Dark Star part one

Just after I posted this, I learned that Phil Lesh died. RIP Phil.

See also the academic literature review in part two.

Space: the final frontier. “Dark Star” is the ultimate Grateful Dead jam vehicle, and the purest experience of the band, at least as far as the true believers are concerned. The song also represents everything that nonbelievers find annoying about them. Brian Marchese satirizes the attitude: “deedle deedle noodle noodle wanky wanky crash boom dum dum da da noodle noodle Dark Star something/ space rock lyrics total dork fest doodle dee smoke another, dude, stoner twirly spinny dancer psychedelic space rock…” I have felt this way myself at times. But if you are in the right frame of mind, “Dark Star” can be a magical journey.

I first heard the tune on What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been, the studio recording that the band (very optimistically) released as a single in 1968. It sold a few hundred copies and vanished.

If you know “Dark Star” by reputation as a long and unfocused jam, this two-and-a-half-minute recording will be quite a surprise. I have a special place in my heart for it, because while it’s silly in some ways, I admire its creative ambition. The stereotypically hippie-ish tambura drone has not aged well, but the last few seconds are really special: the Lydian ending chords fade into Robert Hunter reading a nonsensical poem, which in turn fades into a tiny snippet of Jerry playing uptempo bluegrass banjo. The Dead gave up on that kind of studio adventurism quickly, but I appreciate it while it lasted.

Jerry didn’t regard the studio recording of “Dark Star” with much enthusiasm, as he explains in the liner notes of Grayfolded.

The single that we recorded at the time was a very poor exposition of the idea that I had in my mind. I wanted it to have a lot more depth, but I had no idea how to make the band play that way. I especially didn’t know how to speak to drummers then. I didn’t know how to tell them what I wanted. For me, the single of it is a blunder – it didn’t work…. I wanted it to have more power. I wanted the bass figure to be more powerful…. As always with Grateful Dead stuff, my version usually just dies somewhere and the Grateful Dead version takes over. I’ve learned to trust that process. At the time I was panicked a little because I thought, ‘Well, what happened to my song? What happened to the thing that I wanted to have happen here?’ But as it opened up and we got really risky – when we started to drop the rhythm and just go all over the place – then I realized that the Grateful Dead version was way more interesting both to me as a player and also to me as an audience.

The “Grateful Dead version” found its fullest expression the following year on Live/Dead. Its entire first side is occupied by a performance of “Dark Star” that is more than nine times longer than the studio version. 

This recording has a surprisingly complex production history, because the band recorded to sixteen tracks, which enabled them to make a lot of musical decisions during postproduction.. There are multiple mixes in circulation that sound very different from each other. I’ll be discussing the 2001 remaster embedded above.

Before I talk through the Live/Dead version in detail, let’s look at the big structural features. The tune is in A Mixolydian mode and/or E Dorian mode. These are the same D major scale necklace starting on two different pitches. Jerry took advantage of Mixo/Dorian duality in a lot of his tunes.

This is a very guitar-friendly pitch set. It includes all of the guitar’s open strings. There is essentially no harmonic tension or resolution anywhere in this tune, just gentle oscillation between the two poles of A and E, so whatever musical structure and interest there is will come from melodic and rhythmic gestures. 

The tempo is slow and unstable, ranging from 75 to 100 beats per minute, slowing all the way down to 50 at the end. The eighth notes swing for the most part, though as with the tempo, there’s a lot of variation. There are places where it feels like doubletime with swinging sixteenth notes.

Graeme Boone wrote a detailed transcription and analysis of “Dark Star”, synthesizing its most important features across many different performances. If you need to see music notation, refer to him. 

With all that in mind, here are some key moments in the Live/Dead recording.

