Pen and Ink drawing by Jerry Garcia
The chief lyricists of the Grateful Dead were Robert Hunter, who collaborated primarily with Jerry Garcia but wrote with all the band members, and John Barlow, who collaborated primarily with Bob Weir. Phil Lesh collaborated occasionally with old family friends Robert M. Petersen and Peter Monk, and Bob Weir with Gerrit Graham.
Born October 3, 1947, Jackson Hole, Wyoming. A friend of Bob Weir’s since high school, when they met at Fountain Valley High, a prep school in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where each had been sent to shape up from an early life of misbehavior. Barlow studied literature and theology at Wesleyan, then reunited with Weir in 1967. It was not until several years later that he began writing lyrics for Weir’s songs. He also wrote for Brent Mydland. Since the end of the Grateful Dead’s career he has been writing songs with The String Cheese Incident. He is a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates for freedom in cyberspace, and travels internationally to lecture in service of that cause and to consult with Internet-related business. In 1988, he was elected a Fellow at Harvard Business School’s Berkman Institute for Internet and Society. He lives in Pinedale, Wyoming, and New York City. He has three daughters: Leah, Anna Winter, and Amelia.
Pen and Ink drawing by Jerry Garcia
Born June 23, 1941, in Arroyo Grande, California. The family lived in San Francisco and Palo Alto, where he played trumpet in addition to guitar and violin. He attended the University of Connecticut briefly in 1958. He met Garcia in 1961 in Palo Alto, where they became part of the early Peninsula bohemian scene and musical collaborators, playing together in several early bluegrass and folk bands. Hunter was adopted as the lyricist member of the Grateful Dead in 1967 and remained in this role throughout the band’s career. His work outside the band includes a string of solo albums and several volumes of poetry, including a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. He published his collected lyrics in A Box of Rain, in 1990. He has continued to write, producing lyrics for a range of musicians from the band Zero to country singer Jim Lauderdale. He lives in Marin County, California. He has three children, Charlotte, Jesse, and Kate.
Pen and Ink drawing by Jerry Garcia
Born on March 21, 1937, in New York City. He majored in Philosophy and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1958. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1958 to 1962. On leaving the Navy, he again made his way around the world from New York, through Europe to Asia and eventually to Sri Lanka and Thailand, where he became an ordained Buddhist monk, a calling he took seriously for the rest of his life. Returning to the United States in late 1967, he served as some kind of spiritual force during his years in the Grateful Dead’s extended family, attending many births and performing many marriages. He tried to minister to the suffering and the dying. He had three children, Bodhi, Eva, and Johnny Violet. Peter died in 1992.
Peter wrote songs recorded by the Grateful Dead, Mickey Hart, the Dinosaurs, Richie Havens, and Peter, Paul, and Mary. He wrote poetry throughout his life. Peter also made collages that reflected the complexity of his worldview and that sometimes just gathered together the extended family of the Dead for a calendar, a book, or an album cover.
Born in 1936, of a solid middle-class background in Klamath Falls, Oregon. In the fifties, he hopped freights, played jazz saxaphone, and attended San Mateo College, in California, where he met Phil Lesh, with whom he later wrote several songs for the Dead. Sometimes, he lived on the mountain. He served time. He knew the lore of the West, its local and natural history. He practiced freedom. He bridged the Beat scene of San Francisco to the rock era, like his sometime companion, Neal Cassady. He was a constant presence in the Grateful Dead’s world, from its earliest days in Palo Alto. He published one volume of poetry during his lifetime, Far Away Radios. A posthumous edition of his collected poems, Alleys of the Heart, was published by Hulogosi. Petersen died in 1987. He has one son, Didrik.
Born in New York, New York, November 27, 1948, and grew up in St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago. Graduated from Groton School in 1966. He attended Columbia University through spring 1968, studying French literature. Caught up in the events of that spring, Graham heard the Grateful Dead when they played for striking students who opposed the war in Vietnam. He dropped out of Columbia to become a professional actor, cast opposite Robert De Niro in the Brian De Palma movie Greetings. He moved to Hollywood when Andy Leonard, who worked for Grateful Dead Records (and shot the cover photo for Grateful Dead from Mars Hotel), introduced Graham to Weir, in the fall of 1974, and they became close friends. Weir asked Graham to take a stab at writing lyrics for the incipient song “Victim or the Crime.” Pleased with the results, they wrote four songs for Ratdog’s Evening Moods, and are still collaborating. Graham continues to act, with a lengthy resumé in TV, movies, and stage.