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Mission in the Rain - A Close Reading

I had 24 hours in San Francisco on my way to Santa Cruz to hit up the Grateful Dead archives and one of the things on my fairly manic checklist was checking out the Mission. This song has always fascinated me, with its incredible sense of place, and I needed to experience the location for myself. I spent a while touring the Mission buildings, wandered the streets with dreams riding tall, and hung out in Dolores Park for a while enjoying the views of the city. I didn’t know the pretty horrific colonial history of the Missions, and it was eye-opening to hear of the ways they misused their religion. As I was leaving I picked up a rosary in the gift shop, and it came with me as DSO played Mission in the Rain at Alexandra Palace, which was a nicely cosmic moment.

The song opens with a sense of cyclical movement.

I turn and walk away
Then I come round again
Looks as though tomorrow
I'll do pretty much the same

There’s a sense of repetition here and, like many in the Dead’s catalogue, the speaker seems stuck in a rut. The back two lines of the verse solidify this almost claustrophobic feeling, with the non-committal “looks as though” creating a sense of ambivalence to anything that may happen tomorrow, rooted in its predictability. The speaker is clearly in a fairly desperate state, as in the next verse they say “You know I'm ready to give anything/For anything I take”, suggesting both a lack of much to give and a need to take. Some comments online identify the speaker as an addict looking for a fix, while David Dodd notes thematic similarities to “Wharf Rat” and “Comes a Time” with their pedestrian protagonists.

Garcia, speaking in 1979, said “It's about me in San Francisco, that's what it's about. It's as close to autobiographical as it's possible for me to get working with another guy. Hunter and I both grew up around the Bay Area, and lived in San Francisco, and Hunter is able sometimes to write what I would say, you know what I mean, if it were possible for me to say something in that medium. Every once in a while he's able to do it for me. So that's one of those songs where it's very personal. It's him speaking about me. So when I do the song, for me it's a very personal thing, I'm talking about myself, my life.”

It may be one of the reasons that Jerry felt this song was better suited for JGB than the dead, and the artistic closeness of Hunter and Garcia is hardly ever clearer than it is here. It’s a special song to Hunter as well, he can be found telling Relix that it’s “one of my favourite things I've come up with”.

The speaker in the song feels like the best times of their life are in the past. There’s something incredibly cinematic about the lines “someone called my name you know I turned around to see/It was midnight in the mission and the bells were not for me”. Just as the bells aren’t for the speaker, you get the impression the name called out was not for them either. The person in this song feels so inconsequential in the face of the timeless locale, just a speck in the history of the Mission. The next two verses are some of my favourite pieces of writing in all of Hunter’s output:

Ten years ago I walked this street, my dreams were riding tall
Tonight I would be thankful Lord, for any dreams at all
Some folks would be happy just to have one dream come true
But everything you gather is just more that you can lose

Here we learn that the speaker has been walking these streets for a decade, and we see how his psychic stature has changed. The dreams that filled his sails and puffed his chest have been and gone, and in the present he is directionless and without drive. He’s disillusioned with the concept of achievement, rejecting any attempts to ‘gather’ anything new. This line to me also has an echo of St. Stephen, “one man gathers what another man spills” and together they create this idea of gathering as a fundamental part of life, or of life as a gathering, which I think is definitely worth digging into a little deeper when looking at the underlying spiritualism that I hope to tackle in chapters 4 and 5.

All the things I planned to do, I only did half way
Tomorrow will be Sunday, born of rainy Saturday
There's some satisfaction in the San Francisco rain
No matter what comes down, the mission always looks the same

The first line of this final verse speaks to a fear I’m sure a lot of us share, that we’ll commit our energies too chaotically or in the wrong directions to really make an impact. We’re reminded of the cyclical nature of the world, and this is compared to the speaker's feeling of frustration at their own cycles. Throughout all this spinning, these windmills, the Mission remains steadfast and unaffected, helping to ground both speaker and listener.

The Missions are older than basically anything else in California and their relatively long history helps contribute to this sense of solidity. It’s a shame that it’s so marred by colonialism and a sense of entitlement, but I think this song goes to show that places are as much about their presence as their history, and that the Missions’ contributions to Californian society are more nuanced than their dark origins. I'll leave you with this slamming Mission from 1978.