that piece will be derived from that period. There's a song I wrote for a friend of mine, Butch Waller of High Country, a great bluegrass band, West Coast. They never got around to doing it. I finally recorded it myself. First record.

[Jesse Jarno]

Butch Waller was another of the old school Palo Alto scene, one of the people who tried LSD for the first time alongside Jerry Garcia in May 1965. His band High country had released their newest album in early 1972.

[Robert Hunter]

Dreams, dreams, dreams of unity Tears, tears, tears are so sincere Love, love that I can't hide these dreams are breaking down all my pride.

[Jesse Jarno]

But High country didn't get around to doing it, perhaps because they didn't make another album for another half dozen years. But Hunter held tight to the song.

[Robert Hunter]

I don't know, It Must have been the Roses the roses are the ribbons in her long brown hair I don't know, it must have been the roses all the nose I could not.

[Jesse Jarno]

I love the ambiguity introduced by the maybe it was the roses when the line repeats, though, the variation has caused confusion for generations of musicians and fans singing along. It might sound like a love song, but it's got a dark, weird undercurrent. It's kind of goth, actually. Here's Hunter speaking with Steve Silberman in 1992. Thanks so much to Steve for sharing the audio.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Must have Been the Roses, which, by the way, was slightly inspired by A Rose for Miss Emily by Faulkner, in other words, which gives it an entirely different idea than people actually have. I don't know if I should even.

[Jesse Jarno]

Say William Faulkner's Southern Gothic short story. Arose for Emily was published in 1930, about the love that dare not speak its name. Nope, not that one.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

Nicholas Merriweather, A Rose for Emily. It's basically a story of a woman who falls in love with a bad guy and he betrays her. And this is in small town, 19th century Mississippi, and that's a disgrace. You know, they sleep together and instead of marrying her, she's disgraced and she's scarred by that forever. And what she does is she poisons him and puts him in the upstairs room. And then the incredibly poignant image at the end of the short story when she dies and Homer Barron is her suitor whom she kills, they find a single strand of her hair next to him. So it means that even after she killed him, she went up there and lay with him. And it's incredibly moving.

[Robert Hunter]

Ten years the waves rolled the ships home from the sea A thinking well how it may blow in all good company if I tell another what your own lips told to me May I leath the roses and my eyes no longer see.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

There are a whole bunch of lyric touches that Hunter really skillfully uses that really do evoke the kind of Gothic sorrow and tragedy that is the achievement of Faulkner's short story. Incredibly poignant phrase. One pane of glass in the window.

[Robert Hunter]

One pane of glass in the window. No one is complaining though Come in and shut the door Is the crimson from the ribbons that you wore and it's strange how no one comes round anymore.

[Jesse Jarno]

I can't find a recording of the show, but one fan remembers Hunter introducing it as a song about necrophilia in the South.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

That's a very Hunter jokey boy, folky kind of way of lightning. The just enormous power of what's going on. I mean, I think Faulkner would have howled with laughter if someone had tried to explain it that way. I don't think it diminishes the achievement or the ambition of it at all.

[Robert Hunter]

Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter told Blair Jackson that A Rose for Emily was a morbid little story. There's more than that, but there's a touch of the deep emotionality of A Rose for Emily in It Must have Been the Roses.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

Hunter may be either just not interested in discussing the nuts and bolts of his technique. He may not remember exactly how inspiration struck, but it's significant that he loves the song, and it's one of the few songs that he consistently pointed to as being something that he was proud of and that he liked. But I think part of that is he had that artistic, literary sense of achievement, which was, wow, I really managed to translate, to transmogrify, to transmute one artistic achievement. Because A Rose Family is one of Faulkner's most widely hailed short stories into my own successful work of art. And that's no mean feat for the.

[Jesse Jarno]

Studio version of It Must have Been the Roses, Hunter recruited a group of musicians with a little more nuance than the Liberty Hill Aristocrats. On banjo was Rick Shubb, with his wife Markie on mandolin.

