#China cat sunflower lyrics meaning windows
The Dame Edith Sitwell poem Trio for Two Cats and a Trombone which is about a couple of cats having a love affair ends with the line “In the palace of the Queen Chinee!” A china cat is most likely a porcelain cat, not a cat from China, although there is a common Japanese figurine that is called Maneki Neko known as the beckoning cat, which is believed to bring customers and wealth to a merchant’s establishment when it is displayed in front windows of restaurants and teahouses. This cat took him to all these cat places and that along with the LSD that he dropped, became the essence of this song. Hunter said that he was in a rather hypersensitive state when he wrote this, and he followed this cat out to what he believed to be the planet Neptune, where there were rainbows across Neptune, and cats marching across the rainbow.
Hunter said that ‘China Cat’ took him a long time to write and that it was originally inspired by Dame Edith Sitwell, who had a way with words utilizing assonance and alliteration. In mid-1967, Hunter mailed the lyrics to the Dead, along with the lyrics for another song ‘The Eleven’ and by September 1967, he was working with the band in Rio Nido. The significance of this song, is that it helped Hunter land a job as being the band’s lyricist. In this song, Hunter tells a story of mind-altering situations including words coming out from out a silk trombone and ringing a silent bell, and I don’t think that he ever wanted anybody to know what these lyrics were about. Hunter was asked about the song by BAM: The California Music Magazine, and he gave an interesting answer that was published in 1978 and included in the American musician, songwriter, and music journalist David Gans’ Conversations With the Dead: The Grateful Dead Interview Book in 2002. Up until November 1977, Robert Hunter said that nobody ever asked him about the meaning of this song. Excluding drums and space music only 6 songs were played more times than ‘China Cat Sunflower’, those being ‘Playing in the Band’, ‘Not Fade Away’, ‘Me and My Uncle’, ‘Sugar Magnolia’, ‘I Know You Rider’ and ‘The Other One’.
The two songs segued together perfectly, with ‘China Cat Sunflower’ almost always preceding ‘I Know You Rider’ and the Grateful Dead performed this combination well over 500 times. The Grateful Dead first performed ‘China Cat Sunflower’ on Januand it was recorded on their 1969 studio album Aoxomoxo a, and later released on the triple live album Europe ’72 , played as a suite with the John A Lomax & Alan Lomax traditional blues tune ‘I Know You Rider’. ‘China Cat Sunflower’ and ‘The Eleven’ were the first lyrics that Robert Hunter wrote for the Grateful Dead and they were composed while he was on LSD. The Grateful Dead were known for never playing the same concert twice and most of their fans really paid attention to which songs they were playing, although a lot of real stoners did go to the shows. Well, at least I didn’t request that they play ‘Freebird’. My most embarrassing moment at a Grateful Dead concert came for me at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, when I yelled out ‘China Cat’ and all of these Deadheads looked at me and said, “They already played that song.” I was humiliated, but I can blame my blunder on the acid that I took. Robert Hunter the Grateful Dead lyricist said that the song ‘China Cat Sunflower’ came to him when he was visiting Mexico’s Lake Chapala and a cat decided that his belly looked like a comfortable place to take a nap.
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