10 great songs that were dropped from Grateful Dead live shows
The vast amount of material the Grateful Dead performed live over their 30 years together was astounding. Since the band inspire the most obsessive kind of devotion among their fans, it’s no surprise that fan sites have attempted to organise all the known information about the Dead as possible. Concerts, studio sessions, cancelled gigs, and promotional appearances are all accounted for, but most impressive is the ability to track down each and every song that the Dead were known to have played at least once.
Currently, that list is topping out at just shy of 1,500 different songs. That doesn’t include material that was potentially played in early years but not written down or properly recorded: chances are that the real number is actually much higher. With that being said, some songs never actually made it to the live stage. From the Mars Hotel‘s ‘Prime of Cucamonga’ never got a stage appearance, and neither did Shakedown Street‘s ‘France’. It was unusual for a song to appear on a studio album and never even get attempted on stage, but it’s all a part of the Dead’s unique charm.
As the band weaved its way through distinctive eras, so too did the band’s setlists ebb and flow. Starting in the 1980s, a conscious effort to make each show different led to a number of revivals and a diverse list of songs that included unrecorded originals, never-played album cuts, Bob Dylan covers, and much more. But the Dead lived to break their own rules, and the more fans coveted certain songs, the less interested the band seemed to be in playing them.
Part of the appeal of going to a Dead show was being present for a breakout. For some fans, holy grail songs came in the form of long-since abandoned classics that the band had kept on the shelf for decades at a time. A large contingent of fans never stopped hoping to hear a ‘Dark Star’ or ‘St. Stephen’, at least until Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995 put a permanent end to the Grateful Dead.
Peeking into the songs that got dropped provides a fascinating look into the way the Dead viewed their own music. Sometimes the Dead simply grew tired of their material. Other times, practical reasons kept songs out of rotation. There were cases where some songs were retired due to the death of their singer. There were also cases where the band simply forgot how to play certain songs. With all that in mind, here are ten great tracks that got dropped from the Grateful Dead’s live shows for significant periods of time.
10 songs dropped from Grateful Dead live shows
‘Dark Star’
‘Dark Star’ was, in many ways, the beginning of the Grateful Dead. Before its writing, the band had mostly been a psychedelic blues outfit looking for their own voice. They had briefly jammed out Wilson Pickett’s ‘In the Midnight Hour’, but it took Robert Hunter’s cosmic look at deep space to truly push the Grateful Dead into their own identity.
‘Dark Star’ was played nearly every night the band took the stage in the late ’60s, often appearing in a suite with ‘St. Stephen’ and ‘The Eleven’. By 1974, the band had burned out the last embers of ‘Dark Star’, with two appearances each in 1978 and 1979 before playing it only six times throughout the ’80s. The ’90s saw a small revival in the band’s best-loved jam, but before they embarked on their final tours in 1995, ‘Dark Star’ was once again gone.
‘St. Stephen’
Perhaps the most famous case of a popular song being banished to the wilderness, ‘St. Stephen’ had a history that was similar to the one that followed ‘Dark Star’: played incessantly throughout the late ’60s, by the end of 1971, it was gone. Bob Weir and Phil Lesh even taunted the crowd during a concert on March 21st, 1973, with Lesh claiming that they “don’t do that song anymore” and Weir adding, “We had to quit doing it ‘cause you liked it too much.”
“The truth is that we did it to death when we did do it – when we did it, we did it,” Garcia claimed in 1987. “In fact, we had two periods of time when we did it – we rearranged it later for three voices, with Donna. And we did it, and the people who missed it, that’s too bad, you know?” After just three performances in 1983, ‘St. Stephen’ was gone from the Dead’s repertoire, never to be played again.
‘Box of Rain’
Phil Lesh had a complicated history with his signature lead vocal, ‘Box of Rain’. As the opening track to American Beauty, the song quickly became a fan favourite. However, the song carried significant emotional weight for Lesh, and after one performance in 1970, Lesh only sporadically sang it throughout 1972 and 1973 before retiring it. Lesh stepped away from the microphone after 1974, and ‘Box of Rain’ was left as a relic of the past.
That was until 1986. After more than 780 concerts, Lesh welcomed back ‘Box of Rain’ on March 20th, 1986, in Hampton, Virginia. From that point on, ‘Box of Rain’ had at least a couple of performances every year until the band’s dissolution in 1995. By the ’90s, it was a staple of the band’s sets after more than a decade away.
‘Bird Song’
‘Bird Song’ wasn’t technically a Grateful Dead track: it first appeared on Jerry Garcia’s solo debut, Garcia, in 1971. That same year it entered the Dead’s live rotation, but not for long. By 1974, it was gone, a surprising turn from a band that was becoming jazzier with each passing year. ‘Bird Song’ sat on the shelf for over half a decade, but when the Dead revived their acoustic sets in 1980, ‘Bird Song’ was given new life.
