The Grateful Dead are either the most overrated band of all time or the most underrated. I go with the latter. Here is one reason why: You could hate all of their live music and what they were doing with their space jams (I don't... because Jerry Garcia is capable of improvising guitar solos that shimmer in beauty like a mountain valley encountered on a morning walk), and still rate them as brilliant based upon the song collections "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead." These are albums of 3 to 4- minute songs with tight arrangements, exquisite but not overindulgent musicianship (unlike much other music of the era), and a marriage of lyric and melody that is among the best in American popular music.
Lyricist Robert Hunter knew how to inhabit the world of the "weird, old America" (to use Greil Marcus' term) -- haunted landscapes described in country blues lyrics and other Ovid-in-America metamorphosis-style tales of the sort featured on experimental filmmaker and 78 rpm record collector Harry Smith's 1952 "Anthology of American Folk Music." Ballads that were weird in Scotland got considerably weirder in their American incarnations. Meanwhile, Delta and Piedmont blues artists were singing about the inexplicability of living in a land, the Jim Crow South, where the apartheid system made everyday living a very unstable affair, where white terror could be lurking around the next corner and the next one. These artists used the knotty irony and wry humor of African folktales and folk wisdom to evoke what felt like permanent exile.
To bring it back to Robert Hunter, the words to his song "Dire Wolf" are striking in how they deposit the listener immeditely, in the first line, into an unsettling zone that feels half-remembered and half-forgotten, half-dreamed and half-lived. The singer/narrator sits down to a game of cards against the 600-pound dire wolf who was grinning at his window. The tale the singer tells takes place in someplace called Fennario - probably a place in Scotland that was mispronounced and ended up staying that way, in the old ballad, "Pretty Peggy-o."
In the timbers of Fennario, the wolves are running round
The winter was so hard and cold, froze ten feet 'neath the ground
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
I sat down to my supper, 'twas a bottle of red whisky
I said my prayers and went to bed, that's the last they saw of me
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
When I awoke, the Dire Wolf, six hundred pounds of sin
Was grinning at my window, all I said was come on in
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
The Wolf came in, I got my cards, we sat down for a game
I cut my deck to the Queen of Spades, but the cards were all the same
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Don't murder me
In the backwash of Fennario, the black and bloody mire
The Dire Wolf collects his dues, while the boys sing 'round the fire
Don't murder me, I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Don't murder me
I beg of you don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
No no no don't murder me
I beg of you, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
Please, don't murder me
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