Grateful Dead Book Reviews

Brackett traces “Touch of Grey” from Robert Hunter’s early sketches through the Dead’s evolving live arrangements beginning in 1982, showing how both the words and music continued to shift over several years. After Garcia nearly died, lyrics about getting by and surviving suddenly carried a resonance neither Hunter nor Garcia could have anticipated when the song first began taking shape.

A Box of Rain is less a songbook than a literary artifact—a window into the mind of the man who gave language to the Grateful Dead’s musical soul. Hunter, the band’s primary lyricist and one of rock’s most distinctive writers, gathered nearly three decades of work in the first printing.