RIP: John Dawson

From the New York Times:

John Dawson, a singer and songwriter whose band New Riders of the Purple Sage began as a country-rock offshoot of the Grateful Dead but had a long life of its own, died on Tuesday in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he lived. He was 64.

The cause was stomach cancer, said Trebbie Thomas, a family friend.

Mr. Dawson, known as Marmaduke, founded New Riders of the Purple Sage in 1969 with David Nelson and Jerry Garcia, whom Mr. Dawson had known from Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Band Champions, a Grateful Dead predecessor formed in 1964. Mr. Dawson was looking for a band to perform his country-inflected songs, and Mr. Garcia was eager for a project in which he could indulge his newest musical obsession, pedal-steel guitar.

According to Dennis McNally’s book “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead,” the group grew out of casual performances at the Underground coffeehouse in Menlo Park, Calif., and took its name from a 1912 Western novel by Zane Grey, “Riders of the Purple Sage.” Mickey Hart and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead were briefly members, and New Riders became one of the Dead’s regular opening acts, its country-leaning sound complementing the older band’s psychedelic folk-rock.

New Riders released a dozen albums into the early ’80s. One, “The Adventures of Panama Red,” from 1973, went gold, and a track from that album, “Panama Red” — a novelty song about marijuana, not so thinly veiled — became a staple. With Mr. Garcia and Robert Hunter, the longtime Grateful Dead lyricist, Mr. Dawson also wrote the song “Friend of the Devil,” which appears on the Grateful Dead’s 1970 album “American Beauty.”