Watch the Grateful Dead space out on a legendary ‘Dark Star’ in 1972
Finding the best ‘Dark Star’ is a continuous and nearly insurmountable task for Deadheads. Even for a band notorious for never playing the same song twice, the Grateful Dead never seemed to have any idea where ‘Dark Star’ would go from concert to concert or even within each performance. It’s not just a song, it’s a vehicle for transportation.
If you were to simply look up the studio version of ‘Dark Star’, you probably wouldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. It’s a two-minute track with psychedelic elements and some wonky syncopation in its chorus, but other than that, it’s mostly just a two-chord vamp. It was only when the Dead played it live that ‘Dark Star’ truly came to life, often featuring distinct jams, other songs, new ideas, noise, feedback, and recurring motifs that could stretch the song out to at least half an hour in length and occasionally longer.
All told, the Dead played ‘Dark Star’ just over 200 times, but even that doesn’t tell the whole story. Once it was introduced to the live stage in early 1968, the Dead would play the song frequently from night to night, often repeating the jam across multiple nights. Each new performance of ‘Dark Star’ contained something different and exciting, with entire verses and themes occasionally being discarded for dense improvisations and exploratory jams.
By 1972, the Dead had accumulated a number of songs that could act as catalysts for extended improvisations, including ‘Truckin’ and ‘Playing in the Band’. While ‘Dark Star’ wasn’t quite as unique as it had once been, it was still one of the band’s most popular numbers. Even after gaining honest-to-god hits with songs like ‘Uncle John’s Band’ and ‘Casey Jones’, fans still called out for ‘Dark Star’ as much as any other song. The Dead continued to oblige, but ‘Dark Star’ was starting to become a bit stale.
Between 1973 and the band’s hiatus from touring starting in late 1974, ‘Dark Star’ was played less and less frequently. Between 1975 and 1977, it wasn’t played at all. It took a one-off appearance in 1978 for fans to restart their calls for the song, and with only six performances total in the 1980s, ‘Dark Star’ quickly gained a reputation as the rarest and most exciting of Dead breakouts at any particular concert.
So that brings us back to the best version of the song. While the performance captured on February 27th, 1969, at the Fillmore East in San Francisco is probably the most widely-distributed version of the track thanks to its appearance on the 1969 live album Live/Dead, there are literally hundreds of ‘Dark Star’ performances for fans to parse through and defend across the band’s extended live catalogue.
One version that frequently gets brought up in conversations of the best ‘Dark Star’ performances is August 27th, 1972, in Veneta, Oregon. The band had just returned from their spring jaunt across Europe that would produce the legendary live album Europe ’72, and new pianist Keith Godchaux had been fully integrated into the group’s jam style. This version is also notable for not featuring Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, who fell ill shortly after the band returned from Europe. Throughout their European concerts, Pigpen contributed inspired organ lines to ‘Dark Star’, but after their return, he would play only a single concert with the Dead again before eventually dying in March of 1973.
This version of ‘Dark Star’ takes ten minutes before even reaching the first verse. The slinky and restless take on the track continuously tries to find a centre, but each band member pushes and pulls the composition in different directions. After floating into a wild freeform jam that speeds up and slows down with ease, Jerry Garcia tries to pull the band into one of the band’s emotional centrepieces, ‘Morning Dew’. But Bob Weir has other ideas, starting up the country western swing of the Marty Robbins classic ‘El Paso’ instead.
Check out the version of ‘Dark Star’ from Veneta, Oregon, down below.