[Robert Hunter]

Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose.

[Jesse Jarno]

Rick was, in fact the person who procured the LSD on May Day, 1965, when Jerry Garcia, David Nelson, Butch Waller and others tripped for the first time. Rick Shubb was the visual artist behind Humbeed's revised map of the World, the wonderful poster that mapped the psychedelic folk Republic of 1967-1968, which I wrote about extensively in my book heads. And in 1974, not long after he recorded his banjo part for Rum Runners, Rick Shub invented the shub guitar capo. If you own a guitar capo, there's a decent chance it's a shub on pedal steel. Unknown from the New Riders of the Purple Sage was Buddy Cage.

[Robert Hunter]

Annie laid her head down in the roses she had ribbons, ribbons, ribbons in her long brown hair I don't know, maybe it was was the roses.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

All.

[Robert Hunter]

I know was I could not leave.

[Jesse Jarno]

Her there and on high harmony, Donna Jean God show. I love the way her voice transitions into Buddy Cage's pedal steel under Hunter.

[Robert Hunter]

Singing One pane of glass in the window no one is complaining though bin and shut the door it is the crimson from the ribbons that you wore and it's strange how no one comes.

[Jesse Jarno]

Round anymore Though Jerry Garcia mixed the album, he's only credited with performing on two songs, only one of them recorded during the original sessions. The album closing Keys to the Rain, and it's so restrained by Garcia's standards that I kind of wonder if it's really him.

[Robert Hunter]

Sweet Mary was walking her dog in the fire Singing some tune called My Hope and Desire her tears were like needles that hung on a chain she didn't ask nothing except more of the same her blue eye was scarlet her blind eye was fame she wore a tattoo that read Lock up the rain But I mean who do you think is gonna believe it when you tell em you got the keys to the ring?

[Jesse Jarno]

Here's Hunter describing it to Monty Deem in 1977.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

They're not often about anyone in particular, but rather groups of things, you know, like keys to the Rain or something like that. I might take half a dozen people, incidents, bummers in a ship of fools, something like that. Take a whole bunch of things and just put it all into one crashing bummer of a song.

[Robert Hunter]

Well the Justin the cripple both push up the flowers and nothing remains but the song of the hours But I hope you can dig it I know that you will but please don't run high when I come with my bill before you get trying this new song for size it's so quick to fall yes and so slow to rise and who do you think you'll get to believe ya when you tell them you got the keys to the rain.

[Ted Claire]

I.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Still enjoy doing Keys to the Rain. I don't feel that way about things anymore.

[Jesse Jarno]

Garcia's absence on Rum Runners, I think has to do both, with Hunter wanting to find some independence, but also the fact that Garcia was pretty busy in the spring of 1973. In addition to touring with the Grateful Dead and writing a new batch of songs for what would become Wake of the Flood, he was also in the process of establishing Olden in the Way, gigging constantly with Merle Saunders and taking an active hand in Grateful Dead records. Still, nice to hear him jamming along with Maureen the Spoon Lady. Keys to the Rain was placed in the album closing slot in April 1973, when tales of the Great Rum Runners was mixed, sequenced and finished. Or so Robert Hunter thought. He'd financed the whole album himself, with no commitment from any label. Why would he need one? He was a member of one of the most popular bands in the country. Surely someone would want to release it. The Dead's newsletter announced that he'd just recorded his own album with the band Liberty, but that was a typo. Ted Claire.

[Ted Claire]

No, no, we never used that as a real name.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Dead were then establishing Grateful Dead records, but Round Records was still only a gleam in Ron Rackow and Jerry Garcia's eyes. Hunter tried to interest Jerry Wexler and Atlantic Records, who had just purchased international distribution rights to the Dead's label. Perhaps coincidentally. I respect Jerry Wexler a lot, Hunter told hot wax in 1979. He did a number with Rum Runners, but he just didn't want to handle it. He wrote me a critique sheet on it. You know, all the things that he thought were bad about it and all the things that he thought were good about it. So I sat down and redid it with the sheet in front of me. And even then it wasn't a direct route.

