Saturday, October 19, 2019

Claudia Hoyser "Casey Jones" - Watch your speed. ROBERT HUNTER TOURED TO PAY HIS BILLS

While a lot of city-boy music critics think that Grateful Dead music was about as pleasant as stepping in cow dung, they usually gave a pass to Robert Hunter's lyrics. 

Sure, the Dead could drift on and on for 20 minutes or 20 hours or whatever, behind the strumming and that wonderfully whiny voice from Jerry "it's so cool he has a missing finger" Garcia. 

But listen, this Robert Hunter guy is profound. No, I don't mean "Truckin'." Don't show me selfies of your ugly body in an R. Crumb t-shirt. No, I mean "Casey Jones." I mean, "Trouble ahead, trouble behind." That says it all, don't it? Don't you know that notion just crossed my mind...after HE wrote it? 

Well, we all know that Robert Hunter is now one of the truly dead. 

But here's something most don't know: he was struggling to PAY THE BILLS. What? You mean that thanks to piracy and Spotify, Robert wasn't getting big royalty checks? Gosh.
Darn, too bad about Robert having to PAY HIS MEDICAL BILLS. 

He should've been glad to know that some really, really, really, REALLY hip guy in Sweden or in Turkey or in Croatia, gave away the complete Grateful Dead discography and posted a Crumb "Truckin'" cartoon and wrote: "No infringement intended. I'm just having fun!" 

Robert Hunter wrote some songs with Dylan, which is quite something. Not too many people have a Bob co-write. Funny, though, Bob wrote "If Dogs Run Free" but neither he nor Robert Hunter wrote "Music Should be Free." 



Meanwhile over at YouTube, which is run by GOOGLE, and "GOOGLE IS YOUR FRIEND" and will give you all the blogs you could ever want to give away all the music you won't have the time to actually listen to or understand, plenty of people are covering Robert's words.

Not that they actually KNOW what he meant. You can bet Claudia Hoyser isn't thinking that "trouble ahead" might be some situation where she'll be in the hospital and might be in trouble even if somebody sets up a GoFundMe account. That notion ain't crossed her mind. "Casey Jones" is still a damn catchy song, and she sure is purrrty. Sing it, gal, and shake that thing. 


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