Tragic news struck the family, friends, and fans of Grateful Dead collaborator Gerrit Graham. The actor, screenwriter, and songwriter passed away at 77 years old in Rhinebeck, New York, after battling lung disease.
Graham’s connection with Deadheads stems from the songwriting he did for their song “Victim Or The Crime”. Bob Weir took care of all things music while the multi-hyphenate worked his magic with the lyrics. Eventually, Grateful Dead recorded the song for their album Built To Last in 1989.
The process saw Weir struggle after cobbling the chorus together. After running it by different writers, Gerrit Graham came in, and they hit it off immediately. “No one had been able to provide him with what he was looking for, whatever the hell that may have been. I happened to be there one day when he was b***hing about not getting anywhere with it, and I volunteered to take a stab,” he recalled in an essay about the song.
“Mostly out of frustration, I think, he said sure, go ahead, give it a shot. I’d never written for him before,” Graham admitted. “We had no discussion about what the lyric should be like or what the song ought to be about or where it was supposed to go. I hadn’t even heard the music. I just went back to SoCal and sat down with a pen and a legal pad.”
Gerrit Graham Dies at 77 After a Battle With Lung Disease
However, the lyric “patience runs out on the junkie” rubbed a lot of fans and band members alike the wrong way. Sure, the song was “fun to play,” but all the backlash made things far too complicated. After lots of experimenting with changing the phrase, eventually, all parties relented and let it go.
“[John Perry] Barlow never spoke to me about the word, but plenty of other folks did… I was catching grief with both hands. Feeling the heat, I started to cave… Who was I to presume upon The Grateful Dead?” Gerrit Graham wrote.
“So I went to Weir and suggested we throw water on the fire by changing it to ‘flunky’ or ‘luckless’ or ‘jerkoff’ or whatnot, but he wasn’t having it,” Gerrit Graham continued. “To his credit—he’d been singing the song for four or five years by then and liked it just the way it was. He did finally broach the subject with Garcia, and Jerry said, ‘I don’t give a f**k, sing what you want.’ How predictable is that?”
(Photo by Joey Foley/Getty Images)
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