Grateful Dead listening notes and thoughts while working towards a book on "Dark Star" (V)
- 23 hours ago
- 4 min read
Sunday 8/30/26
The Rubber Soul(s) of Grateful Dead shows: the Dream Bowl gigs from Vallejo on 2/21-22/69, among the most important they ever played for the pathways they opened. The two Dark Stars are both fully realized works of musical art and portals. There was "before" these two versions, and now there will be "after." The famous Fillmore West rendition from Live/Dead was played a several days later, but the fresh flag had already been planted. History-shaping shows.
On 8/21/69 at Seattle's Aqua Theatre, the Grateful Dead took a much different approach to "Dark Star" than was their wont even as a band accustomed to myriad approaches. It's a folk-y, dream-like wisp of a version, all smoky tendrils, like some faded ink blot or the adumbration of where a since-lost flower had been pressed between the pages of a book. Garcia sings the verse eighteen seconds in. The whole thing last six-and-a-half minutes. Fascinating choices and music.
The Grateful Dead canon is laced with passages of sublime beauty--passages to make you feel weak in the legs even as you're sitting down. A shining light among these shining lights is the version of "Attics of My Life" sung solo by Jerry Garcia during the American Beauty sessions. It's a kind of secular communion processional. Note the vocal text painting on the word "fly," when Garcia makes the note soar much like he might a peal of feedback near the start of a 1970 "Dark Star."
On 8/27/72 in Veneta, the Grateful Dead played their third best “Dark Star” of the week. A suggested experiment: listen to each of that week‘s versions, in order, starting with 8/21, one per day. So you’re fresh. I bet, “Huh, what do you know” and “Wait, that’s not how it’s supposed to be” will prove common reactions.
There's a lot of defiance in the music of the Dead, and what I call the good kind of anger, because it helps in getting off the mat. Theirs is the defiance of grit, push back, not taking it, rising. And light, the overriding theme of the Dead's art, the way that time is the overriding theme of Nick Drake's. Goin' down the road feeling bad, yes, but coming back up it again to kick some ass.
The Dead's 8/5/70 Golden Hall San Diego tape was made neither on that day nor in San Diego, but we don't know exactly when in 1970 and where it comes from, though I know it's one of the Grateful Dead recordings--like the 4/8/72 "Dark Star" and 11/8/70--that makes me think it may be the best music I've ever heard. Arguably the ultimate Dead acoustic set, but there's a fierce argument to be had on that score.
The Grateful Dead go to jail--sort of. One of those fun, "Can you believe they played there?" types of tapes from 8/4/71, the Dead rocking at the Terminal Island Correctional Facility in San Pedro. The invited guests--well, you know--got a big charge from the "throw me in the jailhouse" part of "Bertha." Other Dead shows to file in this category: the French chateau affair of 6/21/71, the raspberry farm day out and the Haight flatbed truck set in '68, and the Hilton and high school gigs of '69.
Kissing country-fied cousins: the Dead's acoustic version of "Big Railroad Blues" at the Fillmore East on 9/20/70 and the Rolling Stones' "Country Honk" off of Let It Bleed. Barn dance, baby.
If someone said, "Okay, write a textbook, but fresh, blues suggestive of both the delta and the big northern city, with some joie de vivre to it," then the Grateful Dead's "Operator" would make an ideal response. It's the music version of a "glue guy" in sports--laden with intangibles. We know the song was played four times. In three of those instances it was part of the band's acoustic set, which makes the electric version from 9/18/70 at the Fillmore East a very rare treat indeed.
Much of the Dead's best work has a great intimacy. A person feels uniquely connected to that art, as though it were a friend on the outside who best knows what's inside of us. That being said, there's a kind of glimpsed intimacy--with us doing the peering in--with the tape we have of Jerry Garcia in a studio by himself in early 1970, or perhaps late 1969, working on Workingman's Dead material with nothing but acoustic guitar and voice, and sometimes a falsetto voice at that.
"It's a sinister plot." Bob Weir cracking wise during the Grateful Dead's set at Woodstock on August 16, 1969. Their performance wasn't nearly as bad as people make it out to be, but they erred in how they presented "Dark Star." Didn't match the moment. Had they gone with one of their barn burner, "let's rock the hell out of everybody" type of sets, they would've fared better, as exemplified by the closing "Love Light."
It tends to get lost in the Grateful Dead shuffle, but the tape of the band's 8/23/68 Shrine gig makes for essential listening. The official release of 8/24/68 has seemed to make people less aware that we have Shrine recordings of back-to-back nights. 8/23 is a burn-the-boats type of Dead show like 10/12/68, 12/29/68, and the Capitol Theatre gigs of 1970. The performance of "Death Don't Have No Mercy" is reason to reassess what one is doing in life.
Three-fourths of the 9/3/67 Rio Nido version of “Dancing in the Street” sounds like a spelunking expedition to locate the workings of “Dark Star.”
Just as we can hear the nascent melodic hallmarks of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" in the 9/3/67 "Dancing in the Street" from Rio Nido, so too can we hear the melody of the "Lady with a Fan" portion of 1977's "Terrapin Station" in the 10/19/73 "Dark Star" in Oklahoma City. It appears at 1:16 in the Dick's Picks release (the Archive time is different).
I know it doesn't work like this, but part with the tape of the Grateful Dead's 8/18/70 Fillmore West performance for nothing and keep it close to your heart where it belongs. It's two-and-a-half months prior to the release of American Beauty--the ultimate album, in my mind, of what I call pure song--and we get the first recorded performances of four of its songs. One of the most important tapes in American music history.
Comments