What does the Grateful Dead album title ‘Steal Your Face’ mean?
After a decade of relentless touring, the last year of which involved lugging a gigantic sound reinforcement system around the world to be heard over fan freakouts, the Grateful Dead took a well-deserved break in October 1974. They’d barely had time to process the loss of core member Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan to illness 18 months earlier and needed time to reset as tensions in the band’s internal dynamic were starting to show.
And so, they performed five gigantic homecoming shows at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco before going their separate ways for a few months. They reconvened in February ‘75 to record their next studio album, Blues for Allah, but wouldn’t tour again until June 1976. Thankfully, the contents of these epic shows were recorded for posterity and released on the epic 84-minute live album Steal Your Face just as the Dead were about to head back out on the road.
This double LP is an absolute treat for Deadheads, combining all of the elements that defined the period during which the band arguably reached their peak as live performers. There are the classic rock and roll covers of Chuck Berry and Johnny Cash, the setlist staples from earlier in their career like ‘Cold Rain and Snow’ and ‘Beat It On Down the Line’, the bona fide classics ‘Ship of Fools’ and ‘Sugarbee’, subsequently rarefied nuggets such as closer ‘Casey Jones’ and Bobby Weir’s solo effort ‘Black-Throated Wind’. And let’s not forget the all-out acid party that is ‘U.S. Blues’.
If anything defines the expression “Steal Your Face”, it’s the performance of this song, which saw 6,000 Deadheads tripping simultaneously to a jam that the entire band got right in the pocket, playing fast and loose with a semi-satirical song about Uncle Sam’s red, white and blue. These also happen to be the colours of the album’s cover, which features the Dead’s legendary skull-and-lightning bolt logo for the first time. As a result, the logo was named after the title of the record.
But what does this title actually mean?
Ironically, the origin of the phrase “Steal Your Face” comes from a Dead song that isn’t on the album. ‘He’s Gone’ had already featured on the band’s live album Europe ‘72 and wasn’t really worthy of inclusion on this later record. However, it did offer up one of the most important lines in Deadhead mythology, “Steal your face right off your head”. The phrase actually refers to a thief who’s skipped town after sticking a “knife in the back” of its singer and leaving them high and dry.
The song was written about Dead drummer Mickey Hart’s father, who served as the band’s manager during their first years on tour. That is until he skipped town after embezzling $155,000 of their money. He was tracked down by a detective they hired, and arrested on July 26th, 1971.
He spent six months in prison, and was out in time to hear about the new composition the group had written about him, in which they call him a “rat in a drain ditch”. His son, on the other hand, had left the Dead, as he was unable to come to terms with what his old man had done to the band. It took him years to get over what happened and agree to join his bandmates as a full member again.
By then, the phrase originally written about his father had taken on a whole new meaning among Deadheads. “Steal Your Face”, or “SYF” for short, had become shorthand for someone’s mind being blown, especially in relation to face-melting musical improvisations by Jerry Garcia, Weir and co during live performances.
The Grateful Dead themselves embraced this new meaning. This is why, when they released their most important live album to date in 1976, they could think of no better title for it than the feeling their fans got from seeing them at their best.
