Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 11, Bonus Episode 1
Tiger Rose 50
Archival interviews:
- Mickey Hart, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 11/84.
- Robert Hunter, by Monte Dym & Bob Alson, 12/28/77.
- Robert Hunter, Philadelphia public access, 4/30/81.
- Robert Hunter, by David Gans, Conversations with the Dead, 11/15/77.
- Robert Hunter, by Denis McNamera, WLIR, 3/78.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: In the spring of 1975, Round Records released Tiger Rose, the second solo album by Robert Hunter.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:26-0:39) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: It came just nine months after Tales of the Great Rum Runners, Hunter’s solo debut. In the studio alongside Hunter was his old pal Jerry Garcia, a new kind of collaboration for the longtime creative partners who once performed together as Bob and Jerry. Here’s how Hunter described Tiger Rose on WLIR in 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: The album was done under the auspices of Round Records. This time, I knew that my album would be released. With [Tales of the Great] Rum Runners, I didn't know that, and I don't think I really could have sold that album if I didn't have my own record company, because it doesn't meet professional standards for recording. It’s quite dirty in some respects.
AUDIO: “Rum Runners” (Alternate Version) [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners 50 bonus disc] (0:01-0:19) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: Tiger Rose is produced by Garcia. He mixed Rum Runners for me. He said it was just, uucchh, a real monster. I’d made such a mess of my tracks that he got in there and did the best he could.
AUDIO: “Rum Runners” [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners 50] (0:14-0:26) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: Tiger Rose, he decided that he would like to be in there on the laying down of the tracks.
JESSE: The album was recorded in Marin County, at Rolling Thunder, the barn-studio of Mickey Hart. Here’s how Mickey remembered it to us in 2020.
MICKEY HART: The second one was Tiger Rose. Those were good days. They were sweet — Jerry and Bob working together, having fun and doing Bob's music.
JESSE: Tiger Rose marked the first time since 1961 where Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia performed music side by side.
AUDIO: “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep” [Bob & Jerry, Before the Dead, 5/26/61] (1:16-1:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: And though Hunter had been in the studio contributing to Garcia’s solo debut and tweaking lyrics on Dead albums, Tiger Rose perhaps marks their most complete collaboration as musicians.
AUDIO: “Cruel White Water” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:23-1:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
Back to Marin
JESSE: Tiger Rose picks up at a fairly precise moment in the collective Grateful Dead timeline, winding together a few threads that have come up previously on the Deadcast. Sometime in late 1973 or early 1974, Robert Hunter and his partner Christie relocated to England. He returned to the States early 1974 to put the final touches on Tales of the Great Rum Runners, which we spoke about in its own episode last year.
AUDIO: “That Train” [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners 50] (0:43-1:05) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: Hunter went back to England, and Rum Runners came out in June 1974, around the time of Hunter’s 33rd birthday, and midway through the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound year, which we discussed at length in our From the Mars Hotel season. We last left the Grateful Dead onstage at Winterland in October 1974, where they performed five shows and filmed what became The Grateful Dead Movie.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [10/20/74] (1:38-1:54) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Virtually the next day, Jerry Garcia split town for a week on the beach in Orange County, playing at the Golden Bear with Merl Saunders. And thanks to the meticulous note-taking of Steve Brown and others, we know that preliminary work for Tiger Rose began on Garcia’s return, with a day at Mickey Hart’s studio in Novato, followed by a day of rehearsals at Jerry Garcia’s house in Stinson Beach, on October 29th and 30th, a week-and-a-half after the Dead’s so-called retirement at Winterland. Jerry Garcia and Merl Saunders had a two-week East Coast tour, and—when they returned from that—it was time to get to business. According to the session notes, Tiger Rose proper got started on Friday, November 22nd, with the album’s title song tracked on the very first day.
“Tiger Rose”
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:38-1:04) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: Ron Rakow was the president of Round Records.
RON RAKOW: I thought Tiger Rose was sensational. First of all, it had the best cover. I think it’s one of my five favorite covers of that whole era — that beautiful rose, with the beautiful head of the tiger coming out of it. It was far out.
JESSE: The cover art for the album was by Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley’s Monster Company, located a few blocks away from the Dead’s offices in San Rafael. Frankly, it’s wise to take some of Robert Hunter’s stories with a Prankster-sized dose of salt, but—if this next story is true—it seems as if the artists actually had a hand in getting Hunter to rewrite his material. This is Robert Hunter in Dallas in October 1986.
ROBERT HUNTER [10/18/86]: That song is neither about a tiger nor a rose. It's a secret symbolism that has to do with the time that I was bitten by a spider. Original title of that was “Spider Rose,” but it wasn’t an attractive enough title. I went to Stanley Mouse and Kelley and I talked about, “Could you make this spider and this rose?” And they said, “That's a pretty dark image. You sure you want that out?” And so I thought about it a little bit.
JESSE: If I had to guess, this story took place somewhere in early November 1974, while Jerry Garcia was touring the East Coast, just before the start of the sessions. It wasn’t the first time Hunter altered the title of a song-in-progress.
