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- [00:00]
Rich Mahan
Announcing Dogfish Head Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale Collaborating for over a decade now, Dogfish Head and Grateful Dead have crafted a light bodied pale ale brewed with sustainable kerns of grains, granola and heaps of good karma for a refreshing brew that's music to your taste buds. Check out dogfish.com for more details and to find some Grateful Dead Juicy Pale Ale in your neck of the woods. Dogfish Headcraft Brewery is located in Milton, Delaware. Please drink responsibly the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the Official Podcast of the Grateful Dead I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season eight of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we continue our exploration into the Grateful Dead's 1973 landmark studio album Wake of the Flood by delving into one of the most beautiful songs in the Grateful Dead canon, Stella Blue and It is the 50th anniversary of the Grateful Dead's wake of the Flood. To celebrate, this rhino has a grand 50th anniversary release which includes the original album remastered, some really cool early demos of songs from the album, and songs from a live show at Magaw Memorial hall at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois from November 1, 1973. There's also special vinyl as well as standard black vinyl CDs and digital versions available. More info and orders happening now over@dead.net while you're over@dead.net go to dead.net deadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons 1 through 7. You can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing hitting that like button and if the spirit moves you, leave us a review. Very kind of you. Thank you very much. We do have transcripts for many of your favorite Deadcast episodes available for your reading pleasure, so head over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Thanks to everyone who has left their stories over@stories.dead.net well now we want you to tell your stories about Wake of the Flood or any of the songs on it that really resonate with you. Got a tale about the first time you heard Eyes of the World or a wild tour yarn about that one version of Let It Grow? There's no story too big or too small record yours@stories.dead.net and you may just hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead cast. There is an option to write your story there, but if possible please record yourself telling the story. If you need longer than the time allotted, leave a second one or a third. Thank you very much. Well, Stella Blue closes out side one on Wake of the Flood, and it's not just the beautiful music in this song that moves me personally. It's also the masterful Robert Hunter lyrics landing that perfect one two punch that only a Garcia Hunter CO Wright can deliver. Sit back and let all the years combine and melt into a dream as Jessie Jarno takes us on a tour of Stella Blue.
- [03:50]
Jesse Jarno
Stella Blue is one of the great Jerry Garcia Robert Hunter songs and more. It closes the first side of the Grateful Dead's Wake of the Flood, perhaps the album's heaviest sustained moment.
- [04:11]
Narrator/Reader
They melt into a dream. A broken angel sings from a guitar.
- [04:29]
Jesse Jarno
When the Dead played Stella Blue, most of the time it was late in the show, after the psychedelic meltdowns and recombobulations at the end of a long suite of music. It felt like a song they had to arrive at, not something they could just start playing from a cold stop. So to help us arrive at Stella Blue, we're so happy to have more from the great Elvis Costello since Elvis was last on the Dead cast, talking about the Europe 72 songs he appeared in San Francisco in late 2022 performing sets of Garcia Hunter music, including a few from Europe 72 during a benefit at the Great American Music hall, as well as at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park.
- [05:09]
Narrator/Reader
Just like New York City, just like Jericho.
- [05:17]
Bruce Hornsby
Pays the Hal.
- [05:26]
Jesse Jarno
We spoke with Elvis Costello for our episode about the Dead's visit to the Bickershaw Festival on the Europe 72 tour, where 17 year old DP McManus had a revelatory experience seeing the Dead in the mud. Check it out@dead.net deadcast if you haven't Wake of the Flood came out a year and change later, just after his 19th birthday, released in Europe as part of the distribution deal with Atlantic Records that Ron Rackow worked out to help get the whole enterprise started.
- [05:53]
Elvis Costello
I was living in London again and I remember it came on that very it was on the Grateful Dead label and it came on that kind of oil crisis vinyl. Two records I had that I managed to play four times before they warped were Bach by the Jefferson Airplane.
- [06:12]
Narrator/Reader
So we go on moving, trying to make this image real, straining every nerve, not knowing what we really feel. Straining every Nerve and making everybody see what they read in the Rolling Stone.
- [06:29]
Elvis Costello
Really come to be, which was completely unplayable after about a week. And Wake of the Flood was a little bit better. But it always. I think it added to the drowsiness of some of those melodies. You know, like Ro Jimmy Row. You felt like you were on the sea because the vinyl had a slight wow to it. I don't know whether anybody else had that experience of that record.
- [06:53]
Narrator/Reader
And I say roll. I don't now seems a comma way.
- [07:20]
Elvis Costello
I love Mississippi Uptown too. And then probably you get a lot of readers letters from this. The most beautiful melody Jerry ever wrote, Stella Blue. I'd say the most beautiful. I always heard Mel Tor May singing it. I always wish Mel Torme would have done a version. I think he would have killed that song in a good way. I mean he would have absolutely taken it to a whole other audience.
