The Grateful Dead song played exactly 100 times
By 1969, the Grateful Dead had gotten into a rhythm. In contrast to the years that would follow, the Dead played more-or-less the same show every night of the late 1960s. Starting in mid-1968, the most common progression for the band’s set went like this: ‘Dark Star’ on to ‘St. Stephen’ (with the William Tell Bridge) and on to ‘The Eleven’. Depending on when they played the medley in the set, the band would often drop into some variation of either ‘Turn On Your Love Light’ or ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’.
While this might seem slightly stagnant, the medley left plenty of room for improvisation and jamming that soon became a signature part of the Grateful Dead sound. ‘Dark Star’ was a wide-open piece, one that could virtually go anywhere. ‘St. Stephen’ was a return to a more traditional song structure, but once the ‘William Tell Bridge’ was over, the band rocketed into the controlled chaos of ‘The Eleven’.
Named after the song’s central time signature, ‘The Eleven’ was at once wildly varying and incredibly simple. Based around a simple note progression and anchored by a few chords, it was the rhythm that shot ‘The Eleven’ into the stratosphere. Like the two-chord vamp of ‘Dark Star’, ‘The Eleven’ provided the Dead with a framework that they could unspool, shift around, ignore completely, and then bring back together at the finale.
Largely the baby of bassist Phil Lesh, ‘The Eleven’ took intense discipline to learn. Lesh was protective of the song and demanded that the band get it right. “I was so driven by this vision that I became somewhat, shall we say, insistent about going over and over these transitions,” Lesh explained in his memoir Searching for the Sound. “Sometimes these very intense rehearsal sessions would tip me over the edge, and I’d start yelling at the drummers: ‘Let’s do it again – right this time.’”
Eventually, the rest of the band got tired of the limiting nature of the song. “‘The Eleven’ was successful because it had a great groove… but you’re really stuck in that chord pattern – we used to go into E-minor out of that A-D-E [riff], which is like ‘La Bamba,'” Jerry Garcia explained to Blair Jackson for the Grateful Dead fanzine The Golden Road in 1988. “‘The Eleven’ is like ‘La Bamba,’ it really is… ‘La Bamba’ is a trap too, just like ‘The Eleven’ is, because you’re trapped harmonically in this very fast-moving little chord pattern which is tough to play through.”
“It’s tough to play gracefully through except for the most obvious shit, which is what I did on ‘The Eleven.’ When we went into the E-minor [section], then it started to get weird,” Garcia added. “We used to do these revolving patterns against each other where we would play 11 against 33 – so one part of the band was playing a big thing that revolved in 33 beats, or 66 beats, and the other part of the band would be tying into that 11 figure. That’s what made those things sound like, ‘Whoa, what the hell is going on?’ It was thrilling. But we used to rehearse a lot to get that effect. It sounded like chaos, but it was in reality hard rehearsal.”
“It was really too restrictive; and the vocal part, the song part, was dumb. [Garcia said it was a hard tune to play through] because of the three-chord structure. When we put that together with a drone it was much easier,” Lesh told The Golden Road in 1990. “How was it we used to do it – ‘Dark Star’/’St Stephen’/’The Eleven’/’Lovelight’? It fit well in there, I guess… It was really designed to be a rhythm trip. It wasn’t designed to be a song. That more or less came later as a way to give it more justification or something to work in a rock ‘n’ roll set. We could’ve used it just as a transition, which is what it was, really.”
‘The Eleven’ kept its permanent spot in the band’s favoured medley until the early months of 1970. ‘St. Stephen’ began falling out of favour at this time as well. The Dead were moving away from heady psychedelia and into a mellower, folk-oriented style. In addition, new excursions like ‘That’s It For The Other One’ and ‘Playing in the Band’ were starting to gain steam. The need for the band’s go-to medley had ceased, so ‘Dark Star’ was untethered while the frequency of ‘St. Stephen’ was reduced. After exactly 100 performances, the final version of ‘The Eleven’ was performed on April 26th, 1970.
Check out ‘The Eleven’ with its familiar partners ‘Dark Star’, ‘St. Stephen’ and ‘Death Don’t Have No Mercy’ from November 2nd, 1969 down below.