[Barry Melton]

The point is never quite.

[Jesse Jarno]

That was the Grateful Dead minus Jerry Garcia, led by Robert Hunter, recorded in November 1973 at the Record Plant in Sausalito, a session you can hear in its entirety. In our Tuesday Night Jam episode from last season, Hunter was still casting for a musical identity. It was a tape intended to be played before a Dead show, which it was at least once, on November 10th of that year at Winterland. And it was shortly after that, Weeks maybe, that Robert Hunter moved to London, where this happened.

[Robert Hunter]

Not a chill to the winner, but a dip to the air from the other direction.

[Jesse Jarno]

A few episodes ago, we quoted Robert Hunter saying that Scarlet Begonias was about how he met his future wife, Maureen. But he may have been speaking somewhat figuratively. We track this hopefully non intrusive detail of Robert Hunter's personal life, because in this episode it opens up into a story about yet another lost version of Tales of the Great Rum Runners. Please welcome to the Grateful Dead, cast from the pioneering British punk band the Only Ones. Guitarist John Perry.

[Barry Melton]

I saw all those nights at the Lyceum and they were the best Dead shows I ever saw. They were great. I loved the Live Dead shows from wherever they recorded the Live Dead album. From then Then through to the 72 shows is probably my favorite era of the band and the London lyceum gigs. In 72, Pig Pen was still alive. And they were a good band. I mean, they really. They were really on.

[Jesse Jarno]

Within 18 months or so, Hunter had relocated to London.

[Barry Melton]

Sometime after the band set up their own label. I think Bob started to find the mechanics of group politics tiresome. And it may have been that the move to England was a move away from too much politics. I was living in Bristol and age about 20. I managed to get a farmhouse in the country just outside Bristol. Little village called Pensford, where of all people, Acer Bilk, Stranger on the Shore came from originally. Lovely little town or village. Lovely little village. River running through it, a railway viaduct just locked into this house. And I lived there with Maureen. She'd met Alan Trist in London sometime at the end of the 60s and Trist had said, oh, you must come over to California, you must see it. So she'd gone over there. Maureen had been out in California in 69 or 70 and knew Hunter and various people in the Dead scene. So once we had the house set up, we were living there and I was running my band from the house. We just had regular guests. Hunter and Christie came and stayed for a few weeks and gradually lots of other people dropped and McIntyre dropped in. More names than I can pull out of the hat now.

[Jesse Jarno]

John's band was mining a fairly Dead influenced vein of American ish rock. A contrast to the harder British post Floyd psychedelia exemplified by Hawkwind.

[Barry Melton]

Went under a variety of names. It's simplest at this point to call it over the Hill rather than try and get into the minutia. 50 years ago it was over the Hill, which was a guy called Pete Rowe, who'd also been living out in Marin county at the end of the 60s. And then a bass and drums that I'd grown up with around Bristol. You and all you are sure of.

[Robert Hunter]

Is there's still a long way to.

[Barry Melton]

Go.

[Robert Hunter]

So far from home Just a dream in your eyes but each step that you take Brings you closer than.

[Barry Melton]

You been before.

[Robert Hunter]

Must be another milestone.

[Barry Melton]

Andrew Lauder at United Artists had expressed some interest in the band. And we needed to put down some of the original material. So we recorded four songs at another friend's farmhouse. Keith Christmas had a farmhouse about 20 miles away with a basic studio. So we recorded the demos there a couple of days and when that was finished it just degenerated into a party and Hunter was there. So Hunter was joining in the chorus and everybody had a love.

[Robert Hunter]

Why do fools dismember rats?