- [07:47]
Jesse Jarno
That is certainly a vocalist. I had not thought about doing Stella Blue, though. Some remarkable people have sung it over the years.
- [07:53]
Elvis Costello
I don't know whether that was ever Jerry or Robert Hunter's ambition to be sort of brought into the great American Songbook. But if you only took the songs from 70. Well, maybe from the record before American Beauty, there's a few there. But particularly from Working Men's Dead to Mars Hotel, if you only took those songs, they belong in the great American ensemble.
- [08:36]
Jesse Jarno
In some ways, maybe always. Stella Blue is the most straightforward and traditionally composed song on Wake of the Flood. But that doesn't change why. It's magical. Grateful laid archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [08:48]
David Lemieux
It's a quiet ballad, it's beautiful and builds and builds and then it peaks and then it goes mellow again. But then it usually has a big outro jam. I just love the dynamics and to me it's one of those songs that I can point to when I talk with people about how dynamic not only a Grateful Dead show is, but how each individual song can be very dynamic.
- [09:39]
Jesse Jarno
That was a version from July 3, 1978 at the St. Paul Civic Center. Now on the July 1978 box, it kept peaking from there live. The song developed its own topography, packing an intimate emotional punch even amid the mega sized sounds of the 90s dead. Like this version from Pine Knob in June 1991. Now on the Download Series Volume 11.
- [10:01]
Narrator/Reader
It all rolls into one. Nothing comes for free. There's nothing you can hold for very long.
- [10:29]
Jesse Jarno
Many years later, in his online journal, Robert Hunter alluded to the provisional delusions that were necessary to undertake the act of even keeping an online journal, and added, just as they were in writing a personal lyric like Stella Blue, as opposed to Uncle John's band, which is obviously written for the world and knows.
- [10:57]
Narrator/Reader
Crying Michael be It seems like all this love was just a troll.
- [11:14]
Jesse Jarno
This is perhaps a somewhat unimaginative thing to add, but to my ears, Stella Blue is a late night song. Lonely streets and blue light Cheap hotels aren't the kind of images conjured during daylight hours, and when Robert Hunter wrote Stella Blue, there might have been a very literal hotel blue light glowing nearby. The song has its origins in March 1970 at a hotel that would become famous for songwriting staying up for days.
- [11:39]
Narrator/Reader
In the Chelsea Hotel, writing Sarah, lady of the Lowlands for you, Sarah, Sarah, wherever we travel, we're never apart.
- [11:55]
Jesse Jarno
While Bob Dylan Shirley stayed up for days at New York's Chelsea Hotel in 1966, only the seed of the song was created there, according to interviews with session musicians and Dylan himself. Most of the ten long verses of Sad Eyed lady of the Lowlands were apparently written in the Nashville studio where he recorded it for Blonde on Blonde, but nonetheless, the hotel had a long literary history and continued into the folk and rock eras. In 1968, Leonard Cohn would stay there, reportedly having a fling with Janis Joplin that would result in his own Chelsea Hotel Number two.
- [12:28]
Narrator/Reader
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. You were famous, your heart was a legend. You told me again you preferred handsome.
- [12:43]
Jesse Jarno
Man, but for me you would make an exception. An Astro Story takes Place the Jefferson Airplane would have their own Chelsea Hotel song Jorma Kaukonen's Third Week at the Chelsea, which Elvis Costello heard in warped form on the European release of Bark. In Jorma's memoir Been so Long. He says he wrote the song in a dream while staying at the Chelsea in 1971 and set it on tape exactly as he remembered it when he.
- [13:11]
Narrator/Reader
Woke on an early New York morning. A mirror in the hall showed to me a face I didn't know at all. Lines were drawn around a pair of eyes that opened wide when I looked into them. I found nothing left inside.
- [13:33]
Jesse Jarno
When the Dead stayed at the Chelsea in the spring of 1970, their neighbors included the poet Patti Smith, staying with her close friend, the artist Robert mapplethorpe, in room 204. One website says Garcia often stayed in room 620. Perhaps Robert Hunter was next door. He had joined the Grateful Dead on the road for the first time in the spring of 1970, an experience documented in another song. The Dead began writing that March, working.
- [14:00]
Narrator/Reader
Up above a low been thinking you got the mellow slow takes time you pick a place to go just keep.