ROBERT HUNTER [10/18/86]: “Sugaree” was originally Stingaree, and then that was a little hard to… “Shake it, shake it, Stingaree”? No, no, no.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (2:05-2:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: By the time of the session, the song’s final title had been locked in, written as “Tiger Rose” on the session tracking sheet, and it became what Hunter considered to be one of his signature songs. Like “Sugaree,” which resonated with Elizabeth Cotton’s great song, the phrase Tiger Rose had earlier resonances as well.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (2:23-2:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: Tiger Rose was a 1917 broadway play and a 1923 silent film, remade with sound in 1929. Only the 1923 version seems to survive in full. Also recorded on the first day of the proper sessions was the album’s second song, “One Thing to Try,” which appeared immediately after “Tiger Rose” on the final project.
AUDIO: “One Thing to Try” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:39-0:56) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
Production
JESSE: During the first few days of the sessions, the musicians at hand needed to clarify some boundaries and division of labor. Here’s Robert Hunter speaking to WLIR in 1978 about the album’s production. Incidentally, we’ve been drawing extensively on this rather low fidelity interview for a while now, and we have our buddy Eric Zeiler to thank for cleaning it up a bit.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: I was like, “Okay, Garcia, you're the producer.” I would argue about it and everything like that — and he’d mutter about, “They don’t understand my true genius.” So finally I sat back and we came to the agreement, “Okay, you can produce this one. I'll see what you can do with my work.”
JESSE: Robert Hunter had his own band, of sorts, Road Hog. But he’d temporarily stopped playing them about a year before the Tiger Rose sessions, a story we’ll drop into later. One of Garcia’s production decisions was to bring in a ringer to play most of the guitar on the album, namely himself.
AUDIO: “Last Flash of Rock ‘n’ Roll” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:00-0:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: The bonus tracks on the new edition are almost entirely just alternate mixes, but there’s a solo version of “Rose of Sharon” that gives a glimpse of what the material sounded like before it got to the studio.
AUDIO: “Rose of Sharon” (Alternate Version) [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50 bonus disc] (0:14-0:40) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The sessions also included one song that featured only Hunter, somewhere between an outtake and an oddity. It wasn’t included on Tiger Rose itself, but was actually released before the album. It joins “The Eleven” and some of Hunter’s earlier songs that fall into the category of what Skeleton Key files under “cat dictation.”
AUDIO: “Talkin’ Money Tree” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose Rarities] (0:04-0:23)
JESSE: “Talkin’ Money Tree” came out as a promotional single on Round Records, sent to the Dead Heads mailing list, backed with a little bit of Ned Lagin’s Seastones.
AUDIO: “Talkin’ Money Tree” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose Rarities] (0:23-0:40)
JESSE: When Hunter began performing live, “Talkin’ Money Tree” became a staple of his concerts, re-recorded for the UK-only LP Jack O’ Roses in 1980. This is the even rarer 1974 version, now on the Tiger Rose rarities LP.
AUDIO: “Talkin’ Money Tree” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose Rarities] (0:40-1:11)
JESSE: The studio’s owner, Mickey Hart, had been furloughed from the Dead in 1971. A week and a half before the start of the Tiger Rose sessions though, Hart joined his old bandmates onstage for the final night at Winterland in October 1974, a story we told in our “Ship of Fools” episode.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [10/20/74] (1:52-2:19)
JESSE: It was the beginning of the drummer’s nearly year-long reentry into the Grateful Dead. Here’s how he remembered Tiger Rose to us in 2020.
MICKEY HART: I don't know how long it took us to make that. It seemed like it was really quickly.
JESSE: The album was made mostly over the last two weeks of November 1974 with some overdubs in very early January 1975, and was—in some ways—a smoother process than the sessions that yielded Tales of the Great Rum Runners. But the smoothness might be an illusion. The album had several people overseeing it. Producing was Jerry Garcia; engineering were the Dead family’s great team of Bob Matthews and Betty Cantor-Jackson. But it was Mickey Hart’s studio. Here’s how Hunter recalled it to WLIR in 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: Mickey Hart is the most wired cat you've ever met in your life. He has so many ideas. We had to put him in a bag and tie it up with a rope and put him in the corner, he was beating it against it with ideas.
JESSE: Ultimately, Hart was credited as “anti-producer,” a title he explained to David Gans in 1984.
MICKEY HART [11/84]: That was my studio and I was in it all the time, and kibitzing. And that would be the anti-producer label. I was helping to produce it in my own sort of twisted way. It was all in good fun. I made a contribution to it, and this is what you would call an honor. This is an honorable title in this world.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: It got to the point where I just finally sat over in the corner myself like that. I don't have the energy either of those cats have in a certain way in the studio to fight for production ideas. I just finally sat back and let Mickey and Bob Matthews and Garcia slug it out over what the production of that was going to be. And I could not get a word in edgewise — I just couldn't. Those guys are champion rappers, all three of them. Being a double Cancer, I find I find I have a tendency to go off in the corner and introvert. I just would come out when it was time to do my vocals.
