For Jim’s prompt this week, it couldn’t really be anything else for a self-respecting deadhead but the touchstone of their psychedelic improvisation: ‘Dark Star’

Robert Hunter’s lyrics are intriguing, to say the least, and nothing if not psychedelic –‘reason tatters’; ‘glass hand dissolving’.

Unusually, the music is credited to all members of the group (at the time) rather than solely his usual writing partner, Jerry Garcia. This itself is an indication that ‘Dark Star’ is – or at least certainly became – the key jumping-off point for the mind-bending improvisation for which the Dead is best known. You’ll either love it or hate it.

You know which side I’m on. Shall we go?

Dark star crashes
pouring its light
into ashes

Reason tatters
the forces tear loose
from the axis

Searchlight casting
for faults in the
clouds of delusion

shall we go,
you and I
While we can?
Through
the transitive nightfall
of diamonds

Mirror shatters
in formless reflections
of matter

Glass hand dissolving
to ice petal flowers
revolving

Lady in velvet
recedes
in the nights of goodbye

Shall we go,
you and I
While we can?
Through
the transitive nightfall
of diamonds

Lyrics by Robert Hunter, Music by the Grateful Dead

Song Lyric Sunday 16 August 2020