“Don’t murder me …” – Dire Wolf

When I Awoke â Kristina Layton â used by kind permission of the artist â Check out her other artwork at Wagon Wheel Illustration!
âIn the Timbers of FennarioâŚâ
Todayâs murder ballad dances merrily along borderlines with which weâve become familiar in this blog; boundaries between celebration and fear, civilization and savagery, traditional and post-modern balladry â and of course that inscrutable passage between life and death.  âDire Wolfâ is an unabashedly happy song in the voice of the ghost of a man murdered by a six hundred pound predator.  As art, it was born in a glorious blaze of light during one of the Grateful Deadâs most creative periods, and it hit the smoky concert halls and hungry turntables of post-Summer-of-Love America while a serial killer stalked the Bay Areaâs nighttime streets.
Folks say much online and in print about the song and the band during this period, and we donât propose to repeat all that here.  Our aim today is only to place the song gently in the living playlist we at Murder Ballad Monday hold dear.
It may not be a perfect fit, but you get to judge that for yourselfâŚ
Lyrics for the Grateful Deadâs âDire Wolfâ
 âI sat down to my supperâŚâ
Despite what I said in the introduction, it would be a mistake to tie the songâs inspiration to The Zodiac Killer. Weâll get to that bit in the next section.  Robert Hunter, in a journal entry from July 29, 1996 that is no longer available online but is cited here, confirmed that the inspiration for âDire Wolfâ was not tied to any historical act of violence â
Dire Wolf card back â Kristina Layton â used by permission of the artist
The song âDire Wolfâ was inspired, at least in name, by watching the Hound of the Baskervilles on TV with Garcia. We were speculating on what the ghostly hound might turn out to be, and somehow the idea that maybe it was a Dire Wolf came up⌠We thought Dire Wolves were great big beasts. Extinct now, it turns out they were quite small and ran in packs. But the idea of a great big wolf named Dire was enough to trigger a lyric. As I remember, I wrote the words quickly the next morning upon waking, in that hypnogogic state where deep rooted associations meld together with no effort. Garcia set it later that afternoon.
In a 1986 interview for Relix magazine, Hunter also spoke about the balladâŚ
âThe imagery occurred to me in a dream. I woke up and grabbed a pencil before I was entirely awake and wrote the whole song down. I think I managed to capture the quality of the dream by writing it down before I was wide awake.â
Itâs clear then this is no traditional murder ballad, at least in the sense that it didnât come into being for any of the standard reasons we can identify with such music. Â On the other hand, youâll see that this song isnât faking it. Â As for provenance, the larger creation story of âDire Wolfâ is documented and well-cited in an essay written by Light Into Ashes for the blog Grateful Dead Guide. Â Itâs well worth the time if you want the story in detail. Â For our purposes today, a quick summary of its key points will suffice.

Garcia on pedal steel, Sargent Gym, Boston University â November 21, 1970 â Photograph by Jeff Albertson, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries Special Collections â fair use
It was May of 1969 and the Dead were in transition from their psychedelic âprimalâ phase to the period of folk-country influence typified by the music on Workingmanâs Dead and American Beauty.  Hunter was living in large rural house with Jerry Garcia and Mountain Girl, and he wrote furiously in a sustained, hyper-creative state.  That spring and summer he produced many of the lyrics that, with Garciaâs arrangement, would become some of the bandâs best-known songs.  The night of TV watching that Hunter mentioned seems to have happened sometime that month, and the song was fairly well set later the next day.
The Grateful Dead debuted âDire Wolfâ live on June 7, 1969 at the Fillmore West and by June 21 at the Fillmore East, Bob Weir was singing too and Jerry added his instantly recognizable pedal steel guitar, an instrument with which he had recently fallen in love.  The Dead recorded the song the following February, and released it on Workingmanâs Dead on June 14, 1970.  In between the bookends of those dates, America passed through both Woodstock and Altamont, and the countercultureâs âhigh and beautiful waveâ finally broke and began to recede.  In the wake of that flood, the Grateful Dead played âDire Wolfâ consistently, if sparingly, for a total of 237 times before Jerry Garciaâs death in 1995.  It still makes the lineup of the various post-Jerry incarnations of the band.  Youâll see below that other musicians like the song as well. Â
It seems built to last.