“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relationship to the dead poets and artists.”
— T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent” in Selected Essays
n his Foreword, Hunter addresses the tradition deeply, illuminating for us the inspiration of his own songwriting. He defines the musical innovations of the Grateful Dead as blending and building upon genres of music from classical to the American songbook. And he allows that David Dodd’s annotations are another way to draw our attention to the cultural heritage of the West. We glimpse the hunting grounds of creativity through reference in literature, history, folklore, folk song, contemporary writing, Americana, biblical narrative. Where it can be done because a prior published source can be tracked down and cited, he has done it. He has not been rigorous in restricting citation to eminent tomes, for the playful influence of his website correspondents is evident. He has let them in to enliven his scholarly apparatus. Who is to say that these connections, seen in some gold band or dark hollow of concert experience, are not essential? No creative mystery has been violated in David’s work, and perhaps it could not be.
My own part in this story began in 1961 in a bookstore with coffee tables in Palo Alto, Keplers, where the sources, the books in the then-new paperbound form, ranged like wizened fruit along crowded shelves. These we devoured to the sounds of Garcia’s daily practice. He sang to us—Hunter, Petersen, Lesh, Laird, Christie, Legate, and others, some of whom later fell off the bus or are no longer with us. A growing extension of this living room has been home ever since, with ever-new family members joining till we are legion. The art arising from those beginnings and their maturity is now itself becoming part of the tradition, entering a new room with new players, a new world being born.
It has been my fortune to have maintained these old connections and to have been steward of the Grateful Dead’s song catalog for most of the time since the founding of Ice Nine Publishing Company, in 1970. It is a rare privilege to have the opportunity to bring such a body of work to publication.
To Robert Hunter, to the Grateful Dead in the immediate and largest sense, to John Barlow, Bobby Petersen, and Peter Monk, to all those with the Free Press and March Tenth who have put up with our strictures, to my loving family, and to our illustrator, Jim Carpenter, who has brought a subtle humor to the work, thank you.
—Alan Trist
Ice Nine Publishing Company
San Rafael, California
March 2005