Once the band stopped playing acoustic, ‘Bird Song’ was one of the few songs that made the leap seamlessly over to the electric set. It would be one of the band’s most exploratory first-set songs, often filling the space that ‘Dark Star’ left in the band’s improvisational tastes. ‘Bird Song’ must have been a favourite of Brent Mydland’s since it was nearly inescapable in the ’80s.
‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’
The Grateful Dead loved to sing about death. Even in their earliest days, when Hunter wasn’t around to conjure up the proper spooky atmosphere, the band had the perfect conjurer of darkness in their sets. Reverend Gary Davis’ ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ is one of the scariest blues songs that the Dead ever played, brought to life by Garcia’s impassioned singing and Pigpen’s atmospheric organ.
Appearing as early in sets as 1966, ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ famously featured on Live/Dead, an album that was an iconic portrait of Primal Dead. Just like the rest of the songs on that live LP, ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ was dropped once the Dead began to diversify their setlists. For almost two decades, the band ignored ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ before briefly reviving it for four performances between 1989 and 1990. The gap between its last play in 1970 and its first revival in 1989 amounted to more than 1,300 concerts, one of the longest in Grateful Dead history.
‘Alligator’
In their early days, it was easier to communicate directly with the Grateful Dead. Although they were relatively reticent to answer hecklers, the band members occasionally indulged in responses. At the band’s performance on June 18th, 1972, in Jersey City, New Jersey, Phil Lesh answered a fan’s calls for the early-period jam ‘Alligator’. “We don’t do that tune no more, man,” Lesh said. “It done faded away in the mists of time… As you all might have figured out by now, we can’t do any Pigpen songs because Pigpen ain’t here.”
Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan wouldn’t die for another eight months, but he had already handed in his resignation due to health issues. The Dead occasionally revived Pigpen’s songs after his death in 1973, but ‘Alligator’ was not among them. After exactly 65 performances, the final ‘Alligator’ reared its head in April of 1971 and was never played again. Although the Dead occasionally jammed on Pigpen’s songs in later years, with the most notable being ‘Caution (Do Not Step on Tracks)’, ‘Alligator’ never got such an honour.
‘Mr. Charlie’
The real tragedy of Pigpen’s death was that he was just coming into his own when he stepped away. On the Europe 72 tour, Pigpen had a number of new original songs, including ‘Chinatown Shuffle’ and some in-progress material that appeared in the notebook at the side of his organ. ‘Mr. Charlie’ was the most prominent new addition, being performed at every single show the band played in Europe during that legendary run.
With Pigpen’s death came a permanent abandonment of ‘Mr. Charlie’. There were rumours that Pigpen was potentially going to work on a solo album in his later years and ‘Mr. Charlie’ would have made a great addition. Garcia lamented the fact that the band never recorded the song in 1993, saying: “I thought ‘Mr Charlie’ was a great tune. I’m sorry we never got a chance to do that one in the studio.”
‘New Speedway Boogie’
One of the Dead’s timeliest tracks, not to mention one of their rare entrances into politics, ‘New Speedway Boogie’ was a reaction toward the violence that unfolded at the Altamont Free Concert in 1969. Hunter chose to address the band’s involvement obliquely, avoiding blame and wondering how it could all go so wrong. Garcia wasn’t very into topical material, and as the group got further away from Altamont, the Dead decided to drop ‘Speedway’ in 1970.
More than two decades later, there was some increasing darkness around the band’s scene. The Dead were more popular than ever, but their large crowds were starting to get out of control. It seemed as good a time as any to reintroduce ‘New Speedway Boogie’, which they did on February 19th, 1991, almost exactly 1,340 performances since the last time they played. As it stands, it’s the longest-known gap between an original song being dropped and getting revived in the Dead’s live shows.
‘Attics of My Life’
The American Beauty cut ‘Attics of My Life’ was representative of the Dead’s reinvention in 1970. With acoustic instruments and a strong focus on vocal harmony, the song wasn’t exactly made for the band’s raucous live sets. It bounced around the band’s sets in 1970, but apart from two performances in 1972 and a soundcheck in 1974, it would be another 1,000 concerts before ‘Attics of My Life’ reappeared.
Hampton, Virginia, had become known as a space where the Dead loved stage breakouts (‘Dark Star’ and ‘Box of Rain’ both made notable reappearances there). ‘Attics of My Life’ became another breakout for the books when the Dead revived it in the encore slot on October 9th, 1989. It became one of Garcia’s go-to ballads out of ‘Space’, trading places with songs like ‘China Doll’ and ‘Stella Blue’.
‘Here Comes Sunshine’
‘Here Comes Sunshine’ was a curious track in the Dead’s catalogue. Originally appearing on 1973’s Wake of the Flood, the song was largely only played during the immediate supporting shows for the album that year. One final 1974 performance was the last of ‘Here Comes Sunshine’, and apart from a soundcheck of the song in 1983, the Dead didn’t touch the track for another 18 years.
In the far-out reaches of Chandler, Arizona, in the last month of 1992, however, ‘Here Comes Sunshine’ made its triumphant return. After opening up the December 6th show that year, ‘Here Comes Sunshine’ was back in regular rotation for the final three years of the Grateful Dead’s existence.
