St Stephen

St Stephen might be the most “Grateful Dead” of Grateful Dead songs, the one that (for better or worse) sounds the most like them and the most unlike anyone else. It’s a cliche with the Dead to say that the live version is better than the studio version, but in the case of “St Stephen”, it’s true. The version on Aoxomoxoa is too fast and has some awkward arrangement choices. The canonical recording is the one from Live/Dead.

This is a mess, but it’s a lovable mess. A few things I particularly enjoy: the feedback from (I think) the bass at 0:21; Jerry’s off-mic yell of satisfaction at 3:37; the crowd yelling “sing it!” and so forth at 3:59; the guitar/guitar/bass trio emerging out of chaos at 4:40.

The Live/Dead version ends with the “William Tell Bridge”, the vaguely Scottish “high green chilly winds” part that the Dead eventually (and rightly) dropped. This then segues into “The Eleven“, which, like a lot of Dead tunes of this era, is full of interesting ideas but is marred by tone-deaf caterwauling from Phil and Bobby. Fortunately “St Stephen” is much more within their vocal grasp.

The lineup on Live/Dead included organist Tom Constanten, a music school classmate of Phil’s who had previously been in a band with Steve Reich. Tom features prominently in the Dead’s inexplicable appearance on Playboy After Dark in 1969. It’s a pretty gruesome spectacle, but you do get to see Tom accompanying Jerry on harpsichord on “Mountains of the Moon” before a (heavily edited) full band performance of “St Stephen”.

What are the lyrics to “St Stephen” about? Songfacts does their best to explain, but really, the song is about nothing in particular. Robert Hunter lyrics of this era were more about the sound of the words than any referential or narrative meaning. Saint Stephen was the first Christian martyr, but Robert Hunter claimed that when he wrote the song, he had no idea who Saint Stephen even was, and the lyrics certainly don’t get into any biblical specifics.

The Dead played “St Stephen” constantly through the late 60s, but then they abandoned it, aside from a brief period in the late 70s. This surprised me as a teenage Deadhead; it was such a fan favorite, why not keep playing it? Far Out Magazine quotes some interviews with Jerry where he explains:

It’s one of those things that doesn’t perform that well – we were able to make it work then because we had the power of conviction… It’s got little idiosyncrasies and verses that are different from each other, and if you don’t remember every bit of it – it’s a piece of material that is unnecessarily difficult. It’s been made tricky. It’s got a bridge in the middle that doesn’t really fit in… it has a couple of things that work real good, but finally, the stuff that doesn’t work overpowers the stuff that does work… So in that sense, a song like ‘St. Stephen’ is a cop. It’s our musical policeman: if we don’t do it the way it wants to go, it doesn’t work at all. That means it’s inflexible.

The Dead’s brief 70s revival of the tune gave it a groovier, more laid-back arrangement. Here’s the iconic 5/8/77 version wrapped around “Not Fade Away.”

The ending D chord turns into the tonic of “Morning Dew“, which is just, *chef’s kiss*.

If you want to learn to play this song, the good news is that the basic harmonic concept is simple. It combines E major and E Mixolydian mode, and most of the lead guitar revolves around the E major pentatonic scale. The bad news is that the song is extremely complicated in its details. Much as I love it, my experiences of trying to learn it really make me understand Jerry’s complaints about all the quirks and oddities. YouTube has many guitar tutorials of widely varying quality. This one is pretty good. This one helpfully teaches you Bobby’s part. Don’t sleep on Bobby’s part!

I thought about transcribing the Live/Dead version, but it’s too long and chaotic. Instead, I transcribed the first twenty bars of the intro. (I didn’t attempt the drum parts.)

The intro is pretty weird. Where did that come from? Was Jerry trying to write Renaissance music? It seemingly starts in B Mixolydian but after ambling through B, A, D and E chords, it ultimately lands in E Mixolydian. It’s a winding path that reminds me a bit of the intro to “Brokedown Palace“.

The main groove’s central rhythmic feature is the way it anticipates the downbeat of the even-numbered measures, accenting the previous “and” of four instead. That’s the “catch” you feel in the beat every other bar. The groove uses a two-measure hypermeter, and the “catch” occurs in the middle of each two-measure cell.

The Dead have an unfortunate tendency to clutter up their arrangements, with everybody filling every eighth note in every bar. In “St Stephen”, they leave enough space for audible call and response among the instruments. In the Live/Dead version, the drums are a hot mess; I would rather hear Bill Kreutzmann by himself holding down a steady beat that everyone else could push and pull against. This Mickey-less performance from 1971 proves it.

Is “St Stephen” a good song? Or does it get its charm from its mystery and inscrutability, from all the lore encoded within it? As a teenage Deadhead, the weirder and more nonsensical they got, the more I felt compelled to understand what they were doing. Unlike “Unbroken Chain” or “Blues for Allah”, though, “St Stephen” has appeal for non-cultists as well. “Uncle John’s Band” has a similar quality: a basis in country-ish boogie, an unpredictable enough structure to keep you paying attention, lyrics that seem like they might be decodable into a coherent narrative or message, but that can also be enjoyed as a meaningless string of phonemes. Unlike “Uncle John’s Band”, though, “St Stephen” has a Tolkien quality both lyrically and musically, a direction that the Dead abandoned in favor of Americana. You could almost imagine “St Stephen” as a Led Zeppelin song, if it was played harder and tighter.

There are hardly any covers of this song, aside from Dead tribute bands. The only one I can find that’s even tolerable is the bare-minimum solo acoustic version by John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. The two best covers both involve members of the Dead. Ryan Adams and Phil Lesh did it pretty well, but the best “semi-cover” is by Wilco with Bob Weir.

People don’t tend to cover this song for the same reason the Dead stopped performing it: all those idiosyncratic complexities require either careful transcription or a ton of rehearsal or both. (Meanwhile, a decent band could learn “Franklin’s Tower” in two minutes.) No one is going to sit down and internalize all those twists and turns unless they are a deeply devoted fan. The Dead could only have written and learned “St Stephen” in the first place because they were all living in the same house and had unlimited band practice time. And even then, they had to be obsessive fans of themselves and their own lore. Maybe the fun of listening to Live/Dead is that you get to inhabit that time when the band got along well enough with each other for that to be possible. It didn’t last, but at least it happened.