‘Stella Blue’: the Grateful Dead song Jerry Garcia was most proud of
They were a band that emerged from the acid and a love of The Beatles. Tales abound within the Grateful Dead’s storied adventures of eating cakes laced with 800 tabs of LSD, missing fans, and hijinks with Jimi Hendrix. However, this should never detract from the fact that behind the madness was some of the finest music that the era had to offer and that Jerry Garcia was one of the most considered guitarists of the genre.
However, even when his head was full of acid, this was never lost on Garcia himself, who learned from the likes of Django Reinhardt, Roy Buchanan, and Carlos Santana. So, with that in mind, it comes as little surprise that favoured works are the ones where he thrived with his guitar work, chief among them being ‘Stella Blue’, the track from their 1973 album Wake of the Flood.
“I was so proud of it as a composer — ‘Hey, this is a slick song!’” he would later state about its inception. But his love of the track developed beyond that beginning. Robert Hunter would seize upon the undulations in the music’s arrangement and created an equally waltzing story to lay upon it. As Garcia would sing, “All the years combine / They melt into a dream / A broken angel sings / From a guitar / In the end there’s just a song,” in a tale of “broken dreams and vanished years.”
He wrote these lyrics, like the lyrics to many other great songs, at the Chelsea Hotel in 1970. However, they would soon develop once met with Garcia’s beloved composition. Garcia was already proud of the piece when this marriage aligned, but over the years, he grew even more fond of it. “That’s a good example of a song I sang before I understood it,” Garcia recalled of the brooding ballad. “It has a sort of brittle pathos in it that I didn’t get until I’d been singing it for a while.”
He would come to see the track as the apex of his songwriting achievements. It’s a song that clears up its own ambiguity thanks to the perfectly paired instrumental and the patently obvious mood behind it. When waltzed out in improvised tones on the 328 occasions it was played live, the sentiment was even more potent, with Garcia taking dominion over the ballad like a master storyteller.
Wake of the Flood was the band’s first album in three years, and during that time, Garcia and the group had time to come down from the 1960s. ‘Stella Blue‘ is the ponderous result, a record resplendent with depth and terrific musicianship.
You can watch them rattle it off live at Winterland in 1974 below.
