The Song Garcia Called “Marginal” Was a Fairy Tale
Robert Hunter wrote “China Cat Sunflower” as a gentle, folksy lullaby. Jerry Garcia turned it into a machine — then called the most-played song he ever sang “marginal.”
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The germ came to Hunter at Lake Chapala in Mexico, in what he called “a rather hypersensitive state,” with a cat sitting on his belly — and he followed that cat out to Neptune. He mailed the lyric to Garcia in 1967, part of the first batch of Garcia/Hunter songs. When David Gans later asked how the song had come out rhythmically compared to what he’d first imagined, Hunter answered “Not at all,” picked up a guitar, and played something gentle and melodic at a ballad pace. Gans wrote the feel down as “folksy” and “fairy-tale.” Hunter called his method of that period a “glittery image bank” — images chosen for feel, not meaning. “I can sit right here and write you a ‘China Cat’ in ten minutes,” he said.
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