- [14:16]
Jesse Jarno
The tour began with the band's infamous untaped collaboration with the Buffalo Philharmonic before trucking back to Manhattan, where the band made their home base at the Chelsea Hotel while playing their first shows at the newly opened Capitol Theater in Port Chester. It was then, near the end of March 1970, that Hunter wrote Stella Blue, and after New York they headed to Florida, where they started Assemblin Truckin while sitting around a hotel pool. It was a productive period for Robert Hunter, especially after working on Truckin'. Hunter would travel to London in May, where he wrote the lyrics for To Lay Me Down, Ripple and Broke down palace in a Single Afternoon, and perhaps others in between. Refer back to our American Beauty season for more on that. And while those three songs are connected by Hunter's glorious peak experience in London, they're perhaps the flip side to the experience that bonds Stella Blue to another Garcia Hunter song.
- [15:10]
Narrator/Reader
See hear how everything lead up to this day and it's just like any other day events ever been Robert Hunter.
- [15:33]
Jesse Jarno
Told Blair Jackson in 1988 that the lyrics to Stella Blue were essentially after images from the same horrific June 1969 LSD trip that resulted in the writing of Black Peter, which we discussed in quite some length during the first season of the Dead cast. After being overdosed by the apple juice at the Fillmore West, Hunter went through every assassination that I knew of. It certainly sounds terrifying, he continued. I remember Stella Blue was very present during these incidents. All the imagery in Stella Blue was present in my mind at the time. For Hunter, Black Peter had started as an almost comic piece, but it wound up closer to what Stella Blue became, too.
- [16:15]
Narrator/Reader
Sun coming up and then the sun hit Going window shine through my window and my friends they come around.
- [16:39]
Jesse Jarno
While Robert Hunter worked quickly, it sometimes took Jerry Garcia a little time. There's a lot of that folded into Stella Blue time. It's hard to say that's what the song is about, but the absence of time is definitely one way the song's first line lands, which makes this an opportune time to mention that for this episode, we once again have access to the multitrack recordings made for Wake of the Flood. You can play with some of the isolated tracks from Wake of the flood@dead.net playingintheband and we've posted a direct link to the Stella blue tracks@dead.net deadcast all.
- [17:15]
Narrator/Reader
The years combined they melt into a dream.
- [17:29]
Jesse Jarno
Hunter held onto his original draft of the lyrics and posted them onto his site hunterarchive.com we've shared them@dead.net deadcast they're almost exactly the same as the final version, though the bridge about the blue light cheap hotel isn't there yet, and on the scrap of paper the first verse has a slightly different lyric.
- [17:47]
Narrator/Reader
In this spot, a broken angel sings from a guitar.
- [17:58]
Jesse Jarno
At first the lyric was a broken angel sings from the guitarist, though that's crossed out on the original draft. I have no idea if Hunter was thinking about what might be comfortable for Garcia to sing, but shifting the broken angel from the guitarist to the guitar is a graceful move. There's not a story implied in Stella Blue so much as a lifetime of stories. Nearly every couplet calls back in some way to the collapsed sense of time from the song's beginning.
- [18:27]
Narrator/Reader
In the end, there's just the song.
- [18:31]
Jesse Jarno
One odd literary antecedent to Stella Blue can be found in one of the infamous endnotes of Vladimir Nabokov's masterful 1962 Pale Fire, a novel constructed in the annotations of a poem. Line 627 of the poem concerns an astronomer, the Great Star over Blue, and the note describes his father, who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazerchik, an Americanized kashub, which I suppose means that Stella Blue's maiden name was Stella Lazerchik. While I doubt that Pale Fire is the real origin of Stella Blue, I also kind of wonder. There's another literary antecedent, but we'll touch on that later.
- [19:10]
Narrator/Reader
In the end, there's just the song comes crying up the night through all the broken dreams and vanished years. Stella Blue.
- [19:45]
Jesse Jarno
If there's a real origin to the phrase Stella Blue, it might not be a person, but a brand. At your local supermarket you can probably still purchase Stella Blue cheese, in production since 1923. And that's probably not it either. The most literal explanation, if you fancy such a thing, is that the subject of the song is a blue Stella model guitar manufactured by the Oscar Schmidt Company of Jersey City, New Jersey. Robert Johnson is playing what appears to be a Stella Sunburst in one of the only known photographs of him, and it's through this guitar that we experience the collapse of time and place. It's not a single story, but many. The words freeze time. The music to Stella Blue came just over two years after the lyrics were written. By then, Garcia had written Wharf Rat and Comes a Time and Birdsong and was perhaps ready to write something even quieter. He would recall it happening in Germany during their Europe 72 tour, and for various reasons. My guess is that it happened during the second pass through Germany when they played Munich in May.
- [20:49]
Narrator/Reader
I guess it doesn't.
- [21:05]
Jesse Jarno
Jerry Garcia told guitar player in 1988. When Hunter gave me the lyrics, I sat on him and sat on him. Then when we were in Germany, I sat down with an acoustic early in the morning and the song just fell together. He was so effortless writing it that I don't feel as though I wrote it. Please welcome back from Joe Russo's Almost Dead, Lamp Wolf and other projects Scott Metzger. We've posted links to his current dates@dead.net.
