The Birth of Terrapin Synchronicity
by Gary S. Bobroff, M.A.
Robert Hunter (left) and Jerry Garcia (right)
Songwriting partnerships are frequently amongst the most intimate of friendships. Often they are two people who know each other very well and who have the repeated opportunity to express their feelings towards each other in song. They have privilege of putting words in each other’s mouth. They are creating together; jointly bringing something new into the world.
Beginning in the early 1960’s when they travelled the country together following bluegrass originator Bill Monroe until the latter’s death in 1995, Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia created music together. Hunter wrote the now-called Americana-style lyrics that gave the Grateful Dead much of its meaning, depth and beauty and Garcia wrote the music and led the pioneering band through its improvisational spaces on over 2000 different nights.
Together they asked us to “look for a while at the China Cat Sunflower” – coming out of it were “comic book colours on a violin river cryin' Leonardo words from out a silk trombone.” Here Hunter’s words capture the joyful movement of psychadelia.
Together they gave us the vivacious Sugar Magnolia who:
‘can dance a Cajun rhythm
Jump like a Willys in four wheel drive
She's a summer love in the spring, fall and winter
She can make happy any man alive.
They made music of death and rebirth, reflecting the journeys of consciousness they were making. They well-earned the day-after enlightened appreciation of waking up to “to find out that you are the Eyes of the World. Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings.”
They wrote songs in styles of folk ballads, Brazilian samba, haiku but most of all they uncovered a uniquely American hybrid. Live–a Grateful Dead show regularly included country, jazz, experimental, heavy rock and more influences. Their stories of Jack Straw, Brown-Eyed Women, Row Jimmy and Tennessee Jed bring land, place and character to life.
“There’s no way to measure Jerry’s greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player. I don’t think any eulogizing will do him justice. He was that great, much more than a superb musician, with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He’s the very spirit personified of whatever is Muddy River country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal. To me he wasn’t only a musician and friend, he was more like a big brother who taught and showed me more than he’ll ever know. There’s a lot of spaces and advances between The Carter Family, Buddy Holly and, say, Ornette Coleman, a lot of universes, but he filled them all without being a member of any school. His playing was moody, awesome, sophisticated, hypnotic and subtle. There’s no way to convey the loss. It just digs down really deep.” – Bob Dylan
“Hunter’s got a way with words and I do too. We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting.” – Bob Dylan
Hunter translated two volumes of Rilke poetry and wrote his own as well. He “took word-working seriously wherever he found it.”* His knowledge of literary and songwriting tradition was voluminous: he included Edith Sitwell’s Queen Chinee, Sugaree, the Doodah Man and Charlie Chan. Hunter and Garcia wrote through the musical lineages that they loved and carried the listener into that past with them.
They’re writing songs about getting ‘busted down in New Orleans” (Truckin’), about girlfriends on the side (Loose Lucy), Love in the Afternoon, and aging’s Touch of Grey. They’re sharing the stories of their lives: loss and redemption (Wharf Rat), disappointment, pain and grace.
Ten years ago I walked this street
my dreams were riding tall
Tonight I would be thankful
Lord, for any dream at all
Some folks would be happy
just to have one dream come true
but everything you gather
is just more that you can lose. – Mission in the Rain
In a song like “‘Days Between,’ Hunter was trying to talk to Jerry . . . Bob hoped Jerry would understand how torn he was. Hunter was turning those moments into poetry.’”* Sometimes they even seem to be gently helping each other face what they rather would not.
Can't talk to you without talking to me
We're guilty of the same old things
Thinking a lot about less and less
And forgetting the love we bring. – Althea
And then on a single day, each one separately found themselves with their grandest creation alive in their heads. Watching a lightning storm across the San Francisco bay, Hunter begins with an invocation of the Muse:
Let my inspiration flow
In token rhyme suggesting rhythm
That will not forsake me
Till my tale is told and done
Hunter calls to the creative goddess and she hears him, delivering him the words and even tapping his partner on the shoulder too! At that very moment Garcia was driving across the Richmond-San Rafael bridge and heard the melody. He turned around and went home to get it on tape. The next day they met up and handed the song to each other. “I showed him the words and he said, 'I've got the music.' They dovetailed perfectly and Terrapin edged into this dimension.”*
One of the most interesting facets of our world is the phenomenon of synchronicity–a term coined by psychologist C. G. Jung to refer to moments of symbolic expression in the coordination of worldly events; those times of meaningful interaction of inner state and outer activity. The arrival of two halves of a piece of music to each of its authors simultaneously reflects a creative unity outside of time and space, a living shared field between them. The emergence of Terrapin Station into the consciousness of Hunter and Garcia in a single moment reflects a quality of reality that our culture tends to overlook.
We tend to associate mind with thinking and rationality, but it is the presence of real emotional bonds that are the foundation for shared psychic experiences like the one that gave birth to Terrapin. Jung saw feeling as a quantitative measure of psychic energy—where there is feeling there is psychic weight—and that mass potentiates the field into which a synchronicity can then arrive. Where there is a synchronicity there is emotion either conscious or unconscious, in a single person or shared by two people.
