Almost exclusively when Pig Pen was still a major factor in the band.
Even though I had a couple of albums in my youth including "Europe '72" I didn't
really wake up to the Dead until a buddy turned me on to a version of "DarkStar/Wharf Rat/the Other One" medley'd, on a tape that was circulating in the early '80's from around '69, I think, when Pigpen was still alive.
That also leads me to an update of my memory of Bobby & Pigpen's "probation", when I remembered what my source was, and pulled it down and refreshed this weekend:
According to Joel Selvin's
"The Summer of Love" they were actually
fired in a band meeting in '68 while recording "Aoxomoxoa".
Jerry and Phil were beginning to compose much more complex music with time and key changes, and becoming especially frustrated with Pigpen's lack of desire to learn or play anything more than the 3 or 4 progressions/tunes he knew.
Bobby was having a hard time rising above his own folk guitar roots.
This was the period when the Dead played a few shows minus Bobby and Pigpen as "Micky and the Hartbeats", but within only a couple of months Bobby and Pigpen were back in the band.
That book by the way is essential for anybody interested in what was happening on the SF scene with tons of background about how the bands were founded and evolved, like this one:
Bobby wound up taking lessons from John Cippolina's (Quicksilver Messenger Service) mother, a concert pianist who gave lessons.
I still have no clue why the band felt compelled to outsource their lyric writing to someone who was a wanna be cowboy. NO RELEVANCE to my life.
If you mean Robert Hunter, he was a buddy of Jerry's going all the way back to Jerry's bluegrass days at Stanford.
Rock and psychedelia was actually fostered when Bobby met Jerry and they decided Beatles was where it was at.
Coming back to "country" was actually coming full circle, and Hunter was by far a better lyricist than anybody else in the band at the time.
Also by '68 a nascent movement to "get back to the roots of Americana" was already blossoming in, for example,
Buffalo Springfield("I Am A Child", "Kind Woman", later covered by Messina's band
Poco) and
the Byrds, "Sweetheart of the Rodeo".
The lyrics from the other Bay Area bands may have be semi-weird when you listen now, but they were a whole lot more relevant to our lives than the tale of some cowboy trying to ride ahead of a posse.
In a sense I'm with ya, "country" was always kind of low on my "like" list, but "Friend of the Devil" woke me up to a whole other side of the Dead experience, let's call it the "recovery phase":
"If I get home before daylight, I just might get some sleep tonight...",
That lyric has special meaning for thousands of Deadheads yearning for a "peaceful easy feeling" after several hours or more on a psychedelic roller coaster ride...
Now couple that with the idea of feeling like you're always just a step ahead of the cops and in love with more than one girl, and all of a sudden one gets why it resonated so strongly with Deadheads.
Those lyrics are the ones the have turned out to have stood the test of time and remain relevant still.
It's magnificent in its metaphor.
And when that hit me it became the 3rd Dead tune I ever learned, to my own surprise!
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