Songs
JESSE: The songs on “Tiger Rose” were mostly pretty new in 1975, though a few have origin stories to claw back into slightly. Here’s how Barry Melton described the vibe at Mickey’s studio to us when we spoke for the Tales of the Great Rum Runners episode.
BARRY MELTON: I don't think we did any of our recording out there with commercial plans for them. We were just playing. If it ended up somewhere, that was great. And if it didn't, that was great. If that makes sense.
JESSE: Mickey Hart was constantly recording, creating a few unreleased follow-ups to Rolling Thunder over the course of 1973 and 1974, and Hunter was a fixture there, as was Barry Melton.
BARRY MELTON: I was going through a divorce. I had a place to live in San Rafael, but I was spending a lot of time at Mickey's house.
JESSE: There were lots of loose sessions out at Mickey’s. It was during one of these that Mickey and Hunter first developed “Fire On the Mountain.”
AUDIO: “Fire on the Mountain” [Mickey Hart and Robert Hunter, c. 1973] (1:36-2:00)
JESSE: And it was in this window that, according to Hunter, another piece of music emerged featuring Barry Melton on lead guitar.
AUDIO: “Ariel” [Mickey Hart feat. Barry Melton, c. 1973] (2:14-2:30)
JESSE: The music brought to mind a poem Hunter had written a decade earlier, while living in Palo Alto in 1964, sung in 1972 or 1973 by Barry Melton on the original unreleased version of “Ariel.”
AUDIO: “Ariel” [Mickey Hart feat. Barry Melton, c. 1973] (4:04-4:39)
JESSE: Though Robert Hunter employed many voices as a lyricist, the images of “Ariel” seem pretty different than his usual bag, and explains the song’s unusual rhyme scheme. It probably wasn’t meant to be sung originally.
AUDIO: “Ariel” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:36-2:04) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: With Donna Jean Godchaux’s vocals, it would become the closing song of Tiger Rose.
AUDIO: “Ariel” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (4:20-4:35) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: And one other song predated the sessions, as well.
JESSE: Though Bobby Weir and Robert Hunter somewhat infamously had some falling outs over the lyrics to “Sugar Magnolia” in 1970 and “Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1971, the two actually continued to work together on and off throughout the subsequent decades, with nearly a half-dozen songs that exist in various drafts and rumors, and there’s an uncirculated soundcheck recording of the Dead doing “Yellow Moon” with different lyrics, slightly different music by Weir, and gorgeous vocals by Donna Jean Godchaux. Hunter told Blair Jackson that “Yellow Moon” dated to around 1971. But he told Mary Eisenhart in 1988 that, when he recorded it for Tiger Rose, he’d just written it the night before, which I take to mean he’d just finished updating his own version. Whenever it was written, it’s probably my favorite thing on the album.
AUDIO: “Yellow Moon” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:41-1:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: That’s the sound of Garcia and Hunter on acoustic guitars. “Garcia and I sat down in the studio one morning and just played it,” Hunter told Mary Eisenhart.
AUDIO: “Yellow Moon” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:59-2:20) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: There’s an alternate mix of “Yellow Moon” among the expanded tracks of Tiger Rose, but it’s just Hunter’s take with Garcia’s guitar potted down. The album has this lovely acoustic break.
AUDIO: “Yellow Moon” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (2:20-2:43) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
Tiger Tracks
JESSE: The bulk of Tiger Rose featured an all-star cast of Bay Area musicians, mostly familiar to Dead freaks who’d studied liner notes over the previous decade. Playing bass on a few tunes was Dave Torbert, who’d left the New Riders of the Purple Sage earlier that year and would soon join Bob Weir’s Kingfish.
AUDIO: “Dance A Hole” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:44-1:00) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: On bass and occasionally keyboards and vocals, was David Frieberg, late of Quicksilver Messenger Service, and more recently a member of Jefferson Starship, playing both piano and celeste here on “Rose of Sharon,” along with Garcia’s pedal steel and Hunter himself on mandolin.
AUDIO: “Rose of Sharon” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:30-1:59) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: On the session sheet, Garcia’s pedal steel contribution is written down as Blackjack, his nickname from the era of Bobby Ace and His Cards From the Bottom the Deck era, one of his last pedal steel appearances for a decade. Also doing double duty on bass and keys from the Starship was Pete Sears, formerly of Stoneground. I think this is Sears on sparkling stereo-panned Yamaha synth on “Dance A Hole.”
AUDIO: “Dance A Hole” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:46-1:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: Here’s Sears playing piano on “Last Flash of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
AUDIO: “Last Flash of Rock ‘n’ Roll” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:36-0:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: That’s Donna Jean Godchaux singing on a few tracks, too.
AUDIO: “Last Flash of Rock ‘n’ Roll” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (3:01-3:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: Playing mandolin, overdubbed in January, was Garcia’s old buddy David Grisman, their last recorded project until they reunited in the early 1990s.
AUDIO: “Wild Bill” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:56-2:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: It was one of Hunter’s favorites.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: “Wild Bill” is an excellent tune. I really like that tune, I open my sets with it a lot.