- [21:45]
Scott Metzger
Deadcast a deceptively complicated song. Like, when you first hear that song, I think somebody learning how to play guitar or whatever would be like, oh, yeah, sure, Stella Blue. Like, I learned how to play that. When you get in there, there's some, like, advanced harmonic stuff happening. There's sus chords and there's the whole chromatic walk down from a major triad to a major 7th and sus on the 4 and then to major 4. Sam.
- [22:42]
Jesse Jarno
The early 1970s was a period of concept albums and rock, and motifs of natural elements swarmed through the lyrics and artwork of Wake of the Flood. But if there's a unified concept behind the music on Wake of the Flood, it might be harmonic. Welcome back. Deputy Dean of the Humanities and Arts from the City College of New York, musicologist Sean o'. Donnell.
- [23:02]
Sean O'Donnell
This is definitely a new vocabulary, and the songs are so well known that you don't tend to lump them together as a collection. If you're not going back to the album, but taking the album as a package, it really is a coherent whole in terms of presenting a new harmonic language and vocabulary. You know, particularly for me, the things that stand out a lot is the prominence of major seventh sonorities, and diminished sonorities would be in there too.
- [23:29]
Jesse Jarno
Forget the natural forces of the cosmos. The concept of Wake of the Flood is the seventh chord and tritone substitutions.
- [23:36]
Sean O'Donnell
There's tritone substitutes used in these dominant relationships that seems it's not brand new to their language, but it's more systematic and happens more. The C7 that you hear in Stella Blue really stands out as a dramatic example of that where harmonically functioning like an F sharp seven, but it's a substitute and the counterpoint is just beautiful. When you hear the B flat, a.
- [24:02]
Bruce Hornsby
Sharp note of that chord, that C7.
- [24:05]
Jesse Jarno
Chord that Sean describes hits here on the word sings.
- [24:11]
Narrator/Reader
A broken angel sings from a guitar.
- [24:21]
Jesse Jarno
Elvis Costello compared it to something out of the Great American Songbook, the body of canonical popular music from the post jazz pre rock and roll years, often written by composers and lyricists for specific Broadway musicals and movies.
- [24:35]
Sean O'Donnell
That's part of this new language that they're using. So the types of modal mixture and these chord substitutions, using dominant chords in these other ways starts to move you into like a jazz vocabulary in terms of harmony. It's just the feel isn't the same. It's dead feel all the way.
- [24:55]
Jesse Jarno
The song was debuted on June 17, 1972 at the Hollywood bowl in Los Angeles, the band's first show after their return from the Europe 72 tour and what would turn out to be Pigpen's final performance. Currently it only seems to survive as a not that great audience recording, but the first version of Stella Blue is one of the places that you can hear Pigpen's B3 for the last time. Ask a taper about the rest.
- [25:19]
Narrator/Reader
I've stayed in every blue light she and when we're trying.
- [25:50]
Jesse Jarno
That'S one line of the song that would get revised later. Thanks to the Miracle of Dead tapes, we can figure out exactly when the revision happened. On an eventful day for Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter, exactly three years after writing the initial Stella Blue lyrics, Hunter was once again on tour with the Dead in the Northeast in the spring of 73. The morning after their show on March 26th in Baltimore, the songwriting partners went for a walk and unusually decided to rent a car to drive themselves to the next gig. When they got pulled over in New Jersey, Garcia retrieved his license from his briefcase, and the police officer spotted some substances that he didn't want to see. We discussed this incident more in our Watkins Glenn episodes. It resulted in Garcia getting arrested, Hunter calling the office, and Sam Cutler dispatching promoter John Cher to bail out Garcia, which would result in a lifelong friendship between Garcia and Cher. The next show was March 28th in Rochester. Now Dave's pick 16 and Stella Blue has a new lyric. Hard to know if Garcia and Hunter reworked the line during their car ride, but it doesn't seem totally unlikely. We've previously invoked the distracted guy meme to describe Jerry Garcia's relationship with the slower, heart wrenching songs he was starting to write in the early 70s. In late 1971, about six months before finishing Stella Blue, he and Robert Hunter wrote Comes a time.
- [27:31]
Narrator/Reader
Comes a time when the plan friend takes your hand Says don't you see Gotta make it somehow all the dreams still believe.
- [27:57]
Scott Metzger
That.
- [27:57]
Jesse Jarno
Was from May 25, 1972, the second to last night of the Europe 72 tour. And in early 1973, about six months after writing Stella Blue, Garcia and Hunter wrote China Doll, perhaps even more fragile.
