Hunter later said, “I was so impressed by the songwriting of Robbie Robertson. I had to go all the way to Terrapin, via a probably post-Elizabethan folk song, to avoid the traffic!”īut one contemporary group did strike him – the Band. It was more a matter of trying to resist rather than succumbing to those influences that sent my lyric writing for the Grateful Dead careening into as many forsaken and out of the way spaces as it did. “There were certain songs more or less universally present on the radios and jukeboxes. Hunter didn’t even have his own record player (or, presumably, collection), so the music that came to him was filtered by his environment: “whatever was on KSAN and whatever guitarists, pedal steelers, and country Jerry was playing.
I was sleepin’ on floors and stuff and he took me in.”
It was a nice place to be, and Hunter was kind of floatin’ at the time.” Garcia: “We had a nice big house that we could afford to live in together, but probably couldn’t have afforded separately at that point. Hunter wrote, “We were living on Madrone because tunes had been emerging and it seemed sensible to help the process along and incidentally feed me since I had no income source at all.” As Blair Jackson describes it, the house “sat on an acre of land, had a creek running behind it, tall trees surrounding it, and morning light that came through the branches in great golden shafts.” Dire Wolf’s reference to “the timbers of Fennario” was not so far-removed from their actual situation: the house was in a redwood grove. In 1969 Hunter was living with Garcia in a house on Madrone Canyon Road in Larkspur. As Aoxomoxoa was finished in the spring of 1969, there was little indication of what kind of songs would come next… While a couple songs like Mountains of the Moon had roots in old English poetry, Dupree’s Diamond Blues had been the only Dead song based on American folk tradition, and it seemed to be a cartoonish one-off. Even when writing a bunch of more conventional rock songs for Aoxomoxoa, Hunter & Garcia’s tunes bore little relation to the world at large, tending to withdraw into a more private, esoteric language. For a group of former folkies like Garcia, Weir, and Hunter, they had done their best to shed any folk influences since the first album, in favor of experimentation and strangeness. Dire Wolf was a turning point in the Dead’s songs – the point where the Dead turned from weirdness to accessibility.
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