Days of the Dead, Part 2: A Box of Rain Will Ease the Pain …
… and love will see Deadheads through
Look out of any window
Any morning, any evening, any day
Maybe the sun is shining
Birds are winging, no rain is falling from a heavy sky
What do you want me to do
To do for you to see you through?
For this is all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago
There are few better ways to start the day than by playing “Box of Rain,” the first track from Grateful Dead’s 1970 album American Beauty. It’s a collaboration between bassist Phil Lesh and Robert Hunter with an easy, rolling piano-driven rhythm in the go-to key of G and shimmering lyrics influenced by language poetics. Hunter, who passed in 2019, was an empath who felt the pain Lesh was experiencing as the bassist’s father entered the end-stage phase of terminal cancer, and absorbed the melody and cadence Lesh verbally expressed to him. “Ball of rain” didn’t work in the lyrics as a metaphor for the world, so “box of rain” was substituted.
The result was the most beautiful song in the Grateful Dead’s repertoire. Lesh worked on it as he drove back in forth to visit his father in hospice care. The band played it for the first time September 17, 1970 at the Fillmore East as part of their acoustic set. They played it for the last time July 3, 1995 as the opening number of the first of three shows at Chicago’s Soldier Field.
The band members would play the song again at Soldier Field sans Garcia for the first of three Fare Thee Well dates in 2015. They struggled during the previous two decades to supply the Deadhead universe with a cohesive focal point, a Kaaba for their widespread worshippers to make pilgrimages to. Lesh, Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart had continue tp play the music of the Dead and tour in various incarnations, but their hadn’t been an event until Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of the Grateful Dead.
Walk out of any doorway
Feel your way like the day before
Maybe you'll find direction
Around some corner where it's been waiting to meet you
What do you want me to do
To watch for you while you're sleeping?
Then please don't be surprised when you find me dreaming too
The name of that concert series was a mouthful but the final struggle before the reunification that would unite the tribes was what to call it, and what to call the band. It’s unfortunate that completely appropriate-sounding Dead & Company didn’t come into use closer to Garcia’s August 9, 1995 passing. The stigma surrounding band reunions without key members was pretty strong at the time. Led Zeppelin couldn’t go on after John Bonham died. Steve Perry going solo was the end of Journey. Freddie Mercury was irreplaceable.
Of course, the members of Led Zeppelin performed again without Bonham. Neil Schon makes bank touring with the current lineup of Journey. Queen paying tribute to itself with a new singer paved the way for the ultimate tribute to Mercury in the form of s biopic. Styx is happily making a living playing for enthusiastic fans without Dennis DeYoung. Even Foghat keeps slow riding, fueled by the irrepressible and contagious enthusiasm of drummer Roger Earl.
Times are different now. It’s acceptable for bands to make commercials. Audiences know recording artists make less than one percent royalties from streaming services and are more tolerant of product endorsements and tour sponsorships.
Look into any eyes
You find by you, you can see clear to another day
Maybe been seen before
Through other eyes on other days while going home
What do you want me to do
To do for you to see you through?
It's all a dream we dreamed one afternoon long ago
The Deadhead community had been coping with the loss of the Grateful Dead long before Garcia died. An arrest while he was parked in a car under the influence of narcotics, and a diabetic coma, made headlines in the mid-’80s before the 1987 album Touch of Grey put the band back on top. They never stopped being a touring powerhouse, but by the mid-’70s they started to lead their own alternative culture that followed them from tour stop to tour stop. The Grateful Dead has achieved success on their own terms, with a workforce and traveling market depending on that success continuing, and now had to maintain it.
They had influential allies in Rolling Stone and publisher Jann Wenner, who would embed journalists with tours to write stories with cover teasers like “The Good Ol’ Grateful Dead.” The rest of the music press increasingly disdained them for being musical dinosaurs, playing sloppily (to their ears} and out of tune (hmm…). FM radio dropped every Grateful Dead song from album-oriented rock playlists until morphing into the classic rock format and playing “Casey Jones” and “Truckin’” ad nauseum. Garcia’s health went into sharp decline after the release of 1980 album Go to Heaven.
That album contained “Althea,” the song that John Mayer heard on Pandora in 2011 and became enchanted with. Forty-one years had elapsed since Garcia appeared with the rest of the band dressed in white like angels for the Go to Heaven album cover. Garcia’s health increasingly affected his stage presence and playing from that time forward, but that was not part of Mayer’s consciousness when he heard the song.
Walk into splintered sunlight
Inch your way through dead dreams to another land
Maybe you're tired and broken
Your tongue is twisted with words half spoken and thoughts unclear
What do you want me to do
To do for you, to see you through?
A box of rain will ease the pain and love will see you through
“Althea” stands out on an album that opens with uptempo boogie track “Alabama Getaway,” which became a setlist mainstay. The production sheen on most of the material would make the term “yacht rock” come to mind in many modern media influencers, with dated-sounding guitar effects and laid-back funk workouts that sound more like a reaction to Little Feat than a band reputed for long jam sessions that cause mind-expanding experiences.
Mayer gets Garcia’s snaky guitar sound down when playing live, and his voice perfectly fits the song albeit an octave lower than Garcia’s. Mayer fits Dead & Company on almost every level, and he clearly loves playing in the band. It’s been an unreal chapter for Deadheads who witnessed Garcia go from messiah-like figure to grandfatherly figure in a short amount of time, then joined the jam band followers of Phish and Widespread Panic to keep the party going.
One of the effects of Touch of Grey was a revival of jam band aesthetics that coincided with the rise of alternative music. The album came out at the same time as Jane’s Addiction’s groundbreaking full-length debut. The Grateful Dead had long been dismissed in favor of whatever flavors-of-the-month were en vogue with the music criticism establishment but were rediscovered by aspiring musicians in college towns who couldn’t relate to punk, new wave, new romantics, speed metal or synth pop. A new scene had sprung up with bands that could play when the Grateful Dead could not due to Garcia’s absences due to illness. Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians had a huge hit with “What I Am,” which would not have sounded out of place on Go to Heaven.
In the beginning though there was Chuck Berry fan Garcia, a small Fender amplifier, a Sears guitar and an uncle who tuned it to an open chord. Garcia admits he was too arrogant to take lessons, lost a finger in an accident that would have been useful for fingerstyle and played banjo for three years before meeting Hunter and starting the band that would become the Grateful Dead.
Just a box of rain, wind and water
Believe it if you need it, if you don't just pass it on
Sun and shower, wind and rain
In and out the window like a moth before a flame
And it's just a box of rain, I don't know who put it there
Believe it if you need it or leave it if you dare
And it's just a box of rain, or a ribbon for your hair
Such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there
Dead & Company’s Dead Forever residency at Sphere concludes Saturday, August 10