Dire Wolf - Live

In "Dire Wolf," Dead frontman Jerry Garcia sings about waking up to find a dire wolf, "six hundred pounds of sin," at his window. He invites the wolf in and plays cards with him. When he cuts the deck at the Queen of Spades, he finds "the cards were all the same." The song never explains the significance of the Queen of Spades, but Dead lyricist Robert Hunter once stated that it is the "card of death," which means every card in the deck was a card of death. In short, the narrator is dead, as insinuated early in the song. I sat down to my supper, 'twas a bottle of red whisky I said my prayers and went to bed, that's the last they saw of me Hunter verified that interpretation, stating that the narrator "is the shadow of the man in the song who is dead at this point. It's a song by a ghost." All in good humor. "Dire Wolf" is a fun folk-country tune with heavy singalong vibes. The Dead's goal with the Workingman's Dead album was to create music that was more accessible to listeners, rather than the overly (in the estimation of Hunter and Jerry Garcia) complex and unusual songs found on previous Dead albums such as Aoxomoxoa and Anthem of the Sun.

In the timbers of Fennario, the wolves are running round Fennario is a fictional town mentioned in the song "Pretty Peggy-O," which evolved out an ancient Scottish ballad titled "The Bonnie Lass o' Fyvie." "Fyvie" transformed into "Fennario" after it got to the United States. Bob Dylan recorded "Pretty Peggy-O" on his 1962 self-titled debut album.

Dire wolves were a real species, but they went extinct about 9,500 years ago. They've become popular in the 2020s because they appear in Game Of Thrones as the mystical pets of the Stark family. Unlike their presentation in both the song and Thrones, dire wolves weren't gigantic; they were about the same size as wolves found today.