“Synchronistic phenomena occur for the most part in emotional situations; for instance, in cases of death, sickness, accident and so on. . . . We observe them relatively frequently at moments of heightened emotional activation, which need not however be conscious.” – C. G. Jung
Synchronicities or extended mind experiences emerge out of psychic fields weighted by real emotion. Another expression of this would be shared dreams amongst couples or others. We are indeed joined by our heartstrings and that union can sometimes bend events into being.
The inclusion of feeling in our understanding of synchronistic events points to a worldview not unlike the one the Chinese recognized and recorded in the Tao and the I Ching. Those ancient observers of reality saw that our inner emotional state was connected to the events of the world and that inner changes could effect outer circumstances.
So too does modern science reflect this view (but it doesn’t know it yet). The work of Cambridge biologist Rupert Sheldrake echoes the observation that psyche is a field phenomenon, not something enclosed in our brain. His excellent book, The Sense of Being Stared At, presents mountains of evidence for the understanding that consciousness extends beyond the body. Scientifically controlled staring experiments have a regular success of 55% which is astronomically significant statistically but greater still are the success rate of those who know each other well, partners, family members and siblings. Best of all, of course, are twins. So the extension of consciousness is a scientific fact that our culture has yet to fully accept. More mysterious and unaccepted still is the role that emotion plays in such fields.
Ken Kesey (middle) and Neal Cassady (Right) at the Acid Tests
The Grateful Dead was a music born of the field-experience. It began at the 1966 Acid Tests–a cacophony of participative noise, art and dance fuelled by the then-legal LSD–hosted by their friends Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Being attuned to a tripster’s sensitivities made them capable of being intimate with their audience for thirty years. The space they created with their fans could be so quiet that you could hear a pin drop (the middle of Stella Blue) and at other times so ecstatic that Joseph Campbell called it the “antidote to the atom bomb.”
Hunter and Garcia lived at the epicenter of a daily experiment in emotion-filled fields. Their deep connection allowed Terrapin to be born unto them as it was. That love, although it was one covered-over by a manly facade, was real and produced a sparkling rock anthem that spoke to that heart of who they were.
Terrapin tells the story of a Lady with a fan who throws it into the lion’s den requiring her suitors to regain it to receive her.
Which of you to gain me, tell
Will risk uncertain pains of hell?
I will not forgive you
If you will not take the chance.
Is the Lady’s challenge met? And, if so, has the hero made a worthy choice? It is left up to the listener to decide if the victor was correct in his risk:
The storyteller makes no choice
Soon you will not hear his voice
His job is to shed light
And not to master.
With a second invocation of the Muse, Hunter gives the song’s message:
Inspiration move me brightly
Light the song with sense and color
Hold away despair
More than this I will not ask
Faced with mysteries dark and vast
statements just seem vain at last
Some rise
some fall
some climb
to get to Terrapin.
Asking only to be saved from inner darkness and be shown the road to meaning, Hunter confronts the vanity of larger conclusions. Yet he cannot help but remark on the fact of the reality of healing and of growth–or individuation as Jung called it. We do work out things and get to a better place, we may fail our way there or succeed into it, but either way our own little measure of real enlightenment is possible. We do indeed become more whole.
“The greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble…. They can never be solved, but only outgrown…. This ‘outgrowing’, as I formerly called it, on further experience was seen to consist in a new level of consciousness. Some higher or wider interest arose on the person’s horizon, and through this widening of view, the insoluble problem lost its urgency. It was not solved logically in its own terms, but faded out when confronted with a new and stronger life-tendency.” – C. G. Jung
Is this not also the purpose of synchronicity itself? To enlarge our view of the world? To open our eye to meaning and expand our faith and hope? That sentiment is echoed in Hunter and Garcia’s own beat-infused Taoist road spirituality (inherited in part from their friendship with the real-life protagonist of Kerouac’s On The Road Neal Cassady).
I had one of those flashes I'd been there before, been there before
Well, I ain't always right but I've never been wrong
Seldom turns out the way it does in a song
Once in a while you get shown the light
In the strangest of places if you look at it right. – Scarlet Begonias
The word ‘terrapin’ can be connected to the Greek word therapeuin; to attend to, to do service, to take care of. Most assuredly Hunter and Garcia attended to each other and to making creative babies together. They were there for each other, witness to each other’s life, in the most intimate and important ways.
I have spent my life
Seeking all that’s still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me.
– Attics of My Life
Like Lennon & McCartney, Hunter and Garcia’s creativity was the product of a deeply loving friendship, of eros, of two people who were deeply emotionally engaged with each other. Not one to express his feelings much, Jerry told Hunter that he loved him a week before he passed. But long before that, when they were at their peak and sharing the greatest intimate engagement in their lives – magic happened.
Hunter and Garcia were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2015. Hunter is the only non-performer in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Robert Hunter died September 23rd, 2019.
Let it be known there is a fountain
That was not made by the hands of men. – Ripple
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For more on Robert Hunter:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/robert-hunter-gave-the-grateful-dead-its-voice
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2019/09/robert-hunter-obituary.html
https://religionnews.com/2019/09/26/robert-hunter-religion/