[Jesse Jarno]

Rat Bite Fever, which we just heard, and Milestones, which we heard before, can both be found on Rat Bite Fever, a compilation of perhaps dubious origins, containing demos and live tracks by over the Hill. With Tales of the great Rum Runner still unfinished, Hunter decided to try a session with a new group of musicians.

[Barry Melton]

The actual formal sessions with Hunter, which happened at Mayfair Studios in London, would have been 1974. I think we had this second farmhouse, the Keith Christmas place. We had a couple of rehearsals down there, picked out the songs that we were going to do, which I think were probably for Jack of roses, lasted about 20 minutes.

[Robert Hunter]

What makes you your sweet breast heave, my dear? Your bright eyes fill with tears the jackaroses leave you here they seven lonely years Perhaps.

[Jesse Jarno]

Obviously that was not the version of Jacka Roses recorded with over the hill, but the 1980 version from Hunter's solo album Jacka Roses, by which point he'd sewed it into the expanding Terrapin Station suite. In a rare interview when Rum Runners eventually came out, Hunter described a 30 verse version of the song and mentioned possibly releasing it to the Dead Head's mailing list. Perhaps someday it'll resurface.

[Robert Hunter]

Jackaros is with a fan. East of Edentern Build his castles in the sun and all the bridges burn.

[Jesse Jarno]

Jacka Roses would have taken up an entire album side.

[Barry Melton]

There were probably three other short songs. I think a song called Woodshed was another. It gets hard because, you know, we messed around with some songs. I don't remember exactly which ones we did at Mayfair Studios.

[Jesse Jarno]

Woodshed is an otherwise unknown Hunter song. One was almost certainly that train destined for Rum Runners, with a different lineup of musicians included as a live bonus track on their 1990 CD. The sessions also had another presence from the Grateful Deads world, the red Gibson SG that Jerry Garcia played on Live Dead.

[Barry Melton]

I always think of it as the Live Dead sg, you know, the one with the stars and stripes deckle. And it was the first guitar that Alembic had started tweaking and it was a lovely sg. It played beautifully. But Garcia always, always kind of played guitars for a couple of years and then just changed. So he'd given it to Hunter, but.

[Jesse Jarno]

It wasn't Hunter, who played it on the Mayfair sessions.

[Barry Melton]

And Hunter had a Martin that he liked and was more of an acoustic guitarist than an electric guitarist. So Hunter gave it to me. It was certainly played on the on the Mayfair sessions on the 20 minute Jack of Roses.

[Jesse Jarno]

Two years after recording with Hunter, John Perry became the lead guitarist in the Only Ones, one of the great British bands and probably too far reaching to really call punk. You might know their song Another Girl.

[Robert Hunter]

Another planet I can't face your threats and stand up straight and tall and shout about it I think I'm on another world with you with you I'm on another planet with you with you.

[Jesse Jarno]

Or if you're a Yola Tango fan, you might know their cover of the Whole of the Law, which is how I discovered the Only Ones. Though John Perry's playing an SG on the back cover of their first album. It's not Garcia's I had a Ford.

[Barry Melton]

That I didn't know apparently was the number one easiest car to steal in Great Britain. And I'd been a session all day and went up to a club called Dingwalls in the evening and just parked the car outside the club with that guitar in the boot and came out from the club and the car had gone. So there it went. I mean, you know, guitars come and go. I doubt there's a guitarist anywhere who hasn't had an instrument stolen at some point.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ding Walls was and is the British equivalent of cbgb, creating the very British sentence of having one's guitar stolen from a boot outside Dingwall's. Which is to say the Live Dead SG may have ended up in a British pawn shop somewhere. We'll mention a few details of the guitar in case anybody wants a mission. By the time John Perry got it, both the layered American flag stickers were gone, though you could see the remains of where they'd been scraped off, as well as where the Bigsby pickup used to be. Also gone was the strip of upside down Dymo text in white letters on red sticky tape along the top of the pick guards that read Blackjack Garcia. Baddest fuckin picker in the world. As Gary Lambert recently clarified. Thanks Gar. John was never able to get the serial number. We've got some leads out. Check the episode page dead.netdeadcast for updates. What makes the SG distinct is the brass nut, probably made by Alembics Rick Turner, as well as the modded pickups and other parts of the guts.