• 0:00 Intro, which in the original performance is a jam leading from the end of “Mountains of the Moon“. It’s in D Dorian/G Mixolydian.
• 1:18 Phil plays the “Dark Star” intro riff, carrying us from D Dorian to A Mixo. The riff takes advantage of the fact that those two scales both include the notes D, E, G, A and B, in other words, the E minor pentatonic scale. Cool!
• 1:24 Intro groove in A Mixolydian. Jerry comments quietly in the background.
• 1:59 Jerry plays his first solo, the first of many. He develops some short Mixolydian phrases that gradually get longer.
• 2:25 Jerry plays a gnarly A-sharp as a passing tone.
• 2:40 After pausing for a few seconds, Jerry re-enters with distorted volume swells. Then he resumes ambling around Mixolydian with distorted tone.
• 3:00 Jerry repeats a short cell and gives it some intriguing rhythmic displacement. 
• 4:04 Gorgeous rippling pull-off figure. Nobody plays pulloffs like Jerry.
• 5:00 The “Dark Star” riff, the first indication since 1:18 that this is a specific song and not just a Mixolydian jam.
• 6:04 Verse one. Jerry sings with a weirdly strained tremolo that Jonathan Segal calls “horror movie quavering”. He’s backed by gong washes by Mickey. See Graeme Boone for an exhaustive analysis of this melody.
• 6:40 Chorus one. After a lot of mellow swinging 4/4, the rhythm here gets very complicated. Graeme Boone calls it a bar of 4/4, a bar of 2/4, a bar of 9/16, a bar of 3/4, a bar of 2/4, a bar of 3/4, and so on (adjusted for the fact that he hears the tempo as being twice as fast as I do). I doubt the band were thinking of these specific beat values, it was more about feeling their way through odd phrasing, but maybe they were counting all of this in their head. In later years, they dropped the through-composed contrapuntal material after “transitive nightfall of diamonds” to go straight into the jam, which is understandable, but I like the more structured version of the tune they play here.
• 7:10 Postchorus. Jerry disrupts the quiet “Dark Star” jam by banging out weird metallic chords, and the intensity builds on an upward-swirling E minor groove until it explodes into…
• 8:06 Jerry’s solo. This is going to last about twelve and a half minutes, so strap in. There are several distinct passages and sections. This first one decrescendos off its big beginning into a calm and introspective ramble with long lines from Jerry.
• 9:55 There’s a bar of 2/4 and the beat turns around.
• 10:30 After another bar of 2/4, Jerry changes to shorter phrases.
• 10:55 Jerry briefly drops out, and then after a bar of 3/4 he re-enters with a series of little crying phrases. The beat re-orients around him and everyone falls away to near-silence. 
• 11:15 Jerry begins playing an arpeggiated figure that the Deadheads call “Sputnik” for some reason.
• 11:25 Jerry plays a repeated E and then uses his whammy bar to make it go a little sharp, then wildly flat.
• 11:40 Jerry resumes the Sputnik riff.
• 12:05 Jerry’s three-beat groupings get so insistent that I hear the entire meter shift to 3/4.
• 12:40 4/4 reasserts itself as the Sputnik gets more distorted at distressed-sounding.
• 13:00 Jerry falls to silence and there’s a bit of metrical confusion, an implicit bar of 5/4.
• 13:10 Jerry re-enters with his wah-wah pedal activated, though he doesn’t really use it, he just leaves it partway open for the filter sound. He plays choppy three-beat phrases that once again pull the meter into bars of three, plus an odd bar of two at 13:35. You can hear Billy working hard to follow this idea.
• 14:40 Billy reasserts 4/4 with an almost hip-hop sounding beat. This quickly decays back into jazzy looseness, though.
• 14:20 Phil begins scraping his pick on his strings to make an eerie high-pitched warble, and someone makes a kind of insectoid chirp (I can’t figure out who, maybe Jerry).
• 14:35 The meter falls apart; it’s an implicit bar of 7/4.
• 14:43 Jerry and Billy resume 4/4. Jerry’s melody becomes orderly.
• 15:17 Jerry starts playing repeated odd phrases but everyone else sticks to the 4/4 groove so he cycles in and out of phase, it’s a cool effect.
• 15:26 Jerry gets a nice phrase in, a rising arpeggio that then tumbles down as a chromatic triplet pulloff. This is the kind of thing you don’t hear from your standard jamband noodler. There’s a string bend at 15:31 that also breaks up the Mixolydian pattern in an ear-grabbing way.
• 15:38 Jerry starts repeating the note A in a funky pattern and the energy rapidly builds behind him. The jam starts sounding like actual rock. All through the sixteenth minute, the band is extroverted rather than introverted, running rather than ambling. The tempo gets a little faster, but the main thing is just the passion of the playing.
• 17:00 The band decrescendos again and Jerry pauses to think.
• 17:18 Jerry begins a new fragmented hammer-on figure. He does not hammer on much! Everyone else fragments their ideas in response. The time gets choppy.
• 17:50 Jerry resumes spinning out a long line.
• 18:06 Another rising arpeggio to chromatic pulloff riff. I love that thing so much. After that, Jerry drops out again, and there’s a bar of 2/4 before Phil regains control of the meter and restarts 4/4.
• 18:18 Jerry re-enters with the verse melody. Remember that from twelve minutes ago? It’s exciting to be reminded that it exists. You can feel everyone being roused back into rock energy.
• 18:51 Jerry plays a series of gorgeous pull-off figures.
• 19:02 After another brief pause, Jerry tiptoes back in with a series of long flowing scale riffs.
• 19:30 Jerry does that crying angel thing that I adore. Billy rises to the occasion behind him, playing more of that hip-hop sounding groove.
• 12:10 Jerry plays a triumphant-sounding riff that the Deadheads call “Bright Star”. It sounds almost like an Appalachian fiddle tune played on distorted guitar.
• 20:40 Jerry decrescendos out of “Bright Star” with a series of descending string bend releases that the Deadheads call “Falling Star.”
• 20:48 The “Dark Star” riff, cool and collected. The forces get reattached to the axis.
• 21:26 Verse two. I wish Jerry would just sing with his normal voice. “Glass hand dissolving in ice petal flowers revolving” is one of my favorite Robert Hunter lines. I don’t know what it means, if anything, but it’s a vivid visual.
• 22:02 Chorus two. I have mixed feelings about Phil and Bobby’s backing vocals here. On the one hand, I like the contrapuntal ending. On the other hand, their pitch control is absolutely awful. So, maybe it’s for the best that eventually they just had Jerry sing this himself. In later versions they tended to skip the whole second verse and chorus and just wander off into something else.
• 22:31 Outtro. The band may have been bad at vocal counterpoint, but they were good at instrumental counterpoint. I like this ending a lot, especially the repeated B and A chords with their Lydian flavor.
• 23:08 Ending, which in the original performance leads straight into “St Stephen“.