- [28:11]
Narrator/Reader
Pistol Shot, Nine O'. Clock, The Bells of Heaven Comes A.
- [28:25]
Jesse Jarno
Time didn't really stand a chance, though, disappearing for four years, starting in late 1972. And the band recorded China Doll at the Wake of the Flood sessions. But it, too, would have to wait for another day, as will our discussion of the album's outtakes. Scott Metzger.
- [28:40]
Scott Metzger
The studio version is like, man, you really got it. You know, it stops you dead in your tracks. His vocal delivery on top of a great melody and a great chord progression, and the instrumentation is great. Right. Pedal steel is on that one. And, yeah, it's just great. I wouldn't change a thing.
- [29:04]
Jesse Jarno
Stella Blue is first on the docket on the second full day of the Wake of the flood sessions. Tuesday, August 7, 1973. When we arrive at the Record Plant midway through what's labeled as Take one, it's clear the band are still warming up and figuring out their strategy. Just fade out in this part.
- [29:33]
Narrator/Reader
And.
- [29:33]
Jesse Jarno
Just keep building in. That end part will fade out on.
- [29:36]
Nick Bush
A big old bill.
- [29:41]
Bruce Hornsby
Right?
- [29:50]
Jesse Jarno
Yeah, just like that.
- [29:52]
Bruce Hornsby
You know?
- [29:53]
Jesse Jarno
You know what I mean? Can you dig it? It's early in the session, though, and they're still trying to get the right sound in Studio A. Oh, well, if the door. Let's get. If we're going for the sound. Shut the fucking door. Somebody shut the door. Where the fuck is the door monitor, for God's sakes? I thought this was a professional studio. I'm gonna call the fucking union. Time to come call Willie the doorman.
- [30:19]
Scott Metzger
Turn up the piano on my headphones. Thanks. Where's Willie the doorman when we need him?
- [30:24]
Jesse Jarno
I think that's a reference to Willie the security guard at Winterland. Here he is, as heard in the Grateful Dead movie shot the following autumn.
- [30:33]
Narrator/Reader
Have your ticket ready, please have your ticket ready. There are two doors, so you cannot kill that. I'm sorry, sir. Thank you very kindly. Watch right in and have a good time.
- [30:43]
Jesse Jarno
Though the vocals would be overdubbed, it was still important for Garcia to sing live in the studio. Oh, wait a minute. Let's see. I gotta remember the first line to the tune. Fellas.
- [31:07]
Narrator/Reader
On My Feet. No, that's not it.
- [31:10]
Jesse Jarno
Let me see.
- [31:11]
Narrator/Reader
It's.
- [31:14]
Scott Metzger
How about the Piss Gets in my eyes?
- [31:16]
Narrator/Reader
No, no.
- [31:20]
Jesse Jarno
Okay, I got it. A plus. California Dreaming jokes. Phil didn't have another. Oi. Fucking John Phillips callback in the plans for the Stella Blue sessions, but here we are. The studio work didn't require much heavy lifting, with only two full takes on the tape. Besides the keeper for the album, after the big ending Garcia suggested earlier, they still played the sparkly landing they developed live by the tape box. Math. The version of Stella Blue that's on Wake of the Flood is technically take six. Brian Kehue is the engineer responsible for cleaning up the angel. Share material we just heard.
- [32:27]
Scott Metzger
I'd like to hear more Stella Blues. It's a great song, and there's.
- [32:30]
Jesse Jarno
There's enough of it.
- [32:31]
Scott Metzger
I mean, I'm looking here it's like almost 20 minutes of that, but it just feels so good every time. You could listen to it for hours and it would feel great. So I love to hear them working on that. A very minimal version of it, very straight ahead, and it doesn't need much more. It's a great track.
- [32:47]
Jesse Jarno
Since we have access to the multi tracks of Wake of the Flood, we use them to assemble a mix of the song that moves through the individual isolated instruments and parts, which, one by one, to get a sense for the music's construction. Before we zoom in on a few segments, we'll begin with Jerry Garcia's familiar descending guitar introduction.
- [33:19]
Narrator/Reader
All the years combine they melt into a dream Sam Stella Blue Stella Sam in the end there still that song goes crying like the wind down every lonely tree that's ever been Sam Dust off those rusty strings Just one more time Gonna make them shine Sh.
- [36:51]
Scott Metzger
Sa.
- [37:30]
Narrator/Reader
It all rolls into me and nothing comes to free there's nothing you can hold for very long.
- [37:56]
Jesse Jarno
There's a lot to process in the multi tracks of Stella Blue, so let's stop on a few parts of it and keep going with the spotlight. I mean, first and foremost here, I'm just knocked out by Garcia's vocal performance, possibly. I'd feel this way if I was able to isolate his voice on various live versions of Stella Blue as well. But there's an intentionality to his singing. A classic studio performance in the traditional sense of the concept.
