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Friend of the Devil
Of all the Faustian characters who have sold their souls to Lucifer throughout the last 2000 years, none can compare to the perpetually-fleeting rogue found in 'Friend Of The Devil'. A hapless and far-from-ethical character, his winding path of escape takes us from Reno to Utah and then to California, from Chino to Cherokee, before we too lose track of him in the space of a few minutes.
The image of a traveling vagabond on a road trip harkens back to the beatniks of the '50s and '60s, a lifestyle that Hunter was not so many years removed from when he penned an earlier, abbreviated draft of the song with The New Riders' John Dawson in 1970.
"'Friend of the Devil' was written when Bob Hunter was still a prospective member of the New Riders," Dawson says. "He might have been the bass player, and he's a person that comes up with great song ideas all the time. He came up with the opening theme of that song, and he had all the words written out, but he didn't have any music for that particular part."
Dawson came up with a suitable refrain, part of which would eventually serve as the title of the song ("I set out running but I take my time/A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine"), and then the two stopped writing. "We thought we had the song finished," Dawson says. "He had two or three verses worked out, and once you added that little part of mine it made a nice little song of it."
But Garcia had other plans. "I took the tape back to Larkspur house where the Riders were staying and got up the next morning and I heard Garcia listening to the tape," Hunter remembered in a 1976 interview with Relix. "He had that funny look in his eye. The next thing you know he'd written a bridge for it, the "Ann Marie" part. Before that it was the same melody all the way through. The next thing I knew, the Grateful Dead had snapped it up, much to the New Riders' dismay."
'Friend Of The Devil' is the only track credited to Garcia, Dawson, and Hunter, which also makes it the only time a member of the New Riders Of The Purple Sage appears in the credits of a Dead song.
The tune was debuted during a Family Dog show at the Great Highway in February of 1970. An additional 57 'Devil' sightings were made before it, along with the rest of the band's songs, was put on ice for the duration of the Dead's 18-month retirement from touring, which occurred between October of 1974 and June of 1976.
Upon its return, the song's tempo was unfamiliar, though in a way more fitting for a man who'd been on the lam all those years. The Dead seemed to be taking the line "I set out running, but I take my time" seriously by replacing the familiar pace of the original tempo with a markedly mellower rhythm. Garcia talked about the change in an interview with David Gans in 1981.
"It's the thing of flashing on a song from a different point of view," he explained. "What happened with that one was that I heard a tape of Kenny Loggins doing the tune. Loggins and Messina used to do it as a solo acoustic tune, and he did it as a slow ballad. I heard a tape of that, and it stuck in my head and I thought, 'Wow, that's a nice way for that song to go. It is a nice ballad.' It was somebody else's version of the song, which exposed a character thing to it that I had never noticed before."
Loggins recalls how he had come to change the tempo of the song in the first place. "American Beauty was the first and most impacting Dead album for me," he says. "My rendition came out of my own style and an afternoon of singing songs with pals over lunch. After I'd run out of songs of my own, I launched into Crosby, Stills & Nash, James Taylor, etc., songs. The picking style is my own. 'Danny's Song' just naturally transferred itself into 'Friend Of The Devil'."
Though the brisker '...Devil' would again appear alternately alongside its unhurried counterpart briefly in 1990, that version took the floor permanently the next year, where it remained right up until the Dead's final rendition of the song in Washington DC on June 24, 1995. Hunter, whose take on the song appears on his 1979 solo LP, Jack O'Roses, continued to play his own altered, more fully-realized version of the track in acoustic sets during 1997. "There's a verse to 'Friend Of The Devil' that I do and [Garcia] doesn't do, which I kinda feel ties the bow on that song in a certain direction," Hunter said to Blair Jackson in 1988. "He's loath to change something once he feels like its done, while I'll tinker endlessly with things, for whatever good it does me."
Versions of 'Friend Of The Devil' appear on albums by Garcia and David Grisman, Tom Constanten, and New Riders Of The Purple Sage, while Lyle Lovett covered the song on the 1991 tribute album, Deadicated.
Excerpted by permission of Thunder's Mouth Press. Text and design © Carlton Books Limited 1999.
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