Why the Grateful Dead never “played” ‘What’s Become of the Baby’
When it came to holy grail songs that Deadheads wanted to hear in concert, there were the wanted rarities and the lesser-known obscurities. In the 1980s, everyone wanted their own ‘Dark Star’ or ‘St. Stephen’. In the 1990s, you were among rare company if you heard ‘Casey Jones’. But throughout their career, the Grateful Dead dropped more songs than they ever played, and for a band as prolific as the Dead, that’s saying something.
Most of the group’s early originals had no place in their repertoire by as early as the mid-1970s. Songs like ‘Cream Puff War’ and ‘Can’t Come Down’ were baby steps for the Dead, and once they found their cosmic psychedelic direction, they were dropped, never to be played again. But even into their most heady phase, the Dead were writing and recording, then ignoring, a large amount of material.
Aoxomoxoa remains perhaps the pinnacle of the psychedelic Grateful Dead. Fusing elements of avant-garde with baroque music, the album wasn’t quite as dense and aggressive as their previous effort, Anthem of the Sun, but it still had some wild moments. Most prominent was the ambient piece ‘What’s Become of the Baby’, an inscrutable song that it was barely a song at all.
“‘What’s Become of the Baby’ was originally baroque,” Jerry Garcia revealed to Blair Jackson in 1991. “I had this melody worked out that had this counterpoint and a nice little rhythm. The original setting I’d worked out was really like one of those song forms from the New York Pro Musica. I just had a desire to make it much weirder than that, and I didn’t know how to do it. Also, the technology wasn’t there to do what I could easily do now. I had something specific in mind but simply couldn’t execute it because I didn’t have the tools.”
“I think a lot of people don’t realise that ‘What’s Become Of The Baby’ was a very beautiful, art-nouveau kind of thing,” lyricist Robert Hunter told the crowd at his June 10th, 2003 solo concert. “But the thing was, Jimi Hendrix was going to come over to the studio, so we decided to get it good and weird so he could hear it.
“I had something in mind that was extremely revolutionary. I wanted to use the entire band, but I didn’t want to use it in a standard rhythm section and lead instruments way,” Garcia added. “I wanted something more like the stuff we did in the bridge section of St. Stephen: ‘Lady finger dipped in moonlight.’ That weird scratchy shit. I wanted something more like that, but which also included feedback and other stuff, and it would all be gated through the mouth…it would all be somehow enclosed inside the voice. But, well, you know how it goes… It’s too bad, because it’s an incredible lyric, and I feel I threw the song away somewhat.”
Based on the impossibility of recreating the track in the live setting, the Dead never really performed ‘What’s Become of the Baby’. But the track does show up on a single, solitary setlist from April 24th, 1969. The Dead were sharing a bill with the Velvet Underground, and on the previous night, the Velvets extended their set, forcing the Dead to play a truncated show. When the bands switched spots in the lineup the following night, the Dead went out for revenge.
As they took the stage at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago, the Dead unleashed a three-hour set that was specifically engineered to keep the Velvet Underground from playing. According to jerrybase.com, the 20-song main set included a 33-minute ‘Turn On Your Love Light’, a ‘Dark Star’ jam that didn’t even include any of the song’s lyrics, and a wild ‘Cryptical Envelopment’ to ‘Drums’ to ‘The Other One’ to ‘The Eleven’ and ‘The Other One’ segment.
On the concert’s tape, audiences can be heard stomping and calling for more. The Dead obliged by playing a 40-minute encore that kicks off with ‘Viola Lee Blues’ and quickly takes a turn for the weird. Most of the is either straight improvisation or screeching feedback. But out of the ether comes the sounds of ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ playing over the PA system as the band produces more feedback around it.
In that sense, the Dead never really “played” ‘What’s Become of the Baby’. But it’s there, listed as a song played on an official setlist. Not long after, the Dead began to more earnestly turn to folk and country music (‘Silver Threads and Golden Needles’ was reintroduced into the band’s setlist during this concert for the first time in three years). The Dead still had their unpredictable psychedelic edge, but the time for ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ had passed.
Check out ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ down below.
