Grateful Dead listening notes and thoughts while working towards a book on "Dark Star"

Monday 4/20/26

Lamenting what he perceived to be his failures as an artist in a letter that turned out to be one from the end of his life, F. Scott Fitzgerald maintained that his best work nonetheless possessed a sort of epic grandeur. I apply this appellation to the music the Grateful Dead made in 1972, especially the autumn of that year and the shows with a "Dark Star."

As time is the thematic crux of Nick Drake's art, light is the thematic crux of the Grateful Dead's.

Contrary to what most think, the (perhaps) hypothetical body that was a dark star would have had the luminosity of billions of suns. The "dark" refers to the dark matter annihilation that would feed them. A dark star is powered by darkness in creating a light like no other.

Complaints are frequently filed by Grateful Dead fans on account of the 8/27/72 Veneta, Oregon "Dark Star" transitioning to "El Paso." "It's a travesty that they didn't segue into 'Morning Dew!'" Someone recently opined to me that this was the biggest mistake the Dead ever made.

I find this silly (though I like the passion). "El Paso" was a perfectly apt choice. One of the most important Grateful Dead shows, in my view, was the one that took place on 6/27/69 at Veterans Auditorium in Santa Clara, California. Here we didn't just have a strong country and bluegrass aspect to the proceedings, but rather the country and bluegrass elements had bearing on the non-country and bluegrass aspects of the show. Pooling.

This is Dead logic. It's also "Dark Star" logic. An understanding of Aaron Copland's Western ballet Rodeo, for example, affords us further insight into various Dark Stars, which, Dead-wise, takes us back to Santa Clara. The Veneta "Dark Star" is a logical extension of 6/27/69.

The Carter Family and bluegrass and Hungarian dance music is more relevant to "Dark Star" than the trappings of psychedelia. The Dead weren't particularly psychedelic. No more so than Son House, Hank Williams, Gary Davis, Charlie Parker, Charles Ives, Chubby Parker, Dock Boggs, Bartok, Chuck Berry, or Flatt and Scruggs. What psychedelia there was in the Dead's body of work confined itself to certain bits of their early studio albums, and that was more in the nature of sonic experiments--segues, forays in the margins, incidental stuff--than the music of the songs themselves.

For all of the things that the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" was and could be, it wouldn't have been able to without a theme that is one of music's most indelible melodic constructions. Used sparingly, that theme is tasked with doing so much, and must never bore or "wear off."

I call what transpires over the final minutes of the Wembley 4/8/72 "Dark Star" the answer jam (which occurs again after a fashion in Philly on 9/21/72), because it puts us in a position to in some way experience the answer to it all. A towering achievement of humanity and humanness.

On the magisterial 12/11/72 "Dark Star" from Winterland, Jerry Garcia interpolates a passage from J.S. Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" near the end, and you never think that this music is lesser than that, no matter how well you know the music of Bach.

The Grateful Dead's 10/18/72 "Playin' in the Band" is a spiritual cousin to the Grateful Dead's 6/24/70 "Dark Star," with a "Dark Star" inside of it, whereas the latter houses much that ordinarily isn't part of itself and is more suggestive of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition with "Dark Star" in the promenade role.

As with February 1970 and September 1972, April 1969 was a good time to be a Dark Star. The vehicle was transitioning in terms of its possibilities, while having apex moments. On 4/17/69, the Grateful Dead played the quad at Washington University in St. Louis, with one of their patented, never-to-be-repeated Dark Stars for the ages. Imagine: You're Joe College, and there's the Dead having at it en plein air in the middle of your campus. Neighbors a mile away complained about the volume.

The "Dark Star" from Veneta on 8/27 garners the gushier encomiums, but it could be the third best "Dark Star" of that week. It's less "musical," perhaps more suggestive of an exercise, which can't be said about the two Berkeley Community Theater Dark Stars preceding it. In the history of Dark Stars, the two BCT versions play a similar developmental role to the Dream Bowl versions of 2/69 while also being full-formed masterpieces, and I think we should emphasize the second part of that word here, for these are pieces and you can't really call "Dark Star" a song. Masterpieces. Lean into that idea.

Something rarely noted regarding the Grateful Dead's famous 2/13/70 version of "Dark Star": For the first two minutes of the performance, we can hear the audience clapping along. This kind of thing is very rare on a soundboard recording, which speaks to how amped--let us even say twined with the band--the crowd was.

Determining the highest points of the Grateful Dead's corpus is a stiff challenge given the plethora of candidates, but the four-minute, fugato-like treatment of the main theme of the "Dark Star" from 12/6/73 leading to the verse is a definite copestone.

Pay attention to Grateful Dead shows that have both a "He's Gone" and a "Dark Star." They tend to be magical.

There are myriad Dark Stars by the Grateful Dead that needn’t officially be Dark Stars to be a “Dark Star,” which is part of the point. The first: “Dancing in the Street” from 9/3/67. “Dancing,” yes, but “Dark Star” as well. There it is.

I'm not suggesting that other numbers play the role--a long piece in the second set--of a "Dark Star." I mean that elements of a "Dark Star" can up and occur in other songs. They are "Dark Star" filaments and parcels of photosphere without official title designation. For instance, "Dark Star" comes into being at the 5/2/70 Harpur College show. Can you hear it?