- [38:20]
Narrator/Reader
And when you hear that song.
- [38:28]
Jesse Jarno
Come.
- [38:28]
Narrator/Reader
Crying like the wind, it seems like all this life was just a dream.
- [38:45]
Scott Metzger
Scott Metzger, the delivery, that's the thing about Garcia's vocals, right? Like, I think the vulnerability that he had in singing is like the true X factor of his presentation as a musician. Like the playing, obviously great and everything. And I, I feel like that a lot of players have over the years that are going for, like, that Garcia thing, whatever that means to people have been able to kind of start to dissect the guitar playing and like dissect the gear that Garcia used and the kind of pickups in his guitars and stuff. And they've come, you know, people have come close to the sound and stuff. But one thing that I feel like is still like the Holy Grail and the thing that really is just like X Factor that has not been touched is the Garcia ballad singing like to me it's just like that is worth the price of admission right there every time.
- [39:38]
Jesse Jarno
Darn tootin. Mr. Metzger this album also highlights the wonderful Grateful that vocal blend that existed specifically from 1972 through 1974 between Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and Donna Jean Godshow, recorded in stereo on tracks 13 and 14.
- [40:02]
Narrator/Reader
SA.
- [40:28]
Jesse Jarno
There are no guest musicians on Stella Blue, but there are a couple of wonderfully atmospheric overdubs that come together during the finale. Keith Godshow plays his native grand piano on the basic tracks, but There's a Hammond B3 that runs through the song too. Run through a Leslie with the vibrato turned on. Thanks, Rich. It's hard to call it a tribute to Pigpen, but it's a reminder that Stella Blue was conceived for the two keyboard version of the Grateful Dead.
- [40:53]
Scott Metzger
SA.
- [41:22]
Jesse Jarno
It'S not credited officially on the album, but obviously there's pedal steel here and it's just gorgeous. After playing pedal steel intensely from 1969 through the end of 1971, Jerry Garcia had mostly retired from the instrument by 1973. He played a few scattered sessions in 1972, but hadn't touched it too much lately. Besides some sessions for Ned Lagin's developing Seastones project and some songs for a late blooming album from the Planet Earth Rock and Roll Orchestra, Baron Von Tolbooth and the Chrome Nun, credited to Paul Kantner, Grace Slick and David Freiberg, released in May 1973, this Is yous Mind Has Left yout Body, a name dead tape collectors later adapted for a dead jam that probably didn't derive from it. Sweet pedal steel, though.
- [42:35]
Narrator/Reader
There is one moment in in your life, and it could come at any time, and you remember all of what went on from the instant you were born through your.
- [42:51]
Jesse Jarno
There'd be pedal steel on from the Mars Hotel in 1974, but pedal steel was an intense discipline to keep up, and by then Garcia had decided to bring in a ringer, a story we'll get to next year. He'd played on a few more studio sessions, including some songs with Paul Pena in October 1973. Not released until 2000, but it was disappearing from his arsenal. This is from Paul Pena's Venusian Lady.
- [43:15]
Narrator/Reader
Take time and listen to your message. You gotta see your star, because I know if you take the time to sing, you'll find out who you are.
- [43:45]
Jesse Jarno
One of the remarkable things about the studio version of Stella Blue is that there's no real guitar solo at the song's end, an important part of the song, especially live. Instead, it's a guitar break that makes a bed for the steel, and it becomes a lovely place where Garcia jams along with himself and the band. Before we move along from the multi tracks for this episode, let's listen to the entwined guitar parts during the finale. Bob Weir and a pair of conjoined Jerry Garcias from the song's debut in 1972. It was part of the Dead's book. Through the first tours and up into the spring of 1973, the song would often appear as a standalone number, but once it had been recorded for Wake of the Flood, when the band played it live, it almost exclusively followed jam segments. I'm especially fond of the one drummer versions from before the band's 1975 touring hiatus, which get truly quiet, all five instrumentalists ornamenting the music in the most deliberate ways. This version from Louisville, June 18, 1974 is now Road Trips, Volume 2.
- [45:22]
Narrator/Reader
3 the end there still that song crying like the wind down every moment street.
- [45:52]
Jesse Jarno
Stella Blue is a song that the Dead got pretty faithfully on Wake of the Flood, and the great live takes continued to pour out of them over the years. Find a Deadhead and probably they have a version of Stella Blue that moved them deeply. Whether it's from Wake of the Flood or a live show, the Louisville version is wonderful. They all offer something lovely with slightly different vibes. This is from a little bit just after the album sessions, with a gentle landing that was from September 12, 1973 at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, which We're going to use as both a departure and pausing point. We're going to hang out for a bit in the fall of 1973, the moment right around the time that Wake of the Flood was released. During our Let Me Sing youg Blues Away episode, we talked about what else was on pop radio that season. Today we're going to hear about the music of that particular moment through the ears of one very specific teenage listener who saw the Dead at that Williamsburg show. Less than two weeks after the Wake of the Flood sessions finished. Got into the album when it came out and also later became a touring member of the Grateful Dead. We were just beyond thrilled to welcome to the good old Grateful Dead cast Bruce Hornsby. Like a lot of his early tastes, he owed the progression to his older brother Bobby.