[Robert Hunter]

That's it. That's the Lord. That's the whole of The Lord.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter was still looking for his voice, but he was getting closer. After writing the poems for Deadheads in 1972 and 1973, he was starting to take himself seriously as a poet for the first time, which he discussed with Steve Silberman in 1992.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I looked up to poets. I thought they were doing something that I couldn't do. I had tried to write some poetry, and there was an editor at Iron Methuen in England who was interested in having me write some poetry. So I wrote a book of poetry up. And she presented it to the readers without telling them who wrote it, many of whom, she said, were fans of my lurk.

[Barry Melton]

They rejected it.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

They said it was all too stiff. And indeed it was. I was living in England at the time and really had some idea of poetry that harkened back about a century, which a person will do with no training whatsoever.

[Jesse Jarno]

Nick Merriweather.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

This unpublished book of poetry is really, really interesting.

[Jesse Jarno]

Nick is pretty sure that the sequence of pages got misfiled with the Ice 9 papers in the Grateful Dead archives at UC Santa Cruz.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

The sequence that we have in the file of Hunter's poems that actually reads like a chapbook. It opens with the old fashioned Victorian epistolary address to the reader saying, hey, please buy this. It includes what became Boys in the Bar Room. It's an interesting book. And even though Hunter is deprecating about it in his 1992 interview with Steve Silberman, truth be told, he's far from juvenile. It's like his poems for Deadheads. People who know Hunter's mature poetry are going to recognize all of the touchstones, from language to phraseology to imagery to allusions. It's all there, and it's better than he gives it credit for. I mean, Hunter was a ruthless critic of his own work. And I think often to a point where as readers, we've got to look at it and say, you know, that was just the mood he was in at the time. And I don't know that he would have said that if you had caught him on a better day later on.

[Jesse Jarno]

But it was also a road not taken.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

Hunter took criticism incredibly hard.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter wouldn't return to poetry in a public way for nearly a decade. It was a time of roads not taken. Though Hunter's music remained with over the Hill, who kept at least one song in their repertoire. After all, who wouldn't want a song from Robert Hunter?

[Robert Hunter]

That train don't run here anymore.

[Jesse Jarno]

The Hunters stayed friendly with John Perry over the years. In a story we can only wink at right now. Touch of Gray was actually written in his place. Though the two never shared a stage, the last time they hung out was not long before Hunter's death in late 2019.

[Barry Melton]

The two of us had a play at his house, probably the last play he had with anyone before he died. So it was very close to his death. But never, never on a stage. We played half a dozen songs. I remember we played one of the songs off the first solo, Garcia Deal. We played Deal.

[Jesse Jarno]

I hope the version of Rum Runners with Over the Hill turns up again.

[Barry Melton]

It was great to have a play with Hunter, and they were fun sessions, but I had no idea what the eventual outcome would be. One story I heard was that when he got the tapes back to California, the eight tracks were lined up differently from Californian studios. And that he was unable to use them as the basis for tracks and therefore started again with his own band. But it's just as possible that he had a better band in California.

[Jesse Jarno]

Back in the United States. At Mickey's barn, sometime in early 1974, a different lineup recorded that Train.

[Robert Hunter]

That train don't run here anymore.

[Jesse Jarno]

Not.

[Robert Hunter]

Like it used to run before when it brought land into the city when it brought stranger from the shore Life doesn't run here anymore that train don't.

[Barry Melton]

Run here had to throw away a.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Lot of the early tracks I made with Roadhog because they just weren't solid. And I had. Freiburg came in and worked a lot on that album. And Barry Martin helped me out a lot. And Mickey drummed on it.

