VIA PRESS RELEASE | Rhino is launching a new career-spanning archival series honoring Robert Hunter’s work as a solo artist with a deluxe reissue of his 1974 debut, Tales of the Great Rum Runners. While Hunter is widely revered as the primary lyricist for the Grateful Dead, this series will explore the depth of his solo work, offering a renewed appreciation for his exceptional artistry. Tales Of The Great Rum Runners (Deluxe Edition) will be available on June 7 from Rhino on 2-CD and 2-LP. Pre-order HERE.
This Deluxe Edition introduces a freshly remastered version of the original album alongside 16 previously unreleased recordings, including alternate versions of album tracks and several session outtakes. All the music has been remastered from the original master tapes by GRAMMY® Award-winning engineer David Glasser using Plangent Processes tape restoration and speed correction. Tales Of The Great Rum Runners will also be making its debut on streaming services on June 7. Available today is a sneak peek, with a newly remastered version of “Standing At Your Door” now available digitally.
Originally released in spring 1974, Tales Of The Great Rum Runners marked the inaugural release on Round Records, an offshoot of the newly formed Grateful Dead Records. Among its 13 tracks were several destined to become staples of Hunter’s live repertoire, like “Boys In The Barroom,” “Rum Runners,” and “It Must Have Been The Roses.”
Recorded at Mickey Hart’s converted barn studio in Novato, California, the album reveals Hunter’s multifaceted talents and features him singing and playing various instruments, including guitar, tin whistle, and bagpipes on “Children’s Lament.” He was accompanied by a revolving cast of Bay Area musicians on the album, including Jerry Garcia, Keith and Donna Jean Godchaux, and Mickey Hart of the Dead, as well as guitarist Barry Melton (Country Joe & The Fish), bassist David Freiberg (Quicksilver Messenger Service/Jefferson Starship), and pedal steel guitarist Buddy Cage (New Riders Of The Purple Sage).
Tales Of The Great Rum Runners (Deluxe Edition) comes with 16 previously unreleased bonus tracks, offering new insight into the album’s evolution. Among these are alternate versions of six songs that made the album (“Keys To The Rain” and “It Must Have Been The Roses”), plus ten gems that did not (“The Word,” “Buck Dancer’s Choice,” and “Elijah.”)
In the collection’s liner notes, Jesse Jarnow (author, DJ, and cohost of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast) deftly captures the essence of the album: “The music was as warm and handmade as the tapestries and tie-dyes adorning the Barn studio walls, an idiosyncratic continuation of the cosmic folk vocabulary that Hunter and Dead explored on Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. In an era when the Dead’s own studio albums were growing slicker, Rum Runners doubled down on organic earthiness.”
On October 8, 2024, Hachette Books will publish The Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead—The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter, which was penned by legendary Dead lyricist Robert Hunter in the early 1960s, but left unpublished in his attic. For decades, passionate fans of the Grateful Dead have discussed the existence of a “lost manuscript”—a sort of holy grail—the novelistic origin story of the band.
The book will feature a foreword by John Mayer, an introduction by Dennis McNally, and an afterword by Brigid Meier, a close friend of Hunter’s. Fans will experience the early days of Hunter, Jerry Garcia, and their cohorts, following them into the stacks at Kepler’s Books, to rent instruments at Swain’s House of Music, and through the countryside on road trips. Readers will witness impromptu jams, inspired intellectual pranks, and dialogue that is, by turns, amusing and brilliant and outrageous.
The Silver Snarling Trumpet illustrates how Hunter’s psychedelic expression and wordplay became the soul of the Dead. The book will be available wherever books are sold and can be pre-ordered now at your favorite local bookstore or online. Pre-order HERE.
