Stephen’, another ambitiously exotic poem with religious allegories and a distinct “Lady Fingers” section that inspired Garcia to expand his composition to allow for each section to sound distinctly different. In the process, Garcia stumbled onto ‘St. Garcia recognised the ease at which he could translate Hunter’s words into music, and decided to parse through his friend’s letters to find more verses. Garcia found the perfect counterpoint in the song’s central guitar riff, which gave it a funky rock and roll feeling. Featuring references to “silver kimonos” and “golden string fiddles”, ‘China Cat Sunflower’ needed something to keep it tethered to earth. The first of those songs was ‘China Cat Sunflower’, the wildly imaginative piece that would land on the band’s third album Aoxomoxoa. These visions inspired him to craft three different works, and when he was done with them, Hunter decided that perhaps his old friend and his new band could use them. The psychedelic imagery that he was tapping into was largely influenced by his experiences with LSD as a part of the MKULTRA programme at Stanford University. Although he almost never appeared on stage with the group, Hunter was as much a member of the Grateful Dead as any of the musicians in the band.Īfter moving to New Mexico to get away from his drug addictions and failing to write a novel that he had envisioned, Hunter went more abstract and began composing verses, unsure of whether they would be poems or songs.
Eventually, Hunter would become the Dead’s in-house lyricist. Even when the two were separated in their early 20s, Garcia and Hunter still gravitated toward each other. One of Jerry Garcia’s childhood friends in Palo Alto, California, Hunter took the same beat-inspired path that Garcia did. Throughout their 30 year career together, nobody epitomised the alternative nature of the Grateful Dead lineup like Robert Hunter.
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