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It’s Friday; here’s what we’ve got on deck.
Before the Dead
Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, who died in 2019, didn’t just write songs—although his name is on a pretty staggering number of great ones, including “Casey Jones,” “Ripple,” “Dark Star,” and Bob Dylan’s “The Ugliest Girl in the World.” (Yes, this is a pro-“Ugliest Girl in the World” household, don’t @ us.) He also published books of his poetry and translated Rilke’s Duino Elegies from the original German, which is impressive because Hunter didn’t speak German. But as far as we and Dead biographer Dennis McNally are aware, he only wrote one full-length book of prose, which remained unpublished until this week: A novelistic memoir called The Silver Snarling Trumpet, which documents Hunter’s friendship with a 19-year-old Jerry Garcia circa 1961, years before Garcia put together a band called the Warlocks and began his journey to cultural immortality.
The book, in stores now, is a fascinating document of the historical moment– an interim between the age of the beatniks and the rise of the hippie—that shaped a music legend’s arc. You can read an excerpt here, in which Hunter and Garcia play their first-ever live shows as a duo, and Hunter gets a brief taste of fame—until Garcia decides they should go their separate ways. (The breakup didn’t quite take; although Hunter never played music with the Dead, he went on to write songs with Garcia and other members of the band for thirty years.)
Cole Comfort
Speaking of intra-friend-group tension among songwriters: After bowing out of the most vituperative rap beef in recent history and thereby sparing his family the trauma of a “Meet The Grahams”-type exegesis on his failures as a rapper and a human being, J. Cole has cleared his busy bike/beach/beatmaking schedule and tapped back in. This week GQ war correspondent Frazier Tharpe breaks down the finer points of Cole’s new song “Port Antonio,” in which Jermaine Cole finally addresses his role, or lack thereof, in the Drake/Kendrick feud while squashing rumors of a side-beef with Drake. After rhyming “regrettably” with “discredit me,” “pedigree,” “incredibly” and “hypothetically”—we can see the Cole stans doing the Turn Up The Volume Meme face just reading that sentence—Cole closes with some conciliatory bars that, Tharpe writes, “feel perhaps addressed to Drake and himself: ‘Tappin back into your magic pen is what’s imperative/reminding these folks why we do it/It’s not for beefin, it’s for speakin’ our thoughts/Pushin’ ourselves, reaching the charts.’” Which as it happens is also what we remind ourselves of each time we sit down to write this newsletter.
