Dark Star - Single Version

This Grateful Dead classic was often performed at live shows and was more of a jam than a song, since it was sometimes over 30 minutes long. Widely considered the Dead's signature song, it was written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter.

"Dark Star" began rather unassumingly as a 2:44 single that failed to sell even one third of the copies that were printed. Few people could have guessed then that it would go on to become one of the most beloved and studied songs of a beloved, studied band. Few could have guessed that live performances of the song would one day hold a place of reverence and myth for that fevered subculture of fandom calling themselves Deadheads. Yet, that is exactly how things turned out. Though it's something impossible to quantify definitively, "Dark Star" makes a strong case for being one of the most important songs in the evolution of the Grateful Dead. In So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead, David Browne explains that "Dark Star" represented a "turning point for the Dead on several levels." During this period, the Dead were transitioning from a more typical band image and moving into the "mountain-sage-space-hippie" image they'd eventually embody. They were looking less than a standard rock band and more like a "gang of bemused hippie ranchers," in Browne's words. Creatively, they were searching artistically and philosophically for a different musical space. As Bill Kreutzmann, Dead drummer, states in Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead, at that time they still didn't have their "own thing yet." When their "own thing" finally did begin to materialize, "Dark Star" was one of the first hints at the direction they would move towards.

Bill Kreutzmann believes this song first popped up during the band's stay at the Russian River - it was the same trip in which Kreutzman and Bob Weir developed "The Other One" and Jerry Garcia used some of Robert Hunter's lyrics for the first time in a Dead song with "Alligator." "Dark Star" took some time to find its final form, and eventually coalesced around lyrics provided by Robert Hunter. Hunter had been in New Mexico when the Dead asked him to become their full-time lyricist. He jumped at the opportunity. In Box of Rain: A Box of Rain: Lyrics: 1965-1993, he tells about how the journey "took six weeks with a surreal layover in Denver." When he got to Nevada, he dropped his last dime into a slot machine and got enough money to call the Dead and tell them he was almost there. He had "a case of walking pneumonia and the clothes on his back" when he got to San Francisco. "The next day I was writing 'Dark Star,'" he explained, "feeling pretty much as the lyric suggests."