No one knew at the time “China Cat Sunflower” made its live debut in early 1968 that the song’s future lay in the Grateful Dead’s past. Officially released via the Dead’s third studio album, Aoxomoxoa, “China Cat Sunflower” slinked around their live sets for the better part of two years before it was paired with the blues standard “I Know You Rider,” a staple of the band’s repertoire since their earliest performances. The result was kismet: “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider” would remain all but inseparable for decades to come, evolving into a two-headed psychedelic folk epic synonymous with some of the Dead’s most transcendent onstage moments.
“China Cat Sunflower” opens a portal into the LSD-elevated consciousness of Robert Hunter, the longtime friend and collaborator of the song’s composer, Jerry Garcia. Hunter’s playful, poetically nonsensical lyrics document a multi-sensory journey across the cosmos and back — an odyssey inspired and guided by antecedents including Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, George Herrimann’s surrealist Sunday comics masterpiece Krazy Kat and the Dame Edith Sitwell poem “Polka.”
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“I think the germ of [‘China Cat Sunflower’] came in Mexico, on Lake Chapala. I don’t think any of the words came, exactly. The rhythms came,” Hunter recalled in David Gans’ Conversations with the Dead. “I had a cat sitting on my belly, and was in a rather hypersensitive state, and I followed this cat out to — I believe it was Neptune –– and there were rainbows across Neptune, and cats marching across the rainbow. This cat took me in all these cat places. There’s some essence of that in the song.”
Hunter fired off the completed “China Cat Sunflower” lyrics to Garcia, alongside whom he launched his performing career in 1961 in the Palo Alto, Calif. folkie duo Bob and Jerry. Hunter and Garcia continued to partner in various bluegrass and old-time ensembles after retiring their duo act, often in tandem with future New Riders of the Purple Sage co-founder David Nelson, but after declining Garcia’s invitation to play jug in Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions (the pre-Grateful Dead folk band also featuring Bob Weir and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan), Hunter transferred his creative energies into writing. He later revealed that “China Cat Sunflower” was one of several songs he authored in mid-1967, around the time he cut ties with Palo Alto.
“I got pretty deeply into speed and meth, and came close to messin’ myself up. I had to get out of that scene entirely, because as long as it was around I would be tempted, so I went off to New Mexico,” Hunter told Rolling Stone in 2015. “I had written ‘St. Stephen’ and ‘China Cat Sunflower,’ and I sent those — and ‘Alligator’ — off to Jerry, and he uncharacteristically wrote back [laughs]. He said they were going to use the songs, and why didn’t I come out and be their lyricist? Which I did.” Hunter’s sly, stream-of-consciousness wordplay found its ideal match in Garcia’s springy melody, spidery guitar lines and sunlit groove, and on Jan. 17, 1968, the Grateful Dead first performed “China Cat Sunflower” live at San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom.
The Dead continued polishing “China Cat Sunflower” in the 18 months prior to Aoxomoxoa’s June 20, 1969 release: the tune commonly appeared either as a stand-alone entity or sandwiched in the middle of an extended jam between “Dark Star” and “The Eleven.” But following their first union on Sept. 30, 1969, “China Cat Sunflower” and “I Know You Rider” — the latter first recorded by the Dead nearly four years earlier — existed as two sides of the same coin across a span of more than 500 live dates, often materializing as a second-set opener and highlighting more than a few landmark performances, including Veneta, Ore. on Aug. 27, 1972 (commercially released in 2013 as Sunshine Daydream) and Providence, R.I. on June 26, 1974 (included on Dick’s Picks Vol. 12).
“Nobody ever asked me the meaning of [‘China Cat Sunflower’],” Hunter wrote in his 1991 anthology A Box of Rain. “People seem to know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s good that a few things in this world are clear to all of us.”
