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It’s Friday; here’s what we’ve prepared.
before death
Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, who died in 2019, didn’t just write songs, though his name appears on a surprising number of great songs, including “Casey Jones,” “Ripples,” “Dark Stars” and Bob Dylan’s “The Ugliest Girl in the World” (Yes, this is a pro-“Ugliest Girl in the World” family, don’t @ us.) He has also published his own collection of poems and translated them. Erke’s poetry collection Duino Elegy Coming from originally German, this is impressive since Hunter doesn’t speak German. But as far as we and Death biographer Dennis McNally know, he has only written one long collection of essays, which was not published until this week: a novelistic memoir titled Death Silver Roaring Hornchronicles Hunter’s friendship with 19-year-old Jerry Garcia, circa 1961, a few years before Garcia formed a band called the Warlocks and began his A journey to cultural immortality.
The book, now in stores, is a fascinating record of a historical moment—the transitional period between the Beat Generation era and the rise of the hippies—that shaped the trajectory of a musical legend. You can read an excerpt here , in which Hunter and Garcia performed live for the first time as a duo, with Hunter briefly getting a taste of fame until Garcia decided they should go their separate ways. (The breakup wasn’t entirely over; while Hunter never played music with the Dead, he continued to write songs with Garcia and the rest of the band for three decades.)
Cole Comfort
On the tension within the songwriter’s friend group: After getting over one of the most reviled rap beefs in recent history, thereby sparing his family from a “Meet the Grahams”-style attack on him as a rapper and as a human being Traumatized by failed interpretations, J. Cole has cleared out his busy bike/beach/beat schedule and is back to work. Details on new song “Port Antonio,” where Jermaine Cole finally talks about his role in Drake and Kendrick’s feud while also Suppressing rumors of a feud with Drake, that’s lacking. After “sadly” rhymes with “smear me,” “bloodline,” “unbelievable” and “hypothetically” – we can see Kirstein fans turning up the volume when reading this sentence Memetic Looks — Cole ends with a few conciliatory bars, with Sapp writing, “Feeling maybe addressed to Drake and himself: ‘Knocking your magic pen back is a priority/Reminding these guys why We do this / It’s not to vent, it’s to speak our mind / Push ourselves and get on the charts” This is something we remind ourselves every time we sit down to write this newsletter.
