Interview with Robert Hunter and Greg Anton, August 25, 1997

When I Can't Tell the Song from the Singer

xian

Since you know that Judge is the vocalist, do you write into his voice or his sense of phrasing, or do you just give him the words and it's his "art" to figure out how to sing them.

RH

That's a subliminal thing. I've never been able to give a truly correct answer to that. I don't write for anyone's sense of phrasing but my own. It's a hard question. I don't really know. I bet there was a time when I thought I would write something different for Jerry than I would write for myself, for example. Generally though, there were things I would say that he wouldn't, and I wouldn't say those things.

Jerry didn't want to get into political rave-ups and stuff and I appreciated that and didn't go in those directions, though I was quite capable of it. With Zero, I can get a little more into that stuff, like the Wounded Knee business in Spoken For and in Possession. They're more politically conscious. I had no desire to be entirely apolitical or anything. It's a stance I took which happened to fit the Grateful Dead pretty well. It hasn't fit Zero that well. They're more political beasts than the Dead was.

xian

You and Jerry kind of co-evolved a vocabulary of songs that part of the audience took to be Jerry talking to them, though some people knew they were your words most of the time. Millions of hallucinating people believed that this voice was telling them something, but with Zero there's seem to be much more of a consciousness that Robert Hunter, the well known established lyricist has now joined forces with this band.

RH

Jerry was a magnificent, charismatic star, and anyone within 20 miles of him was over there in the limelight somewhere. That's not the case with Zero. Zero is not a personality cult, and the Grateful Dead was, to a large degree. The rest of us took on a hazy sort of half-life while Jerry radiated out there.

The Dead Audience and Zero

xian

It sometimes feels like the whole Dead thing and the whole "Kimock sounding like Garcia" thing that a lot of fans focus on, whether or not that's true, seems to dog Zero a little bit just because, who wants to be so much like any other thing?

They're looking at Zero as spare parts for re- forming the Dead. This is disturbing.

On the other hand, perhaps Jerry's disappearance from the material plane, and the Dead not being a performing band, has opened up more space for other musicians, other bands. even literally, in that dollars that maybe went to a Dead show are now free.

RH

Reading stuff on the Net, though, people are starting to more and more vocably demand that the Dead reform in some way. They're not content that we all have our own little individual spaces that we're developing right now. They're even tending to look at Zero as spare parts for re-forming the Dead. This is disturbing.

xian

Your collaboration with Zero arguable lends some of the Dead cachet to Zero, as a marketing tool or a cultural thing, doesn't it? That's a double-edged sword.

RH

True, but if you actually look at it phenomenologically, I'm adding my cachet to Zero, but if they're identifying me as the Dead, then they think I'm adding the Dead cachet. It's all definitions, isn't it?

It's weird, and I have to not let it influence me as much as possible. When I sit down to write a song, I just write a song the same way I ever wrote a song, and that stuff goes away. But the way people accept it is in terms of known categories, and maybe, for that reason, they're hearing their fantasies overlaid on what's really there. I'd like to see some new audiences come in for something like Zero, some people who're maybe a little even "Dead innocent," so they can truly hear Zero.

xian

You don't want one band to have, as it's ultimate the goal, the whole audience of another band. You want people who didn't know about or didn't like the Dead, but, maybe because they like jazz more, or...

RH

Anybody who likes Coltrane likes Miles, right? You don't get mistakes about that. And anybody who likes Zero's gonna like the Dead, and I assume vice versa. There is a local loose-limbed, jamming sort of thing--I would tend to call it indigenous San Francisco music - of which the Dead partook, rather than the Dead created it and anybody else who works in that form is somehow copping off the Dead. I don't think that Zero does cop off the Dead.

xian

Is that an issue for you at all, Greg, or is that just audience bullshit that doesn't mean anything to you?

Greg

The latter.

Kimock's Role in Composing Zero Tunes

RH

Kimock has a unique guitar voice.

Greg

Usually, I give Hunter some chord changes, and we go back and forth. I'll try to fit the words on in, I'll ask him for another chorus, or this or that. Then Steve usually will rearrange it to some extent, add a bridge, add a chorus, or leave it alone. That's pretty much how it's gone. With Chance in a Million we went through a whole bunch of verse ideas, re-wrote the song a bunch of time, worked up the verses, and finally came up with Chance in a Million. But with End of the World Blues, I don't think one word or syllable or lick changed from the original thing. It just snapped together. So every song's a little bit different.