It was upon his 1967 return to the Bay Area that Hunter first began composing the lines that would become Dead classics. Many of the more famous ones reflected the mystical flavors of the time, as well as the writer's engagement with beat and modernist poetry, from the T.S. Eliot reference in the chorus of "Dark Star" ("Shall we go, you and I") to the kaleidoscopic visions that adorn every inch of "China Cat Sunflower" ("A leaf of all colors plays a golden string fiddle to a double-e waterfall over my back"). Yet, even as Hunter's words throughout Aoxomoxoa (released in June of 1969) matched Rick Griffin's incredible cover, the song "Dupree's Diamond Blues" — about a lover craving "jelly roll," robbing a jewelry store and receiving a life sentence for his trouble — took a different tack, bookending the old-timey blues tropes popular with the day's white rock musicians with philosophical point and penance. The move was prescient even in the moment. The week Aoxomoxoa dropped, the Dead was already performing as a more traditional acoustic-minded ensemble, beginning to roll out songs that would aid their transition from psychedelic volcano to Workingman's country-rock storytellers, covering George Jones and "Wabash Cannonball" months before the rainbows of Woodstock and the darkness of Altamont realigned the margins and purpose of their community. While it's impossible to gauge whether it was Hunter's reunion with Garcia that re-centered the songs away from utopian possibilities to IRL responsibilities, it was his words and characters that gave the transition a sense of the past being re-lived in a contemporary setting. Just how clearly the open-endedness of Hunter's gaze continues to speak to our time is a testament to the rich, enduring images he began collecting in the Dead's songs.