The British Roots of ‘Touch of Grey’

Well, just in time for all the most recent hoopla about the Grateful Dead – an upcoming exhibit at the N.Y. Historical Society; a tie-dyed light show on the Empire State Building to celebrate the event – I’ve got The Grateful Dead Scrapbook out.

It’s an exhibit on paper: GD memorabilia, artwork and other goodies that readers can fold out or remove from various pages of the book. To me, those are the stars of the book. What I added was a historical narrative about the band, some sidebars on the Dead Heads phenomenon, and spotlights on ten songs that reflect the Dead at various stages of their amazing run. Those songs were chosen with advice from long-time Dead chroniclers David Gans and Blair Jackson. In researching the stories behind the songs, I ran across a few surprises. Take one of their most beloved tunes:

“Touch of Grey” may have been a fresh song for the masses, who bought the single in great enough numbers to give the Grateful Dead their first hit record in 1987. But it had been composed at least six years before, and it made its onstage debut in September, 1982 in Landover, Maryland.

The span of the years seems right, as, in the early Eighties, most of the band were approaching age forty—old by rock ‘n’ roll standards—and, through numerous ups and downs, had displayed perseverance and endurance, two of the song’s themes. Whenever they sang it, their audiences roared in appreciation; they were celebrating the survival of their own community.

Robert Hunter wrote the song in 1981 while in England, visiting his girlfriend. “I had been up all night,” he said, “and I was looking blearily through the window the next morning, wondering, ‘How do you survive?’ And I thought, ‘You just do.’ And I sat down and wrote from the world-weary point of view I was experiencing right then. I started detailing the things that were happening to me.” As a performer, Hunter had been singing the song for awhile before Garcia took it to the Dead.

Phil Lesh recalls hearing that when Arista Records heard their recording, one executive shouted, “A fucking hit! The Grateful Dead wrote a fucking hit!”

But Garcia was just trying to fit the song to himself. “Hunter sang ‘Touch of Grey’ as a sort of dry, satirical piece with an intimate feel,” he said, “but I heard something else coming through it. ‘We will get by’ said something so me, so I set it to play big. My version still has the ironic bite in the lyrics, but what comes across is a more celebratory quality.”