OK, let’s face it. You heard the news about the return of dire wolf pups after 12,000 years, marking the end of that species’ extinction. And maybe you thought, “Wow, 12,000 years flies by!” Or you thought, “You mean, like in Game of Thrones?” But, if you’re a music nerd of any generation, you likely thought, “Man, I love that Dead song.”
The dire wolf predated the Grateful Dead by about 2 million years, a period when the species rambled around this part of the world before vanishing around 10,000 BCE. Fast forward to a much later era, sometime in 1969, when Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were in the midst of an incredibly productive songwriting streak at Garcia and his partner Mountain Girl’s home in Larkspur, California. It was during a productive early period for the two. “I’d give him a stack of songs, you know, like ‘Dire Wolf’ and I don’t remember [what else],” Hunter told RS in 2013. “I’d hand him a bunch of stuff like this and he’d say, ‘Oh God, Hunter! Not again.’ You know, ’cause this is what I did. I wrote songs and Jerry had a whole performing career and stage and everything else I can see.”
Like any classic song or bit of pop culture, “Dire Wolf” has several origin stories. As one legend has it, Hunter and Mountain Girl were at the house one night watching a filmed version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (probably the 1939 version starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes). As Hunter would later recall, they all mused about the sight of a “ghostly hound,” but it may have been Mountain Girl who brought up the “dire wolf” phrase (and good on her for remembering after a few million years). Whatever the source, the very idea of a massive wolf called “Dire” sparked Hunter, who wrote the entire lyric in one pass the next day, set in the mythical land of Fennario. The “don’t murder me” phrase could have also been a nod to the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer in the Bay Area in the late Sixties.
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With its casual, loping beat and Garcia’s guitar twang snaking through it, “Dire Wolf” wasn’t merely another new Hunter-Garcia song; it was part of the Dead’s entrée into a new world of unplugged music, songs that would tap into folklore and folk music and make them eternal, as heard on Workingman’s Dead, the 1970 album where “Dire Wolf” first appeared. Starting in 1969, the song remained a regular part of the Dead’s set. To plug their Reckoning and Dead Set live albums 12 years later, they even played it on late-night host Tom Snyder’s talk show, The Tomorrow Show, still sticking with the unplugged arrangement of the original.
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The song had a surreal last act, at least for Garcia. As the band was preparing to take the stage at Deer Creek Music Center in Indiana in July 1995, they were alerted that Garcia had received a death threat. Any other musician would probably not have played a tune with that particular refrain under those circumstances, but three songs in, they launched into “Dire Wolf.” As cops scanned the crowd for a supposed shooter who never materialized, Garcia sang “please don’t murder me” with a twinkle in his eye. The following month, he was dead of a heart attack.
In a testament to the song, “Dire Wolf” never went extinct. Dead & Co. have played it about two dozen times, and it continues to be covered by others, recently by Billy Strings. Game of Thrones auteur George R.R. Martin is a known Deadhead, hence the use of the imagery. After the Dead fumbled one take during the Workingman’s sessions, Garcia said, “We fucked up the ending.” But the fact that the phrase “dire wolf” still triggers that song more than 55 years later shows they didn’t screw up its legacy.
