“Friend of the Devil” by The Grateful Dead

"Friend of the Devil" sits second on American Beauty, the Grateful Dead's 1970 album for Warner Bros., and it's the Dead setting down the amplifiers and picking up the porch instruments. Jerry Garcia and John Dawson wrote the music and Robert Hunter the words; Garcia opens it walking a scale down low before the acoustic guitars break into a gallop and David Grisman's mandolin skips alongside.

Hunter's lyric is an outlaw ballad on the lam: a fugitive setting out from Reno with a sheriff, a pack of hounds and the Devil himself on his heels, wives in Chino and Cherokee, a night holed up in a Utah cave, all on the long road home, and no telling whether he gets there. The band first played it live in March 1970 at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, and after their mid-'70s break from the road it came back slowed right down and stretched out with long solos.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.