AUDIO: “Wild Bill” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (2:13-2:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: The original tracking sheets show that Garcia played some banjo, but it didn’t survive into either of the mixes, opting for electric guitar instead. It’s brief, but I love hearing Garcia and Grisman playing together over Pete Sears’ bubbling Clavinet during this last break.
AUDIO: “Wild Bill” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (2:39-2:50) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: On “Cruel White Water,” there are possibly as many as three David Grismans spread around the stereo mix.
AUDIO: “Cruel White Water” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:24-1:38) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: Filling out the band on drums was a musician that would’ve been unfamiliar to even the most studious of Bay Area discographers, B.D. Shot.
AUDIO: “Over the Hills” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:41-1:12) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: Here’s how Mickey Hart remembered B.D. Shot to David Gans in 1984. You can read the full interview in David’s great book Conversations with the Dead.
MICKEY HART [11/84]: I was going through a catharsis here with Hunter, because Hart—Mickey Hart, as Mickey Hart knew Mickey Hart—could never play on Bob Hunter's record, play straight drums. He couldn't play bass drum, snare drum, hi-hat and cymbals, because Hart didn't play like that. He wasn't a straight drummer. Hart was a space drummer. Hart played around it all, up until that point. I was faced with an inner decision here. So what I did was I split my personality and I knew B.D. Shot: Bass Drum, Snare, hi-hat, overhead and tom-tom was the basic signature… that was the track, so it became B.D. Shot. Now, Shot’s consciousness wasn't anything like Hart. Shot could play the straight [vocalizes drum beat]. He could play that all day because he wasn't Hart, and it was no threat to Hart.
DAVID GANS [11/84]: Well, why can't Hart handle the idea of playing something like that?
MICKEY HART [11/84]: He couldn't then.
DAVID GANS [11/84]: Couldn't then?
MICKEY HART [11/84]: No, he couldn't then.
DAVID GANS [11/84]: Weren’t you with the New Riders though?
MICKEY HART [11/84]: Of course, but wasn't that later?
DAVID GANS [11/84]: No, that was ‘70—
MICKEY HART [11/84]: Oh, yeah—
DAVID GANS [11/84]: ‘70, 71, ‘69.
MICKEY HART [11/84]:Right, right, okay, I did. But it was a lot more spacey than what Hunter’s stuff was. Hunter’s was really… even with the New Riders, I was stretching it.
DAVID GANS [11/84]: “Cruel White Water” and all that.
MICKEY HART [11/84]: Yeah, I was stretching it. But this was really straight-ahead stuff, and it had to be, and I didn't want to play this for the rest of my life. And Hart wouldn't do anything he didn't want to do. Hart couldn't even make Hart do it. Ain't nothing like that in this body. Whatever it was, I had to deal with it in my own space and time. And so I made myself B.D. Shot, and it had to be percussion. So then Hart met Shot on one of these records. I think it's on the credits that way.
DAVID GANS [11/84]: Did you like each other?
MICKEY HART [11/84]: Oh, we finally made peace. And then Hart and Shot became one after that.
JESSE: And, indeed, both the names Mickey Hart and B.D. Shot appear on the session sheets in various credits. Here’s how Mickey remembered it to us in 2020.
MICKEY HART: I think that was the one where I covered all my drums with a sheet. And I played the drums really dry, with a bedsheet over ‘em, or something like that taped around them. I kind of remember that, Jerry, it was like he taped me with gaffer tape.
JESSE: However they chose to restrain B.D. Shot, it worked.
AUDIO: “Over the Hills” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (2:18-2:36) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: But perhaps the most versatile player of the sessions was Garcia himself, adding texture on a number of instruments. Obviously, he plays some sweet lead guitar.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:55-1:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: But listen to that guitar break again while squinting your ears and then listen for the tack piano in the far background, and the bass ARP synth that comes in at the end, both Garcia as well.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:55-1:13) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: On a few songs, Garcia plays Roland and ARP synths, last heard on the Dead’s From the Mars Hotel. On “Over the Hills,” he’s playing both.
AUDIO: “Over the Hills” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:12-1:34) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: On the tracking sheet for “Over the Hills” Hunter is credited with “orally articulated string ensemble” but it seems to be half-erased. The longer alternate mix of “Dance A Hole” has a few things to point out, like the alternate intro.
AUDIO: “Dance A Hole” (Alternate Version) [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50 bonus disc] (0:00-0:10) - [dead.net]
JESSE: You can see why they went with a different version. You may notice that the Roland synth on “Dance A Hole” kind of sounds like bagpipes.
AUDIO: “Dance A Hole” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:00-0:22) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: You might also notice the little synth that burps up and cuts out just before the end of the song.
AUDIO: “Dance A Hole” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (3:11-3:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: But the alternate mix proposes that maybe that little synth shouldn’t cut out.
