What the Lyrics Mean: Phil Lesh and the Grateful Dead

Writer's Life

The famous Grateful Dead skeleton with roses was borrowed from an illustration by Edmund Joseph Sullivan for an edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of 1913. This is my sketch of Sullivan’s black and white picture, with added red.

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

“Box of Rain” lyric by Robert Hunter music by Phil Lesh

Phil Lesh has passed and many of us think of the song he co-wrote, “Box of Rain,” one of the great songs by the Grateful Dead.

I’ve come here to tell you a story about following the Grateful Dead and I feel a terrific resistance. Since the theme today is “the writer’s life” about everything to do with being a writer, I’ve decided to make my resistance part of the story. What is this resistance? I think I feel protective of the time. Also, I’ve written up the ferret story before, though I never did anything with it and don’t know where it is. Here goes.

When I was in college I had a grad student boyfriend who was a Deadhead. I myself had a few Dead albums and loved a bunch of their songs but was bored by the long jam sessions. My grad student had tons of cassette tapes of live show jam sessions, and I bore with them.

He had spent many days and nights following the Grateful Dead around from show to show, camping as you go, and he wanted me to love it as much as he did. It was close. I liked riding around the country in his little VW bug, being part of a people that would take over highways with red roses on bumper stickers, and swarm rest stops with our recognizable style, honking and waving and talking to each other like friends. My grad student was not broke which softened the edges.

One morning I woke up in a pup tent, happy, having tripped on mescaline the night before. I’d had an amazing time interacting with lots of happy, high people who all seemed to want to share everything with me. I was a pretty eighteen year old girl with long brown hair dressed in a pretty purple and white flow-y Indian skirt and had everything I needed—just the sort of person with whom people want to share food, wine, smokes, weed. Was I scared when I’d venture off on my own? Yes, but it had been a pitch black fairyland of music, dancing, and goodwill.

I wake up first and decide I need to go down to where there are portable toilets and a river to wash up in. It’s not close, and there is no path there, it is like being on a crowded beach where every six foot square was someone’s sovereign territory.

So I start to make my way towards the river and rather soon in my journey Presto! I am joined by a ferret. I am frightened at first. I am actually frightened of everything but am trying to be a free spirit. So I’m trying to get the ferret to stop following me at my side, but I can’t shake him. I’m still quite buzzing from last night and this ferret thing seems cartoonishly strange. I try to ignore the little beast and restart wending my way through the tents, hoping he’ll leave me alone, but people start saying it right away, changing my mood toward the small menace, “Nice Ferret!”

“Nice ferret!” “Nice ferret!”“Nice ferret!”“Nice ferret!” “I love your ferret!

What can I say? At first I deny him, “He’s not mine!” “He’s not mine!” “He’s not mine!” I respond, but that starts to feel wrong.

Clearly he is with me. So I switch to “Thank you!” and even stop for a moment to chat here and there, each time the ferret waiting impatiently at my hem. “He’s not mine,” I then confess, to which they say, “Are you hungry? Would you like any of our stuff?”

I decide at some point that his owner must have a similar skirt, and that as long as it follows me back to my tent it should be able to reunite. That’s why I remember what I was wearing so clearly. Anyway, that is what happened, the ferret stayed with me at the river where a bunch of gorgeous young people splashed themselves in various states of undress, ineffable beauty, and it followed me back (“Nice ferret!” “Nice ferret!”“Nice ferret!”) and then disappeared, I hoped sensing its rightful human.

Here’s the ending of “Box of Rain”:

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

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

I’ve always thought these were some brilliant lines. It’s well known that Lesh wrote the tune as a song to sing to his dying father. He gave it to Hunter who said it wrote itself. The lines are so great because

1. In all the millions of love songs that promise to do all sorts of things for the beloved, how many straight out ask, “What do you want me to do?” The frequent choruses over a relatively long lyric lets the singer say it over and over.

2. It’s very tender, to me, that invitation to “inch your way” forward “through dead dreams.” We don’t think to say that until we know it first hand. The song knows about dead dreams and that you can be faced with them when you are tired and broken and can’t think straight.

3. The world is a box of rain, mostly ocean. Hunter once said it’s box of rain because ball of rain didn’t sound quite right. We are free to also imagine a box full of rain —that is a comfort.

4. I love the way “In and out the window/ Like a moth before a flame” shows us humans appreciating the weather from inside and outside, flitting — it would seem in a time lapse film—like a moth around a flame.

5. When the song says it doesn’t know who put the world here it is suggesting the possibility of a God, which is then gently dismissed with “believe it if you need it/ or leave it if you dare.”

6. I love how much is made of the box of rain and yet in the last moment it is swapped out for a hair ribbon, another hopelessly beautiful image, much unlike the rain but calling to mind all that is lovely, and girlish, and trying to be lovely in the world.

7. It doesn’t get better than that final couplet. It’s true in a way that is entirely melancholy and in a way that is hopelessly sweet. The melancholy is that you are sad to be away from home, and yet sad for your adventure away to feel so brief. The sweetness is from the same thing, you had a good time, but you love your real life. It’s dear either way.

8. I think the sweetness of the crowd was at least one iota created by the fact that one of the band’s anthems was so kind and incredibly giving.

So is my ferret story a Grateful Dead story? Should I add that among the things I had fun despite being scared of was dancing like a Deadhead? In my next incarnation, later in college, I found that I could jump around to punk, and from there eventually became a willing dancing fool, but in my Grateful Dead days I deeply lamented that I could not let go of my inhibitions enough to sway and wiggle around like the dancers there did.

I don’t now know how to reconcile the real danger I look back and see myself in, with my charmed memory; nor the free spirited me traveling to the river and back with a mildly wild animal, yet afraid to fully boogie; in a kind of paradise, though I loved some of the songs but didn’t entirely dig the music, which was at the center of it all. That said, I think my resistance to writing this was overcome when I started trying to be honest about how complex the experience actually was. So you kids go ahead and try it at home!

Do you have any Grateful Dead memories? Or have you ever followed a band from show to show? Have a ferret story? Let us know in the comments!

***

That’s all the news. Stay well, stop spring cleaning, it’s time to hunker down for the winter. Hunker with all you’ve got. Write a few lines, or draw a picture of yourself with a thought bubble. If you can’t think of words to put in it, just pick one word. Why not a verb? Why not “Hunker!” Okay, that’s my time. Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage us again.

love,

Jennifer