The Grateful Dead song Jerry Garica found “cumbersome” to perform live
There was a reasonably simple maxim when it came to the Grateful Dead: if a song didn’t survive in the live set, it rarely survived at all. However, there were certainly some exceptions along the way: classic songs like ‘St. Stephen’ and ‘Casey Jones’ saw long periods of time without being played but were still considered top-shelf Dead material. Other favoured tracks like ‘New Speedway Boogie’ and ‘Attics of My Life’ simply weren’t played all that much in the first place, with neither song getting above 60 live performances.
But a separate list of tracks were those that were abandoned by the band after a certain amount of time. Some of these were sadly circumstantial – after Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan’s death in 1973, there wasn’t any reason to trot out ‘Mr. Charlie’ or ‘Chinatown Shuffle’ anymore. Most of the songs that the Dead wound up dropping permanently came from their first five years, when psychedelic experimentation was king and concise songwriting was on the outs.
‘Cosmic Charlie’ from 1969’s Aoxomoxoa was akin to space blues. A rambling tune consisting of multiple parts and some delicate slide guitar work from Jerry Garica, ‘Cosmic Charlie’ was actually one of the less complex songs to appear on Aoxomoxoa, especially when compared to the complicated structures of songs like ‘Doin’ That Rag’ and ‘What’s Become of the Baby’. But Garcia disliked having to wrestle with it live, so after a handful of performances across 1969 and 1970, ‘Cosmic Charlie’ was eventually dropped from the Dead’s sets.
“‘Cosmic Charlie’ was really a recording song, and even when we did perform it, it always had its weaknesses,” Garcia told David Gans in his book Conversations with the Dead. “The weaknesses were part of what’s musically clever about the songs [on Aoxomoxoa], but part of what’s cumbersome about performing them. ‘Cosmic Charlie’ has some really complex chord voicings in the bridges.”
“Being able to pull off the changes and do the vocals – last time we worked it out was with Donna [Jean Godchaux], and it was pretty effective, sort of,” Garcia added. “But we still had a hell of a time getting through those bridges, and the fact that it didn’t stick as a piece of material tells something about what was flawed about the construction. It’s not quite performable… Those were the first songs me and Hunter did together, and we didn’t have the craft of songwriting down. We did things that in retrospect turned out to be unwise… Songs like ‘Cosmic Charlie,’ there’s technically too much happening there for me to be able to come up with a comfortable version of it that I can sing and play on stage. I never would have thought about that when I started writing songs. I didn’t realize that you had to think about that stuff…”
After a single performance of the song in early 1971, ‘Cosmic Charlie’ was retired for a full half-decade. And then, somewhat unexpectedly, the Grateful Dead decided to revive the song in 1976. The song’s return came during a period when the Dead were brushing up on their old material following a year-long live hiatus (minus a few shows scattered around 1975). ‘Cosmic Charlie’ was an old-school track that gained new life onstage… only to be retired once again after only six performances in 1976.
“We’ve already brought it back once. It didn’t work out too well,” Garcia told Steve Marcus in 1986. “We brought it back once when Keith & Donna were in the band, and we actually worked it out with harmony – three-part harmony all the way through – and it sounded pretty neat. But the thing is that the regular groove part of ‘Cosmic Charlie’ is OK, it works, but Hunter and I were inexperienced songwriters when we wrote the song, so the song has some problematic [elements].”
“It doesn’t have any room to breathe, for one thing, and the other thing is it has these intense little bridges,” Garcia specified. “There are two little melodic bridges in the chorus of the song that have words and everything, and they’re harmonically really complicated. They’re not easy, so trying to sing that song and actually play it at the same time is almost impossible. Now, all I can say is we did bring it back, but it didn’t work, it wasn’t successful. The record…has a certain bigness to it, a kind of funky grandeur that we haven’t been able to capture really in a concert yet. Someday we might pull it off, but really it’s awful wordy.”
Check out a 1976 rendition of ‘Cosmic Charlie’ down below.