AUDIO: “Dance A Hole” (Alternate Version) [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50 bonus disc] (3:47-3:56) - [dead.net]
JESSE: I kind of wonder if Dance A Hole was maybe meant to close the album, because after a little bit more synth comes a full bagpipe coda by Hunter with B.D. Shot on field drums, sounding like a final statement.
AUDIO: “Dance A Hole” (Alternate Version) [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50 bonus disc] (4:10-4:33) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Which in turn is followed by a proper Hunter signoff, tying it back to the top.
AUDIO: “Dance A Hole” (Alternate Version) [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50 bonus disc] (4:48-5:03) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Perhaps not coincidentally, “Dance A Hole” is the only song on Tiger Rose that Robert Hunter isn’t known to have performed live. Some of the synth overdubs are pretty ambient. Blink and you’ll miss the ARP Odyssey under the third line of the pre-chorus to “Cruel White Water.”
AUDIO: “Cruel White Water” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:08-1:23) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: The chorus invokes the mysterious Marie Helena.
AUDIO: “Cruel White Water” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:23-1:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: Some Robert Hunter songs had their roots in old folk traditions, but Marie Helena was born at a powerful Mexican radio station in 1932.
AUDIO: “Maria Elena” [Pedro Vargas] (0:00-0:29) [Spotify]
JESSE: The song “Maria Elena” was written by Loenzo Barcelata at the 50,000-watt XEW in Mexico City, known as the Voice of Latin America. The original had a slightly different title than what Hunter ended up with — Maria instead of Marie, Elena instead of Helena. But, like, dig this — a few years later, in 1941, it became a massive American hit in translation for bandleader Jimmy Dorsey.
AUDIO: “Maria Elena” [Jimmy Dorsey, Nearness of You] (0:00-0:28) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Not only was “Maria Elena” a massive hit and on the air the year Robert Hunter was born, it was in the air as Robert Hunter was born. In Hunter’s online journal in 2003, he wrote of a trip through Southern California where he and his wife stopped through the town of his birth, Arroyo Grande. “I was only there long enough to get born – my parents were living in a motel in Pismo Beach at the time. My mother says a guy was strolling past the hospital’s open window whistling Marie Helena [sic], then popular, while I was being born. Sounds like a blessing; the song has always had special significance for me.”
AUDIO: “Maria Elena” [Jimmy Dorsey, Nearness of You] (1:10-1:30) - [Spotify]
JESSE: It was a name that clearly stuck with Robert Hunter.
AUDIO: “Cruel White Water” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:23-1:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: A decade later, in 1985, Hunter recorded the album-length epic, Flight of the Marie Helena, where she lent her name to a massive sea-going vessel.
AUDIO: “First Day” [Robert Hunter, Flight of the Marie Helena] (1:13-1:27)
JESSE: It was a Ship of Fools, of sorts.
AUDIO: “Second Day” [Robert Hunter, Flight of the Marie Helena] (0:36-0:47)
JESSE: So who was Marie Helena? As you may have gleaned from the invocation at the start of “Terrapin Station,” Robert Hunter was a believer in the classical idea of the muse.
AUDIO: “Terrapin Station” [Robert Hunter, Jack O’ Roses] (0:12-0:29)
JESSE: Robert Hunter took his muses very seriously and very literally. He talked to David Gans about them at length in 1977. Some of this conversation is in David’s majestic Conversations with the Dead.
ROBERT HUNTER [11/15/77]: I have one set of muses which always comes in threes and is composed of mostly sunlight, very transparent. Feminine. Very feminine. Very full of brilliance, very loving and mischievous. And then there's a rather solemn loving, overriding muse, definitely the overlooker of all the others.
JESSE: And then there were what Hunter called the son-of-a-bitch muses, the low muses.
ROBERT HUNTER [11/15/77]: “Wharf Rat” basically is a description of one of the low muses. And yet the Wharf Rat evokes one of the other muses, which is the Pearly Blue, which is a muse.
AUDIO: “Wharf Rat” [Skull and Roses] (1:38-1:52) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Hunter had good reasons to both take his muses seriously and celebrate them.
ROBERT HUNTER [11/15/77]: I'm pretty much driven by them in the way that I have to adopt certain habits in life. Certain things that I can and can't do, because I've learned through practice that they'll go away. And when they go away, you have nothing to say. You can sit at the typewriter, but all you feel is like an empty vault in yourself. ‘We don't like you anymore. You can't act like that. Screw you, Jack… see you later.’ Let us know, ring the bell. Go out. Be nice to somebody or whatever.
JESSE: I’d suggest that Marie Helena is maybe one of Robert Hunter’s muses, and—if not that—at least some kind of extended presence in his musical life. One way I can hear “Cruel White Water” is as a story about what Hunter just described — trying to reconnect with a muse.
AUDIO: “Cruel White Water” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:55-2:25) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: In 1978, Hunter told WLIR that “Cruel White Water” was one of the vocal performances that he stood by.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: “Cruel White Water” is probably the best tune on that, from the point of view of having a good vocal delivery.
AUDIO: “Cruel White Water” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:40-1:56) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
I Heard You Singing
JESSE: Hunter didn’t have a lot of time to overdub his vocals onto the album. Here he is speaking with Monte Dym in 1977.
