I woke today . . .
And felt your side of bed
The covers were still warm where you’d been laying
You were gone . . .
My heart was filled with dread
You might not be sleeping here again
It’s alright, ’cause I love you
And that’s not gonna change
Run me round, make me hurt again and again
But I’ll still sing you love songs
Written in the letters of your name1
And brave the storm to come,
For it surely looks like rain
Did you ever waken to the sound2
Of street cats making love
And guess from their cries
You were listening to a fight?
Well, you know . . .
Hate’s just the last thing they’re thinking of
They’re only trying to make it through the night
It’s alright, ’cause I love you
And that’s not gonna change
Run me round, make me hurt again and again
But I’ll still sing you love songs
Written in the letters of your name
And brave the storm to come,
For it surely looks like rain
I don’t want to tie you down
Or fence you in the lines
I might have drawn
It’s just that I’ve gotten used to
Having you around
My landscape would be empty
If you were gone
Rain, rain, go away . . .3
Words by John Barlow
Music by Bob Weir
I used to try to figure out what names might be spelled using only letters corresponding to notes in the musical scale, but I gave up. The available letters are A through G, or through H, if you use the German convention for naming B natural. And the Germans also use “es” (pronounced like the letter S) for E-flat. Or maybe this isn’t what Barlow means at all!
Perhaps he is referring to simple love songs that take a name and than create a phrase for each letter of the name. For example, the name Trish could be parsed in the following way: T is for the tenderness of your soul, R is for the reflective way you look at me, I is for your insightful thoughts in troubled times . . . and so on until the full name is spelled out with corresponding lines.
During the 1980 simulcast of the Halloween show at Radio City Music Hall, Al Franken and Tom Davis engaged in some very funny skits. Weir was asked about songwriting, and he proceeded to demonstrate that he merely took events from his life and set them to music. Franken rolls out a chalkboard and gives Weir the chalk. “For instance, the song ‘Looks Like Rain’ has a line about ‘written in the letters of your name.’ That song starts in the key of G, goes to A, then goes to D, then goes to E, and ends on a C minor. GADEC Minor was the name of this beautiful girl I knew in Prague—the Soviet tanks rolled in in ’68 and I had to leave town in a hurry.” Franken, amazed, says, “So the song ‘Looks Like Rain’ is actually about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia? Amazing.” Of course, Weir delivered this whole spiel with an absolute straight face.
Compare, also, two poems by Edgar Allan Poe:
AN ENIGMA
“Seldom we find,” says Solomon Don Dunce,
“Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.
Through all the flimsy things we see at once
As easily as through a Naples bonnet—
Trash of all trash?—how can a lady don it?
Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff—
Owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff
Twirls into trunk-paper while you con it.”
And, veritably, Sol is right enough.
The general tuckermanities are arrant
Bubbles—ephemeral and so transparent—
But this is, now,—you may depend on it—
Stable, opaque, immortal—all by dint
Of the dear names that lie concealed within’t.
Take the first letter of the first line (S), the second of the second (a), and so on, and you get the name Sarah Anna Lewis, a writer Poe was in contact with. (He sent her the poem, asking her to solve the riddle.)
A VALENTINE
For her these lines are penned, whose luminous eyes,
Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,
Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies
Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.
Search narrowly the lines! They hold a treasure
Divine—a talisman—an amulet
That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure—
The words—the syllables! Do not forget
The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor
And yet there is in this no Gordian knot
Which one might not undo without a sabre,
If one could merely comprehend the plot.
Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering
Eyes scintillating, soul, there lies perdus “Three
eloquent works oft uttered in the hearing
Of poets, by poets, as the name is a poet’s, too.
Its letters, although naturally lying—
Like the knight Pinto—Mendez Ferdinando—
Still form a synonym for truth—Cease trying!
You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do.
Poe used the same method here; the name is Frances Sargent Osgood.
Assuming that John Barlow did the same, I get the name of (this is exciting; I’m finding out as I type this, who Barlow’s valentine was in ’72?) INE WAGISN LHS . . .
Pigpen struck up an acquaintance with Janis Joplin, Big Brother’s new singer. . . . Their friendship soon ripened into something more. On many a night, they would kill off a couple of bottles of Southern Comfort, play and sing themselves into a romantic mood, and retire to Pig’s room, which was situated just above mine. I could hear them grunting and screeching ecstatically very clearly, and I often wonder if the line “Did you ever waken to the sound / of street cats making love,” from Bob’s song “Looks like Rain,” was inspired by the music Pig and Janis made in the dead of night. (Lesh) 95
While not included in Barlow’s version of the lyrics, Weir always sang these lines as a rave-up at the tail end of the song. They’re a good example of the use of nursery rhyme in Grateful Dead lyrics. The “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day” rhyme was first recorded by John Aubrey in 1687.
Written in Cora, Wyoming, January 1972.
Studio recording: Ace (May 1972).
First performance: Probably March 21, 1972, at the Academy of Music in New York. It remained in the repertoire from then on, often sung as a “weather magic” invocation when rain threatened an open-air concert.