10. Grateful Dead, Live/Dead (1969) – “Dark Star”

[2012 review here]

At one time the second side of the first LP of Live/Dead was my favorite on the classic double live set, cobbled together from different shows early in 1969. Side 2 has longish versions of “St. Stephen” and “The Eleven” (named for its time signature, hence proggy). I can’t say I ever warmed much to Pigpen, who owns the third side with 15 minutes of “Turn On Your Love Light,” and then the fourth side has stark and sometimes interesting fare with feedback, somber moods and such, but somehow I have never listened to it much. “Dark Star” did not hit me for 20 years, at a peculiar passage in my life, living alone again. I flipped for the 23-minute workup, with all its many twists and turns. I played it at night in bed. It felt light, or like light shining, inviting and playful, but also dark and mysterious, suddenly swelling up like The Rite of Spring with great power. I know now those moments are at approximately 8:05 and 12:20. The singing parts are like some Maynard Krebs troubadour stepping off a spaceship, something from a dream. Sometimes I fell asleep to the album side, sometimes I pondered the agonies and victories of the day, with the snarls of Jerry Garcia’s wandering electric guitar and that throbbing bass or gentle organ catching at me. Many years after that, in downloading times, I made a hobby of collecting other versions of “Dark Star,” almost always live of course, with many variations across the years for how they approached playing it. Perhaps not surprisingly, my favorite turned out to be the one I fell in love with originally from this album. But I was amused to discover it was also released as a single, running time of 2:42—basically all the singing parts, and a little more up-tempo. Where a fair amount of the psychedelia I went and still go for is fairly described as space-rock, “Dark Star,” even with all its astronomical features (and even with heady modern physics finally catching up with it in a way)—“Dark Star” does not hit as space-rock for me but as something more interior. With, perhaps, the figurative dimensions of a galaxy—but all inside, more absorbed now over the years of listening to it. The bass fading up and in after a few seconds of silence and then the tones of the electric guitar following it. I am triggered within 20 seconds for all the swoops and shifts, the embarking journey, the rising squalls and peaceful passages, that beatnik (Bob Weir) who keeps showing up to warble verses—almost immediately I’m sent to this place of great comfort, serenity, bliss. Other albums sides+ that can send me this way include Pharoah Sanders’s Karma and the Rascals’ “Peaceful World.” What can I say, I must be an easy mark. But nothing does it like “Dark Star,” all full of Steve Ditko visions.

Live/Dead (1969)

As for the Grateful Dead, I have circled back on myself so many times I'm not even sure exactly where to pick up the thread. But I can say at least at long last I have the decency to recognize this album for the powerful, stirring, and mysterious set that it can be—notably, "Dark Star," the 23-minute opener that occupied the first side of the vinyl double-LP and periodically reenters and rules my world again, often after dark in quiet rooms alone. Candles burning, etc. More recently, "Death Don't Have No Mercy" and the eight-minute feedback sculpture (capped by the tremblingly beautiful but very brief "And We Bid You Goodnight"), which occupied the fourth side, have emerged as stellar points in their own right. "St. Stephen" and "The Eleven," side 2, at one time were my favorites, along with similar passages from Anthem of the Sun. That leaves only the 15-minute Pigpen goof made out of "Turn on Your Love Light" left for me to make peace with (which, to be honest, would not seem to be coming any time soon as it still seems to me indulgent and unnecessary, though I know Pigpen has his partisans). "Dark Star" remains my chief way in here, truly one of the great album sides along with Bitches Brew side 1 ("Pharoah's Dance") or Electric Ladyland side 3. Partly for such reasons I was tickled to find a "single version" of "Dark Star" on the expanded version of this album now available—that such a thing would exist never occurred to me. But sure enough, there are all the singing parts polished and marshaled in a row, with even some flavor of the guitar breaks scattered in lightly, tidying up at a relatively scant 2:42. Interesting to hear it conceived that way, because I so much prefer what is done with the longer version, which feels its way into the many strange places it travels. It's a jam but not what I think is more often implied by the term, a sort of communal rocking out with turns at solos. Instead it operates almost like pure intuition, mimicking and anticipating daydreamy kinds of thought patterns in endlessly eerie ways. It's even hard for me to focus on it as music once it starts to play; it is much more like a place I move through, or that moves past me, familiar but never quite known. I lose my concentration somehow, as it produces a sensation of returning to a city long abandoned, but whose streets and sites I still know well, embedded into neural pathways out of the reach of consciousness. I know where it's going, I sense the turns even as they approach, I never feel lost, and yet it is always beautiful in ways I can't anticipate. It still surprises me.