ROBERT HUNTER [12/28/77]: My son was being born in England and I got all my vocals down and split and left the record in Jerry and Matthews and Mickey's hands, and got over to England just in time to get into the delivery room, as my son was being born.
MONTE DYM [12/28/77]: That was what “Rose of Sharon” was all about.
ROBERT HUNTER [12/28/77]: Oh, I suppose…
AUDIO: “Rose of Sharon” (Alternate Version) [Tiger Rose 50 bonus disc] (0:15-0:38) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The Rose of Sharon is mentioned in the Bible, but Biblical scholars don’t agree on what kind of flower it actually was — some candidates include crocuses, lilies, and tulips, but no actual roses, making it a unique specimen in Hunter’s songwriting. Many learned scholars have argued that a rose is a rose is a rose, but this song perhaps answers the musical question, when is a rose not a rose?
AUDIO: “Rose of Sharon” (Alternate Version) [Tiger Rose 50 bonus disc] (2:01-2:22) - [dead.net]
JESSE: When everything was assembled, the results were a bit slicker than Tales From the Rum Runners, glistening folk-pop for 1975. Here’s how Hunter assessed it to WLIR in 1978.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: I'm afraid that the tracks are more like Garcia music than mine, which may be good or bad depending on where you're coming from. It has that kind of mellowed out sound, whereas Rum Runners is real rough and ready, which is more of my style.
JESSE: Yeah, well. Robert Hunter may have recorded the album with his all-star pals, but he actually had a band of his own. Hunter was quite fond of the phrase “rough and ready” to describe his musical stylings, and if you want the rough and ready versions of Tiger Rose songs, seek out some live tapes by Roadhog.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter & Roadhog, 7/30/76] (1:25-1:43)
JESSE: We’re going to use this Tiger Rose episode to briefly frame this period of Robert Hunter’s career, up until he shifted into his next phase, because it’s a little confusing and I don’t think it’s ever been spelled out before. In our Tales of the Great Rum Runners episode, guitarist Ted Claire joined us to tell us how Robert Hunter began showing up to play live with Rodney Albin’s acoustic band the Liberty Hill Aristocrats probably sometime in 1972, performing pseudonymously as Lefty Banks, and eventually writing the theme song that helped them transform into the electric band Roadhog.
AUDIO: “Road Hog” [Robert Hunter, Tales of the Great Rum Runners 50 bonus disc] (0:19-0:57) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
JESSE: On paper, it all seems to make sense: Robert Hunter began performing live with a band in 1972, then launched his solo career with a pair of albums in 1974 and 1975, while that band gigged relentlessly around the Bay Area and northern California. And while all those words are true, it’s also true that Tales of the Great Rum Runners came out in June 1974 and Tiger Rose in April 1975, but Hunter himself effectively left Roadhog in late 1973 and didn’t really return until the spring of 1976, or possibly late 1975.
AUDIO: “Dry Dusty Road” [Robert Hunter & Roadhog, 7/30/76] (0:13-0:22)
JESSE: Hunter had even been a somewhat inconsistent participant during his first stint in the band. Joining us today to fill in more pieces of the story, we are delighted to welcome Roadhog vocalist Kathy Veda Vaughan Bogert.
VEDA VAUGHAN: Bob just wanted to have somewhere where he could come up and play anytime he felt like it. That was the main thing. Wherever we went, he would come if he felt like and not if he didn't. So that was really great. The idea was we would do the songs, and if he came, great, and if he didn't, it would be fine. We did our own strange, psychedelic cowboy songs, original things. And we did bluegrass and we did blues, because Jeff was a great blues guitar player and also an incredible five-string banjo player.
JESSE: Sometimes they did Hunter’s songs without him.
AUDIO: “New Greenbriar Shore” [The Liberty Hill Aristocrats, Guitar] (7:00-7:22)
JESSE: That was the “New Greenbriar Shore,” from the only known recording of the ‘70s iteration of the Liberty Hill Aristocrats, from a syndicated radio program just called Guitar, by the Standard School Broadcast. You can find used copies somewhat easily.
VEDA VAUGHAN: We did a few like “Rum Runners,” things off of Rum Runners. One of my favorites was when I sang “It Must Have Been the Roses.” He really liked the way I did that one. I think that was one of my favorites.
JESSE: I’m sad there don’t seem to be any tapes of either the Aristocrats or the early version of Roadhog. But they had their own thing going on.
VEDA VAUGHAN: A lot of what we did was travel way up the coast to little bars. Point Arena… wherever there was a little bar to play, we would travel up there. We went to Tahoe. We were up in the snow, in Donner Pass in the van.
JESSE: Hunter didn’t really take too many road trips with the Hogs, but was certainly around for some of the shenanigans.
VEDA VAUGHAN: It was one of the times I think that Bob did show up. But Rodney, we had a coffin on stage, and he comes out of the coffin, and then he breaks into “Battle of New Orleans” on the fiddle.