- [48:00]
Bruce Hornsby
My older brother, the resident Deadhead of the family at the time. But not yet. Not at this point. I was a junior in high school and we were driving down the Colonial Parkway from Williamsburg to Yorktown to visit some of our cousins down there. We had eight track tape player in the car and he put on this eight track of this record, Tumbleweed Connection, that just floored me.
- [48:19]
Narrator/Reader
Find out the mission.
- [48:27]
Bruce Hornsby
Watch the black.
- [48:28]
Narrator/Reader
Smoke fly the red flame light the.
- [48:32]
Bruce Hornsby
Sky Elton John's second American record. Third record, actually, there was a British release. In hindsight, as everyone feels about that record, it was Elton and Bernie's version of the band. They loved the band like the Dead, like so many groups did. And. And the Dead had their version of bandesque music, of course, with American Beauty and Working Men's Debt. This was Elton John and Bernie Taupin's version. Tubley Connection. It's my favorite record of Elton's. It's the one record that didn't have a hit on it. It was not commercial, but it was just gorgeous. Amarina burned down the Mission. You could just keep going on my father's gun from this day on I own my father's gun so great.
- [49:16]
Narrator/Reader
From this day on I own my father's gun.
- [49:30]
Bruce Hornsby
Plus he turned me on to Joe Cocker, Mad Dogs and Englishman with the great Leon Russell and Chris Stanton, piano. So Elton and Leon were the first guys that got me into all this. That's what sort of moved me out of the basketball world that I was in. And I was headlong deeply involved from then until I. My next move is into a pine box, you know, so that. I mean, it's a lifelong obsession that has always been since then. So I was into those guys and then I got into Dr. John and I got into all the singer songwriters, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and et cetera.
- [50:28]
Jesse Jarno
But then the Hornsby brothers discovered the Grateful Dead.
- [50:30]
Bruce Hornsby
Then my brother turned me on to. I guess probably all I remember is that when I got to college, my one year lost year of real, real college, University of Richmond, which confirmed to me that this was not my path, that I needed to catch my lot with the musos. And then I went to music school from then on until I graduated from Suntan U University, Miami. But my brother turned me on to the Dead because I Know that I was really listening to, say, Europe 72. It's a big record for me. Probably the first one that really got me.
- [51:04]
Narrator/Reader
Just like Mary Shelley, just like Frankenstein. Make your chains and count your chains and try to walk the land.
- [51:21]
Jesse Jarno
As a young piano player, Bruce couldn't help but notice Keith God show Europe 72.
- [51:26]
Bruce Hornsby
That was my entree and that was really not a showcase for Keith. But he was well hurt and he was so in the mix and such a key sonic element. I still like it fairly well, I guarantee you. I'm still playing Keith licks on certain songs that I remembered from my youth, because it. It always felt right. He knew the right thing to play to me.
- [51:54]
Narrator/Reader
I wish I was all I know.
- [52:14]
Jesse Jarno
But even when he was discovering the Dead, his ears were immersed in a wider world of piano players.
- [52:19]
Bruce Hornsby
I loved Keith, of course, as I've said, I was deeply into Leon, really got into Leon. Elton the same. But at the time I really started getting into Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, I'd moved also into that world. And McCoy Tyner, the four one named icons that are known by just their first name. Herbie, chick, Keith and McCoy.
- [53:12]
Jesse Jarno
That was the other piano playing Keith. Keith Jarrett's improvised solo concert from Bremen, recorded a few weeks before Wake of the Flood and released on ECM later that year. But the Dead as a whole knocked Bruce out of his socks.
- [53:24]
Bruce Hornsby
I had seen the dead, maybe 73, in the Cap Center, Baltimore.
- [53:29]
Jesse Jarno
That'd be the March 26, 1973 show, probably the day before Garcia's bust in New Jersey. And Hunter possibly wrote that final line for Stella Blue.
- [53:38]
Bruce Hornsby
But then what really turned me out, they came and played William Mary in my hometown here in Williamsburg, Va. William Mary hall, the basketball arena, College of William Mary here. And so we went down from Richmond, my cousin Doug Hornsby and I. He was a good guitar player. I played in bands with him too. And we were really close and we loved it.
- [54:11]
Narrator/Reader
I don't know.