By the way, I tried putting a hip-hop beat under all of this and it’s more enjoyable than you might think. Let me know if you want to hear it.

Something about this tune really brings out the archivist in people. The always thorough Dead Essays site has a complete chronology of the song. Jonathan Segal wrote reviews of the first hundred performances. I won’t do anything nearly so completist here; I’ll just point to some versions that I think are especially enjoyable or interesting.

Many of the Deadheads think that the best Dark Star is from 2/13/70, especially the Feelin’ Groovy jam at 18:11.

The late Steve Silberman says of this performance: “Theme after improvised theme circulates among the players like shapes in water. the band reaches a level of subtle empathy equaled only by, say, the Bill Evans Trio with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian.” I don’t know about that, but it is an enjoyable jam.

“Dark Star” was often strung together with other tunes to make epic suites. The band’s first attempt at this idea was to connect it to “China Cat Sunflower” and “The Eleven.” The performance below is a hot mess, but it’s interesting to see an alternative direction the tune might have gone.

The open-ended central jam made it very easy to insert other tunes within it. On 11/8/69, “Dark Star” flows into, out of and around “The Other One” and a jam on “Uncle John’s Band” before finally transitioning into “St Stephen”. This is only the beginning of a seamless hour-long sequence of other tunes and jams. It’s a good one. 

On 2/18/71, the central jam segues into the first ever performance of “Wharf Rat” via the Beautiful Jam, then back to “Dark Star”.

On 10/21/71, they segue into “Sittin’ On Top Of The World” and back.

The following year, the suites began to really stretch out in length and ambition. On 4/8/72, they segue from “Dark Star” into the Mind Left Body jam into “Sugar Magnolia”, and from there into “Caution”.

On 4/24/72, they go from “Dark Star” into “Me and My Uncle” and back. 

In the 70s, the band often follows “Dark Star” with “Morning Dew“. One of the loveliest transitions is on 8/24/72, coming out of near silence.

Three days later, on 8/27/72, it seems like another epic “Dark Star” is headed into “Morning Dew”, but instead Bobby launches unexpectedly into “El Paso” by Marty Robbins. Watch at 31:20. Many Deadheads find this annoying; I think it’s funny.

A few weeks after that, on 9/21/72, the band spends 49 whole minutes moving from “Dark Star” to “Morning Dew.” They were really on a hot streak that year. Less than a week later, on 9/27/ 72, they segue from “Dark Star” into “Cumberland Blues”.

The hot streak continued the next year. On 11/11/73, they go from “Dark Star” into a great Mind Left Body jam into “Eyes of the World”, and then elegantly into “China Doll”.

By 1974, “Dark Star” started to fall out of the rotation, and it never came back in as a regular thing. There was a brief revival in the early 90s because Bruce Hornsby loved to play it so much, but it had very little of the old magic.

A lot of jambands have tried covering “Dark Star”, and it tends not to result in anything special. People treat it either as an opportunity for unstructured jamming in Mixolydian mode or free jazz or both. I do enjoy the Flaming Lips’ indie-rock-trip-hop take from the Day of the Dead compilation.

David Murray takes the basic free jazz approach, but he does it well.

Randy Steele’s bluegrass version is refreshingly original. I wonder if he was inspired by the last three seconds of the Dead single.

The most significant artwork that “Dark Star” has inspired is John Oswald’s Greyfolded album, commissioned by the Dead in the early 1990s. It combines together more than a hundred performances of the song from across the band’s entire career. It’s pretty great. I remixed my favorite part of Greyfolded to include a Mind Left Body jam and some other things.

There is a ton of academic literature about “Dark Star” and its relationship to drugs, religion, psychology, jazz, non-Western music and much else. This post is long enough already, so I’ll do my literature review in part two.

Update: the 500 Songs podcast has a very long, thoroughly-researched episode about “Dark Star” that is also the single best encapsulation of the Dead’s larger context and cultural significance.