AUDIO: “Battle of New Orleans” [Comfort, 3/10/78] (0:33-0:44)
JESSE: That was Robert Hunter and Comfort in 1978. The one constant between the two groups was the late bassist and fiddler Rodney Albin, Hunter’s chief musical lieutenant in his bands.
VEDA VAUGHAN: Rodney was the most straight person — he never did any drugs, ever, of any kind. He had that music store; it was called Birds That Sing first. We rehearsed in the music store, then it was called Acoustic Music after that. Rodney built this amazing instrument called the Neanderlin. It was a pedal steel banjo. When we did the bluegrass, Jeff wanted to be able to bend the notes, so Rodney built a pedal steel banjo for him, so that he could. It was an electric banjo with pedals. It was and they named it the NeanderLin.
JESSE: It’s hard to know the precise order of things, but Kathy Vaughan left Roadhog in early 1974, around the time that Robert Hunter moved to England. The band gigged harder than ever that year, but there’s no evidence of Hunter turning up with them again until late 1975, at a one-off gig at the Klamath Potato Festival. It sounds like he was back in California more full time by early 1976. But, now that he had his own band and two albums, Hunter decided he no longer wanted to sing his own songs, as he told Monte Dym in 1977.
ROBERT HUNTER [12/28/77]: I wasn't performing my own tunes at that point with them. I wanted to do other people's tunes until I got chops down and felt comfortable on stage. For a while, I stood there like a stick for the first couple of gigs, with my knees shaking. And then people kept saying to me, “Why don't you do your own tunes?” I didn't want to. I wanted to get into something entirely different. I guess I knew that just as soon as I started doing those, then it was — blam, blam, blam, right to here, you know?
JESSE: So he picked some brand new tunes to learn, both on albums that came out in the second half of 1975.
ROBERT HUNTER [12/28/77]: “Born to Run,” I think is one of the all-time numbers from the last couple years. That's maybe the one tune that I played over and over in the last couple of years. I must have played that thing ‘til I drove my old lady out. I even learned how to play on guitar and do a pretty good imitation of Springsteen.
AUDIO: “Born to Run” [Robert Hunter, 5/9/79] (0:11-0:44)
JESSE: That was a live version from 1979. There don’t seem to be any Roadhog tapes of “Born to Run,” nor of this next song.
ROBERT HUNTER [12/28/77]: I worked out that in “Free Money,” Patti Smith's thing.
AUDIO: “Free Money” [Patti Smith, Horses] (0:15-0:47) - [Spotify]
JESSE: There aren’t that many Roadhog tapes period, really only a handful of audience recordings, none of them of terribly high fidelity.
AUDIO: “Wild Bill” [Robert Hunter & Roadhog, 7/30/76] (0:25-0:45)
JESSE: It was during this period, in summer 1976, a full year after Tiger Rose’s release, and more than three years after he began his live career, that Robert Hunter began to publicly identify as Robert Hunter for the first time, and audience members would understand that the person onstage singing all those Grateful Dead songs was actually the person who co-wrote them. It could be a mixed bag.
AUDIO: “Friend of the Devil” [Robert Hunter & Roadhog, 9/26/76] (1:01-1:19)
JESSE: In his online journal, Robert Hunter wrote, “I remember an early Roadhog gig where I sang ‘Friend of the Devil’ and ‘It Must Have Been the Roses.’ A fellow came up to me after the show and said "I don't think I like hearing you sing those songs!" When I asked why, he replied: ‘I like to believe Jerry wrote them.’ That remark hit deep.” But it was the first time many Dead Heads got to see Hunter in person, or at least recognize that they were seeing Hunter in person. We’ve posted Corry Arnold’s great work reconstructing the band’s performing history in 1975 and 1976, as well as some photos of Roadhog in action. As you can imagine, the information is far from complete. Howie Levine was a Fillmore East vintage head and caught Hunter with Roadhog at the Euphoria Tavern in Portland, Oregon on a date that we’ve not been able to pin down yet.
HOWIE LEVINE: I remember it being like springtime ‘76. I was going to school in Oregon, and the album came out the year before. Somebody said, “Hey, you know, Hunter’s playing up in Portland.” Took a ride up there and — tiny bar, couldn't have been more than 50 people. It was the epitome of a bar band. These were guys just having fun playing. People were calling out for songs, “Buy me a beer, we'll play that one.” “Okay.” He played some songs four or five times. “Tiger Rose,” for sure, he played multiple times.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter & Roadhog, 9/26/76] (1:06-1:22)
JESSE: Hunter continued to balance Dead songs with tunes from his own career, but his stint in Roadhog lasted probably through late 1976. In 1977, he started the band Comfort, also featuring Rodney Albin on bass, a story we’ll hopefully continue some other day. And we’ll use this occasion, too, to send a farewell to Larry Klein, who passed away this January, who played with Hunter in both Comfort and his early solo career, playing a very early Alembic 6-string electric bass.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter & Larry Klein, 6/23/78] (0:38-0:59)
Postscript
JESSE: And, in case you were wondering, not the same Larry Klein who played bass for Joni Mitchell. The songs of Tiger Rose had all kinds of additional lives. The last time Garcia had helped Hunter with a solo album, he poached one of the tunes for the Grateful Dead’s repertoire.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: “It Must Have Been the Roses” I had thought of as my signature tune, and then Jerry decided he wanted to do it. I was not too happy about it because I had recorded it already, because I knew what a monster he is. That song would no longer be identified with me once he did it. So, I almost think it is a Dead tune that I do now.