[Jesse Jarno]

On piano for that Train was Keith God Show. Singing was Donna Jean. Mickey Hart was on drums. Taking notes was our friend Steve Brown, which is perhaps why those songs ended up with slightly more detailed credits on the final release. Hey, Steve.

[Rich Mahan]

The first Robert Hunter round record one they did, yeah, yeah, Rum Runners.

[Jesse Jarno]

That was the first time I got.

[Ted Claire]

To work in the barn with Mickey and such. And there he was with his big.

[Jesse Jarno]

Ampex machine out of Hollywood, I guess it came from.

[Ted Claire]

And he had the sign on it, you know, try to record more than you erase.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

It was that same game again, where.

[Jesse Jarno]

I had to coordinate the production that was hiring the guys that come in.

[Ted Claire]

And play bass and stuff.

[Jesse Jarno]

And people that were part of the.

[Rich Mahan]

Musicianship for that album.

[Ted Claire]

And also taking notes again. And the pay role, keeping track of the pay and.

[Nicholas Merriweather]

And the tape that we needed.

[Jesse Jarno]

They cleaned up a few songs, Adding drums to keys to the rain.

[Robert Hunter]

Hammer and rip Saw the ways Keep horizon step up Tell us the name of.

[Jesse Jarno]

Your poison Some of the second round of sessions featured more complex lineups anchored around the rhythm section of David Freiberg and Mickey Hart. Freiberg wrote the music for I heard you singing, I heard the people all.

[Robert Hunter]

Singing like they'd never sung before all over the country.

[Jesse Jarno]

Three of the songs featured an expanded lineup that might require all kinds of extra air traffic control on Steve Brown's part. There's no way to account for every single player right now, but there's a host of wild connections. Guitarist Ray Scott was a teenage jamming pal of Keith God show and would end up in the Keith and Donna band. Randall Smith was the founder of Mesa Boogie Amps, which would be in the Dead's Post Wall of Sound stage gear. Trumpet player Milt Farrow was Mickey Hart's stepfather.

[Robert Hunter]

Arizona Lightning cut out like a thunder his voice rang clear across the usa.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter wrote Arizona Lightning while staying in Lake Havasu, Arizona. He said that it's mostly an anti Nixon Watergate song, but that one line was a reference to Teddy Kennedy getting buddy buddy with racist Governor George Wallace, which places the writing around July 1973.

[Robert Hunter]

Alabama master one step forward, two steps back that.

[Jesse Jarno]

Alex Allen points out a line that sure seems like an early draft of Touch of Grey. One song featured guitarist Robbie Stokes, a former member of Devil's Kitchen who played all over Mickey Hart's Rolling Thunder album. We spoke with him a while back. Robbie passed away last year and I just wanted to get his voice into this episode. I was on a track on a Robert Hunter album called Tales of the Great Rum Runners, and the track was.

[Barry Melton]

Called Mad M A D Mad.

[Jesse Jarno]

Mickey Hart is credited for the music on Mad, and there are a few alternate versions on some of his unreleased sessions from this era. There was also perhaps the album's most beautiful song.

[Robert Hunter]

All of my fancy, all of my dreams come true Just to.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Be here with you for the last.

[Robert Hunter]

Dream Hey.

[Jesse Jarno]

I adore maybe she's a Bluebird When Pigpen died in early 1973, around the time Hunter was recording the first draft of Rum Runners, a tape in Pig's apartment included a song labeled Bluebird. The tape has never circulated, but I wonder if Hunter possibly wrote the song for the ailing Pigpen.

[Robert Hunter]

All of my life starts to make sense now. I think I see what it means.

[Barry Melton]

Barry Melton There's a song on there, I think, called Bluebird, and Bob's voice had a different quality depending on whether he's tired or awake or sleep or whatever. And Bluebird was recorded, and I know I recorded the vocal on that. But he was tired and his voice had a really sort of earthy from the heart quality. And I remember recording that.

