![]() ![]() For “Ripple,” Garcia constructed a melody that was pure and humble, tinged with a bit of sadness. Lines like that were tailor-made for Garcia because he could deliver heady profundities like that with a twinkle in his voice, keeping them grounded when they easily could have floated off into the ether. When asked by Rolling Stone earlier this year to name a certain lyric of which he was particularly proud, he responded, “Let it be known there is a fountain/ That was not made by the hands of men,” a line from “Ripple.” “That’s pretty much my favorite line I ever wrote, that’s ever popped into my head. Hunter certainly seems to think he was firing on all cylinders for the song. Workingman’s Dead was quickly followed by American Beauty, and from that latter album came “Ripple,” perhaps the quintessence of both the band’s delicate studio magic and the Garcia/Hunter partnership. Yet in 1970, the Dead released a pair of studio albums within months of each other that seemed to both capture the unease of an entire generation unmoored from their ideals and act as a balm to soothe those disappointments. Along those same lines, the songwriting prowess of the band, which often boiled down to the music of Jerry Garcia and the lyrics of Robert Hunter, doesn’t always get the credit it deserves. As a result of their well-deserved reputation as the preeminent live act of their era, it’s understandable that the studio recordings of The Grateful Dead can be somewhat overshadowed.
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