AUDIO: “It Must Have Been the Roses” [Reflections] (0:49-1:25) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: Then he wanted to do “Tiger Rose” and I said, “Well, come on, don't do that.” I finally said, “Okay, do ‘It Must Have Been the Roses.’ I'm not going to be a dog in a manger about the whole thing. I didn't sell it — maybe you can. But ‘Tiger Rose’ is my other signature tune like that, so I gotta keep one of them.” So, he agreed not to touch “Tiger Rose.”
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (1:30-1:48) - [dead.net] [Spotify]
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: It's a recognition tune. People don't even have to have heard it; they’ve at least seen the album cover. So when I sing “Tiger Rose,” they applaud a little bit.
JESSE: A few years later, in spring 1980, when Hunter opened for a few Jerry Garcia Band shows, he joined the band onstage each night to do “Tiger Rose.”
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Jerry Garcia Band with Robert Hunter, After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80] (1:10-1:28) - [Spotify]
JESSE: This is from February 28th, 1980, released as After Midnight.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Jerry Garcia Band with Robert Hunter, After Midnight: Kean College, 2/28/80] (1:26-1:43) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Tiger Rose, the album, is the very-asterisked answer to one of my favorite bits of Hunter/Garcia trivia, that’s about to get slightly more asterisked. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Hunter was often a presence when the Dead and Garcia recorded in the studio. He appears on the “Dark Star” single, was very likely present in the studio from the beginning to end of the Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty sessions, as well as Garcia’s solo debut, where Hunter served various musical roles, including tuning the radio on the side 2 sound collage, “Spidergawd.”
AUDIO: “Spidergawd” [Jerry Garcia, Garcia] (2:46-3:04) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Garcia did some mixing on Tales of the Great Rum Runners, but doesn’t really play on the album. So, with all of those caveats, one way to describe Tiger Rose is as the only album that Hunter and Garcia made together from start to finish, and “Yellow Moon” is the only time they played together more or less in their original Bob and Jerry configuration. But there’s an asterisk there, too. When researching this episode, I came across this 1981 interview clip with Robert Hunter that appeared online last year, dropping a few very alluring sentences.
ROBERT HUNTER [4/30/81]: I've just finished trying to do a record with Garcia playing lead acoustic guitar on it, him playing acoustic. We had John Kahn and Mickey [Hart] and Billy [Kreutzmann]. We came near to completing it, but then I went off to England because the Grateful Dead had commandeered the studio in order to finish their album.
JESSE: This would’ve probably been about a year after Hunter’s live appearances with the Jerry Garcia Band, in the brief window after the Dead returned from Europe in late March 1981 and when they had to start mixing Dead Set, their upcoming live album.
ROBERT HUNTER [4/30/81]: We were recording for my Touch of Grey album, was the title of it. I had Herbie Greene in San Francisco do a cover for it and all the artwork and stuff.
JESSE: Perhaps obviously, Robert Hunter never released an acoustic album called Touch of Grey featuring Jerry Garcia, John Kahn, Mickey Hart, and Billy Kreutzmann. But it’s nice to think about and hope it surfaces someday. But that’s a few lost albums away, hopefully we’ll get to circle back sometime with more information. Tiger Rose was to be Hunter’s last officially released studio album of new material until 1984’s Amagamalin Street, and he remained justly proud of it. But he lingered on one particular issue.
ROBERT HUNTER [3/78]: My excuse for the vocals on this thing, I always have to excuse them is my kid was being born over in England, and I got my vocals down as quick as I could over the tracks and split. And I had to… I really wish I'd had more time.
JESSE: No, he really lingered on it. Here is speaking with Monte Dym.
ROBERT HUNTER [12/28/77]: I'd like to take a week with those Tiger Rose basics, go back in there and cut the vocals right on it. Maybe I should consider that water under the bridge. Maybe not. But I love the songs on there. I think it's one of the best batches of songs I've ever gotten together. And I don't think I treated ‘em right. I howled, and spitted, and cracked
JESSE: And that’s exactly what happened in 1989, when Tiger Rose was reissued on CD.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 1989 CD edition] (0:00-0:21)
JESSE: It was a style of the time, sometimes a little regrettable, just ask Reuben and the Jets. Though Hunter wasn’t a fan of them, I like the vocals on the original Tiger Rose just fine, and we hope you do, too, because that’s what’s on the newest release. Point yourself to the world of Marie Helena and Ariel, Wild Bill and Diamond Lil, Handsome Moll and Tiger Rose.
AUDIO: “Tiger Rose” [Robert Hunter, Tiger Rose 50] (0:00-0:21) - [dead.net] [Spotify]