[Robert Hunter]

Maybe you're blooper. You will never fly away not fly away no, not fly away maybe you're a blooper. Will never.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter was finally almost done.

[Rich Mahan]

Steve Brown, he was very serious about making it happen. Good for him. He was very conscientious about everything he did.

[Jesse Jarno]

From Round Records, Ron Rackow, you know.

[Ted Claire]

What it was like to have a.

[Barry Melton]

Partner like Jerry Garcia. Robert Hunter gave me a record, Tales.

[Ted Claire]

Of the Great Rum Runners.

[Barry Melton]

I think that was the one. And Gary said, buddy, what do we got going on? I said, we got a Hunter album. He said, I haven't even heard it. So I play it. I have a good sound system in my office. I play it.

[Robert Hunter]

Lady simplicity, right? Like a ribbon bow Everything everywhere Just for the show. Lead it implicitly. Love is tranquility. If you don't know that, then nothing is known.

[Barry Melton]

He listened to it in my office.

[Ted Claire]

While he was not yet done listening to it.

[Barry Melton]

And he said, book me two nights of studio time. I'll have to remix the album. It's not right. He never talked to Hunter about it or never talked to anybody about it.

[Jesse Jarno]

Hunter could be a harsh self critic.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

He mixed Rum Runners for me. He said it was just a real monster. I made such a mess of my tracks that he got in there and did the best he could with him, put it together for me.

[Jesse Jarno]

In later years like this 1978 interview on WLIR, Hunter could be especially critical of his own contributions to Rum Runners.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

My singing art is a little sort of pathetic. I haven't sung in about 10 years, like in front of people.

[Jesse Jarno]

A decade after that, Hunter told Blair Jackson that he was still hoping to remix the album. Garcia told him, good luck. You used every misrecording technique known to man on that album. I know where it all is because I went through the hell of mixing.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

It with Rum Runners. I don't think I really could have sold that album if I didn't have my own record coming because it doesn't meet professional standards for recordings. It's quite dirty in some respects.

[Jesse Jarno]

The album received a gorgeous cover from Rick Griffin, a rum running pirate. A sail on a turbulent emerald sea. On one hand, you shouldn't judge an album by its cover. On the other hand, maybe you should. Tales of the Great Rumrunners is a different kind of pre modern world than the one occupied by Hunter's Grateful Dead lyrics. It was new territory. He did some press, but would only do interviews through the mail. When the Oakland Tribune put him on the COVID of their Sunday magazine, there was no photo but a hand drawn self portrait. The headline called him Rock's Howard Hughes, after the infamous recluse, and Hunter's lack of advertised live appearances under his own name didn't do much to help his own cause, and he was living in England by then anyway. The album was about its songs, and they opened a new chapter in Hunter's career. Though the Liberty Hill Aristocrats got mostly cut from the album, they took on a new name thanks to hunter, and by 1976 Hunter would take to the stage under his own name for the first time, with Roadhog at his back. Hunter himself would be back in Mickey Hart's studio before the end of 1974.

[Robert Hunter]

Tiger Rose Jelly roll it honey while I sing your song on the bank where the children play Ring Leo come on and show this song I don't.

[Jesse Jarno]

Know but Tiger Rose is a story for another day Tales of the Great Rum Runners was not quite a million seller. It got a sweet review in Rolling Stone. Rather than trying to recreate the past like Robbie Robertson, a rye cooter, Hunter asserts primal myths with a semi religious intensity. The themes of his strongest work, those of physical and psychic survival in extreme circumstances. Stephen Holden wrote, while Tales is not nearly so impressive as Working Man's Dead or American Beauty, it stands as perhaps the most interesting solo album to emerge from the Dead's ambit. But musicians were ready for Rum Runners, performing songs from it before it was even out for Deadheads. Tales of the Great Rum Runners was responsible for introducing it must have been the Roses to the world. The world in this case, including Jerry Garcia, who heard it for the first time, probably when he was mixing. Before the album could even be released in June 74, Garcia had pulled it into the Grateful Dead's repertoire, debuting it in February. This is the version from Dave's Picks thirteen.