There's a Hüsker Dü box set called Savage Young Dü (highly recommended) which takes its titular cue from an old Beatles bootleg from 1965 (conceivably the first), and though the Grateful Dead had been at it for years, I think of the "Dark Star"/"St. Stephen"/"The Eleven"/"Death Don't Have No Mercy" suite from their 11/2/69 Family Dog show as being indicative of the Savage Young Dead. The "Death" smolders. Sounds like a buck dancer's choice for the Reaper himself, not that the Reaper requires any provision.

If it's true that a band is only as a good as its drummer, does that mean the Grateful Dead's Bill Kreutzmann is the best drummer in history? NB: Am listening to "Big River" from the 6/16/74 audience tape.

He's his own man, stylist, technician, and artist, but Kreutzmann could play "free" with as much felicity as Tony Williams in certain instances (e.g. at the Plugged Nickel) with Miles Davis' Second Great Quintet. There's even a kind of courage and honor in piloting the percussive ship through some of those roiling outer space seas of certain Dark Stars and helping the band stay afloat. I don't think anyone else could have done it.

The Grateful Dead's 10/19/73 show in Oklahoma City just sounds like autumn, like Brahms' late piano works, Miles Davis' Miles Smiles, Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left sounds like autumn.

It can be enthralling how slowly the Grateful Dead proceed—especially at first—with "Dark Star" come 1973 (in the autumn especially). The Viscous Dead.

You could lay the acoustic set from the recording of the Grateful Dead's 8/18/70 Fillmore West gig atop Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as if compositing a palimpsest of what I call "pure song," and that formidable package would only be bolstered. Said tape gets my vote for "most historic" in American popular music history.

The 12/27/70 rendition of "Brokedown Palace" from Legion Stadium in El Monte, CA, is taken at a slower pace than was usual with the song, turning a dusty riverside ballad into a dusty riverside hymn. Cooler water sourced from the same river.

The Dead's 4/18/70 acoustic stealth performance at the Family Dog is one of those rarest of recordings that feels like it could have come from any time that humans have existed. It is the earliest past and the endless future. No matter how dark and ugly things get--we get, as we devolve, along with culture, society, the human in theory and practice--there may be someone in the year 2350 who can hear this music for what it is and will always be: present. Then they cede the stage to Mr. McKernan, who rolls on solo and is arresting himself. The recording has become harder to locate in recent years, but worth the search. One of those quintessentially illuminating Dead documents that can alter how one thinks about them. And you get an acoustic "New Speedway Boogie."

For guitarists give me Jerry Garcia, Nick Drake, and Maybelle Carter.

Rarely does music--or art, for that matter--get more beautiful than when Garcia's guitar starts singing out the notes of "And We Bid You Goodnight" during "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad." Sometimes I think this music is almost too beautiful, like I cannot bear its beauty. But, of course, one can.

"Big Railroad Blues" is to the Grateful Dead as "Long Tall Sally" is to the Beatles: a scorcher. A Beatles concert, or BBC session, was of course far afield of a Grateful Dead show, but the contextual effect--and intent--of each of these songs in their respective contexts was similar. Every version of "Big Railroad Blues" is a thermal affair, even in 1973, the year of sublime viscosity. It was always piping hot.

Listening to various versions of the Dead's cover of the Miracles' "I Second that Emotion," I'm reminded of late night conversations a college roommate and I would have regarding the philosophical dilemma as to whether a taste of honey is really worse than none at all. My stance is that Smokey and the boys had it wrong; you always want to drink life to the lees, no matter how much is held within the cup. Yes, I understand that within the strict parameters of the song, the metaphor is one of sexual relations, but I don't believe these things ought to be limited or that that's the intention. Such a thing has other levels which include the worldly and philosophical.

"Operator" is the lone Ron McKernan Grateful Dead number that, I think, qualifies as being sing-song in nature. It's chipper and has lilt and bounce. So tuneful. Best not to sleep on it.

Previously I'd written an entry in this record about the audience and soundboard recordings of the Grateful Dead's 8/6/71 show featuring their famed performance of "Hard to Handle." You need both versions. Often I'll think about Duke Ellington's orchestra in relation to the Dead. Similarly, you need the 1999 restored version of their 1956 Newport performance with "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue" and the Voice of America recording of that number with the crowd going nuts.

"They can't revoke your soul for trying." One of the best lines in rock and roll history because it is also among the wisest. The world would be a different place if more people understood as much and made a point of living this inarguable truth.

The 11/8/70 performance of "Truckin'", as heard on the Ken and Judy Lee audience tape, is as charged as live musical performance gets (see also: the start of the Stone Roses' 1990 Glasgow Green show, Sam Cooke's Harlem Square Club LP--especially the ending--as discussed in my book about the record, Otis Redding's Live in Europe, the opening of Karl Böhm's Bayreuth Tristan und Isolde from 1966). The ending of that version of "Truckin'" reveals much about the central theme of "Dark Star." The coda suggests Howlin' Wolf's "Smokestack Lightning." Listen to how readily that then becomes "Dark Star." Which isn't to imply the "Dark Star" theme is a Wolf riff variant. No no no. We can see a connection though. The one knows the other. Recognizes him from around town, so to speak.

The Dead could have released the thirty-minute "Caution (Do Not Stop on the Tracks)" from 6/14/68 (in its soundboard guise that features as a bonus track on Fillmore West 1969: The Complete Recordings) as a stand-alone live album and it would have been one of the best of the 1960s and at one track at that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=RDr-T6cZwvsV4&v=r-T6cZwvsV4