On the 31st, the Dead were in the northwest, playing McArthur Court in Eugene, which means that it might well have been on Sunday evening May 25th, 1969, that Garcia, Hunter, and Mountain Girl found themselves watching the 9:30 showing of The Hound of Baskervilles on Channel 2 - and on Monday, May 26th, when Hunter woke up with words and Garcia wrote some music, and “Dire Wolf” came into existence. The song was done by that afternoon, and debuted onstage by the Grateful Dead on Jat the Fillmore West.Īccording to the San Francisco Examiner archives, The Hound of the Baskervilles aired on Bay Area television exactly twice in the spring of 1969, May 25th and May 31st. I said ‘I don't live here because of your sweet temper, it's to write songs!’ Somewhat startled at the vehemence of the statement, he picked up the page and got right to work setting it. He took them and placed them aside without looking at them, continued watching TV. He continued, “I remember giving Jerry the lyrics for ‘Dire Wolf" while he was noodling on guitar, watching television. I think I managed to capture the quality of the dream by writing it down before I was wide awake.” The next morning, he told Steve Silberman, “I woke up and grabbed a pencil before I was entirely awake and wrote the whole song down. But the idea of a great big wolf named Dire was enough to trigger a lyric.” Extinct now, it turns out they were quite small and ran in packs. Hunter wrote, “We thought Dire Wolves were great big beasts. Somebody, possibly Mountain Girl, suggested that it might be a dire wolf. Recalled Robert Hunter in his online journal in 1996, “We were speculating on what the ghostly hound might turn out to be.” ![]() It all started one evening when Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia were home watching television, specifically the 1959 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes. Garcia would dedicate one version (at Winterland in October) to “the Zodiac cat.”īut “Dire Wolf” predated the Zodiac Killer’s arrival in the Bay Area’s consciousness, and was inspired initially by a slightly more classical source: Sherlock Holmes. The song’s jaunty “don’t murder me” chorus would become a mantra for Jerry Garcia when he stopped his car late at night at stoplights, and surely served a similar function for other Bay Area Dead freaks lucky enough to hear early versions of the song before the band recorded it for Workingman’s Dead in the early 1970. *Shipping Charges of Return Item are buyer’s responsibility.Around the time the Grateful Dead started to play “Dire Wolf,” the still-unidentified Zodiac Killer was loose in San Francisco. *Shipping/handling charges are non-refundable. *Guarantee 30 days your money back after we received damage/defected item. So I will try my best to resolve your concerns. *Please contact me immediately if you are not fully satisfied with your purchase.
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