By ‘box of rain,’ I meant the world we live on…” Hunter once said in an email response to a listener that he wrote the “box of rain” line because “ball of rain” didn’t “have the right ring.” And what is a ball of rain? Again, Hunter, in the same exchange: “Well, I don’t like to do this, since it encourages others to ask about what I had in mind when I wrote a song, and mostly you’d need to have my mind to understand even approximately what I had in it.
I will decline to do so, as usual, opting instead for acting as a pointer to possible avenues of conversation. Hunter’s imagery-a box of rain, ribbons for your hair, splintered sunlight-and the situations into which they are inserted in this lyric-someone communicating with someone else, or with everyone else, about the mysteries of this life: what’s coming up around the next corner?-make this song swirl around endlessly. It stayed in the repertoire after that, and was the last song ever played in concert by the band, on July 9, 1995. It was finally brought back on Ma(first day of Spring, Lesh’s birth-week…), at the Coliseum in Hampton, Virginia. It didn’t stay in the rotation long-just through mid-1973 or so-after which it fell away for, oh, 13 years. The song, which features Lesh in his first lead vocal for the band, opens side one of “American Beauty,” which was released in November 1970, but it didn’t appear in concert until October 9, 1972, at Winterland. One way or another, that must have been a catalyst for his imagination-a day later, he presented me with some of the most moving and heartfelt lyrics I’ve ever had the good fortune to sing.” Lesh’s own version is slightly different, as laid out in his autobiography, Searching for the Sound: “…actually, I merely mentioned casually that I’d be working out the vocals as I drove to visit.
If ever a lyric ‘wrote itself,’ this did-as fast as the pen would pull.” But according to Hunter, “Phil Lesh wanted a song to sing to his dying father and had composed a piece complete with every vocal nuance but the words. Have you ever tried that? I’m not even sure how it was possible to write a coherent song, much less a great song, using that method.
In describing the evolution of the song, he says he gave Hunter a tape with each syllable of the melody, and Hunter drafted words to go with the melody and the sense of the song as conveyed by Lesh. Lesh was driving out to the Livermore Valley (where I grew up!) on a regular basis, and this song came to be during those drives. When he was a youngster of only 29 or 30, he and Robert Hunter collaborated to write “Box of Rain.” It was a song written to and for his father, who at the time was in his final days. This last week, on March 15, Phil Lesh turned 73 years old.
#Growing up lyrics phil free#
Therefore, the best part, I would hope, would not be anything in particular that I might have to say, but rather, the conversation that may happen via the comments over the course of time-and since all the posts will stay up, you can feel free to weigh in any time on any of the songs! With Grateful Dead lyrics, there’s always a new and different take on what they bring up for each listener, it seems. Here’s the plan-each week, I will blog about a different song, focusing, usually, on the lyrics, but also on some other aspects of the song, including its overall impact-a truly subjective thing.
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