The 1969 Grateful Dead song Jerry Garcia considered a ‘throwaway’ and never wanted to play
Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia did more than enough to cement his place amongst his era’s greatest musicians.
Not only was he something of a guitar maestro, but he was also a magnificent songwriter, managing to draw upon a host of different forms, from folk to psychedelia, weaving them together seamlessly and making the California group one of the most pioneering of the time.
As the creative figurehead of the definitive countercultural act, Jerry Garcia devised an array of exciting moments. These included favourites such as ‘Uncle John’s Band’, ‘Dark Star’ and the only hit single they ever had, ‘Touch of Grey’. As fans of the band will know well, these songs are simply the tip of the iceberg, with the Grateful Dead composing a mountain of material in their time that ranges from more traditional compositions to starkly experimental pieces that evoke the boundary-pushing spirit of the time.
An exciting chapter for the group arrived at the end of the 1960s, as the dark side of hippiedom was starting to rear its head. This came via the negative long-term impacts of hedonism, such as LSD taking on Garcia and the band, and broader cultural events like the Manson Family murders.
This era of the Grateful Dead is arguably why they are hailed as one of the definitive psychedelic outfits. Perhaps the best representation of their most far-out era is 1969’s third album, Aoxomoxoa. A comprehensive reflection of their propensity to experiment, the record fuses avant-garde aspects with Baroque twists and contains a series of sonically challenging moments. The standout is the somewhat creepy, minimal piece, ‘What’s Become of the Baby’, one of the most mysterious the group ever recorded.
According to Garcia, the song was something of a ‘throwaway’, in light of the “revolutionary” idea he had for it. “I had something in mind that was extremely revolutionary. I wanted to use the entire band, but I didn’t want to use it in a standard rhythm section and lead instruments way,” he once explained.
Garcia continued: “I wanted something more like the stuff we did in the bridge section of St. Stephen: ‘Lady finger dipped in moonlight.’ That weird scratchy shit. I wanted something more like that, but which also included feedback and other stuff, and it would all be gated through the mouth…it would all be somehow enclosed inside the voice. But, well, you know how it goes… It’s too bad, because it’s an incredible lyric, and I feel I threw the song away somewhat.”
Did they ever play the song?
For all the songs that the Grateful Dead left behind over the years, ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ sits in a category of its own. The Aoxomoxoa oddity was never really built for the stage in the first place. Jerry Garcia later admitted that the band’s ambitions for the track far outweighed the technology available to them at the time, while Robert Hunter described it as a once-beautiful composition that became deliberately “good and weird” ahead of a possible studio visit from Jimi Hendrix. By the standards of a conventional Dead performance, the song was essentially impossible to recreate live.
Still, Deadheads searching through old setlists will notice one fascinating anomaly. On April 24th, 1969, during a chaotic night at Chicago’s Kinetic Playground alongside the Velvet Underground, ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ appeared on an official Grateful Dead setlist. The concert itself was pure psychedelic excess, with the band stretching songs into sprawling jams and seemingly attempting to exhaust both the audience and the Velvets in the process. By the encore, the Dead had descended almost entirely into improvisation, feedback and noise experiments.
That’s where the song finally surfaced, although not in the way most fans would imagine. Rather than performing ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ as a proper live number, the band reportedly played the studio recording over the venue PA while layering additional feedback and chaos around it.
Technically, yes, the Grateful Dead did “play” the song once. But in reality, they never truly performed it live in the traditional sense. It remained more of a ghost in their catalogue than a genuine part of their repertoire.