[Robert Hunter]

Deep and Roses. She had ribbons, ribbons, ribbons in her long brown hair. I don't know, maybe it was the roses. All I know.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Must have brother Roses I had thought of as my signature to old Jarrah decided he wanted to do it and I was not too happy about it because I had recorded it already because I knew what a monster he is, that that song would no longer be identified with me once he did it. So I almost think it is a dead tune that I do now.

[Jesse Jarno]

In the wonderful joint interview with Blair Jackson, Garcia called Hunter's Melody perfect. And Hunter pointed out, actually you stuck A minor chord in there, which makes it ever so much more powerful. Here's Hunter's version.

[Robert Hunter]

Must have been the roses. The roses are the ribbons and her long brown hair I don't know. It must have been the roses all in those. I could not leave her there.

[Jesse Jarno]

And here's Garcia's setting. The F sharp minor was there already, actually, but Garcia's new tempo really highlights it. Just after the ambiguity of. Maybe it was the roses.

[Robert Hunter]

I don't know. Must have been the roses the roses are the rivers in a brown.

[Barry Melton]

I don't know.

[Robert Hunter]

Maybe it was the grocery.

[Jesse Jarno]

Though the Dead never officially put it on a studio album of their own, it appeared on a pair of LPs in 1976, the Live Dead album Steal youl Face and Jerry Garcia's solo album Reflections, where he was backed by the Dead. Here he is introducing it on Ksan in 1976. Robert Hunter wrote this tune. It was on his first record, which.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

Was not exactly top 40 smash or anything like that, but it's a great song. I just. I love the song.

[Barry Melton]

Sam.

[Jesse Jarno]

It became a staple in Dead sets, included on the acoustic Reckoning album, and played pretty consistently through the mid-80s, appearing at least once or twice a year through 1995. One fan of the song from the album's original release was Elvis Costello, who paired it with another 1974 song.

[Robert Hunter (Interviewee)]

I gave Ship of Falls to the dedicated album. I learned to play that one. And it must have been the Roses, which I felt were related somehow, maybe harmonically. They are related, of course. Must have been the Rose's first appearance was on Hunter's record, with him singing. And I held that song in my heart for many years.

[Robert Hunter]

Thinking where it may blow all good company if I tell another what your own lips told to me May I lay beneath the roses and my eyes no love is.

[Jesse Jarno]

That version where Elvis goes into roses is from the stolen Roses compilation assembled by David Ganz.

[Robert Hunter]

I don't know. Maybe it was the roses, the roses or the rivers in a long brown hair I don't know. Maybe it was the roses. All I know is I could not leave her there.

[Jesse Jarno]

Robert Hunter retained it as his signature song, Garcia be damned. Tales of the Great Rum Runners was about finding his own voice. It stayed in his repertoire through all phases of his solo career, along with Keys to the Rain, Dry Dusty Road, and especially Boys in the Barroom, which close nearly every Hunter live performance, and which, of course, will also do.

[Robert Hunter]

I love the dim lights like some love the dew Only thing I wonder sometimes is Does God look down on the boys in the bar room Mainly for sake of, but surely not judged Jacks, kings and aces, Their faces in wine do, Lord, deliver our kind.

[Rich Mahan]

Thanks very much for tuning in to this special bonus episode of the good old Grateful Dead cast Friends. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode Mickey Hart, Barry Melton, John Perry, Ted Clear, Ron Rakow, Steve Brown, Robbie Stokes and Nicholas Merriweather. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Gans for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. We'd also like to thank Steve Silberman this time around, who also contributed from his archive. Thanks, fellas. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mayhem Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All rights reserved.