Believe it if you need it.

To get started. I walk out of the kitchen door one morning and it’s cold. I’ve just started reading the Theory stuff. Social theory. When I walk to the car I see that there are boxes piled up on the table by the door. One of them is a nice Harry and David’s box. It could hold lots of things, nicely. Pretty. It’s not torn up like the amazon boxes. Maybe I should keep it.
I think about those boxes and start signing on the way to the car.
“…Just a box of rain -
wind and water -
Believe it if you need it,
if you don't just pass it on
Sun and shower -
Wind and rain -
in and out the window
like a moth before a flame…”
Is theory just a box rain? What was this song about, anyway? I look it up. What was Hunter’s intention when he wrote the lyrics? I find an exchange appeared in Hunter's mailbag on 8/6/96:
Date: Jul 25 1996 12:36 AM EDT
From: cebass@pacbell.net (Charles E. Bass)
Dear Robert,
After reading through a number of Mailbags posted at your web site, I finally decided that it was time to contribute a thought and a question.
Between your evocative, thoughtful lyrics and Jerry's powerful melodies, I have aphorisms and meditations a-plenty to help me through my days and in my life. For that, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I sat down the other day and figured out the chord changes to Mission in the Rain. My wife (who is not a deadhead) especially likes that song. Maybe it is because we live in San Francisco and there is a reference to the Mission. When I play it she always starts dancing.
Robert, if you would, please tell me what you were thinking when you penned the phrase "box of rain." What, for you, does a box of rain represent. I am not asking for the meaning of the song, or for you to explain the song to me -- I spent plenty of time on my own doing that. I am just terribly curious how you came to choose that image.
Well, I won't take any more bandwith. There is much I would like to say, but I've said it in my mind for so long now, it feels funny and self-conscious trying to put onto "paper."
Regards,
Charlie Bass
Charlie,
well, I don't like to do this, since it encourages others to ask about what I had in mind when I wrote a song, and mostly you'd need to have my mind to understand even approximately what I had in it. By "box of rain," I meant the world we live on, but "ball" of rain didn't have the right ring to my ear, so box it became, and I don't know who put it there. http://arts.ucsc.edu/Gdead/AGDL/box.html
[rh]
love this response. I have always believed that it doesn’t matter what the artist has in mind, but what the viewer or listener gets from it. That’s the moment of creation. Hunter says it perfectly, “you’d need to have my mind.” So, maybe box of rain is like the silly box that is theory. Conflict theory. Social theory. All of it. Believe it if you need it, or if you don’t just pass it on.