- [54:13]
Jesse Jarno
That's September 11, 1973, where Bruce heard most of the Wake of the Flood songs for the first time.
- [54:19]
Bruce Hornsby
In my experience, it was the first time I'd seen the wall of sound. All the little ants, all the little speakers piled high in the sky way up there. So that was amazing just visually to me, but that's my main memory. Nothing musically stood out to me. I just liked the whole thing. But the amazing thing about this night was they played long gig, of course. And then at the end of the night, Bob Weir walks up to the mic and says, hey, everybody. We had Such a great time playing here tonight that we're gonna come back tomorrow night and play maybe for free and take out all the seats and just have a big party.
- [54:56]
Jesse Jarno
Lesh made the announcement, but Bruce's memory is pretty spot on.
- [55:00]
Scott Metzger
We'd kind of like to come on in here tomorrow in a sort of unscheduled event and play here, same thing like tonight.
- [55:08]
Bruce Hornsby
Extra $3, take all the chairs out.
- [55:10]
Scott Metzger
Everybody have a good time. If y' all take that idea, you.
- [55:16]
Bruce Hornsby
Come on back tomorrow night.
- [55:18]
Rich Mahan
Cheaper.
- [55:19]
Jesse Jarno
You're warmed up, you're warmed up, and we should have a pretty good time.
- [55:25]
Bruce Hornsby
When you're 19 years old, you're a freshman in college, you know, that was totally for me. I just went, man, this is for me. These guys are just fantastic. I love the music and I love the attitude, the mindset, the aesthetic, you know? So that's when I was in.
- [55:40]
Jesse Jarno
The two Williamsburg, Virginia shows came in the surprisingly brief window between when the band recorded Wake of the flood in August 1973 and when they released it in mid October.
- [55:50]
Bruce Hornsby
And then Wake of the Flood came maybe a little bit after that. That's my memory, anyway, so. So then I got very much, very interested in the Dead. I loved Wake of the Flood. Mostly. What I remember before looking it up was that the record started off with Half Step, and that remains one of the greats, one of my favorites.
- [56:07]
Narrator/Reader
They say that when your ship comes in, first man takes the sail, second takes the after deck, third.
- [56:20]
Jesse Jarno
Once again, it was his brother who pulled him deeper.
- [56:22]
Bruce Hornsby
My brother had a Dead cover band up in Charlottesville, an hour from where I was living in Richmond, Virginia. And so I ended up going and playing Fender Rhodes piano and singing lead for his band. Bobby High Test and the Octane Kids was the name of the band. And so then I was totally immersed in that world. Musical world. The musical world of the Dead.
- [56:48]
Scott Metzger
Some folks trust the music, others trust in mind.
- [56:52]
Narrator/Reader
Me, I don't trust nothing But I know you.
- [56:58]
Scott Metzger
Once again.
- [57:25]
Jesse Jarno
That was Bruce Hornsby singing live with the octane kids in 1974. You can hear more of that on grateful that hour, number 265. There's some fun photos online of Bobby High Test and the Octane Kids, too. We've posted links to both@dead.net deadcast I.
- [57:41]
Bruce Hornsby
Have no shirt on. Probably playing the roads, my classes. And yeah, that was a grain alcohol party out in Lake Renovia outside of Charlottesville. Just a big hippie time. It was really right in the heart. Everyone talks about the 60s as an idea to me. The 60s started in 63, maybe with JFK's assassination. Sadly enough, that was the first thing that really skewed the landscape and just people up, to be honest. And then to me, it ended around 74, 75. The 60s to me didn't end in 60 because a whole lot of great music was made that was very much what you'd call counterculture bohemian music in the 70s. In this time we're talking about the Dead was no different. They were the flagship group, the Dead in the band. And what Bob Dylan was doing then was also so great. So, yes, we played a lot of parties like that. We played a frat house for three layers of dancers, the standard dancers, people in the back dancing on tables and people doing the Dying cockroach on the floor. The gator, as they call it, an animal house. It was called the Dying Cockroach here in Virginia.
- [58:55]
Jesse Jarno
I asked a little more about Wake of the Flood because, well, you know.
- [58:58]
Bruce Hornsby
Well, I love Ro, Jimmy and Stella Blue for Come On With It. I mean, one of the great songs. But here's a funny ass story about Stella Blue. So I graduated from University of Miami 1977 and came back here and started a band with some people. Well, this is a great story because the Grateful Dead word world knows John Molo very well. My longtime drummer who ended up playing with the other ones and that parlayed him into. He moved headlong into the Phil world from that. So we started this band, 77. We're just playing again the local hotel lounge circuit, playing Shake your Booty and that's the way, huh, huh. And also, I know you're right, you know, there's a odd mix, of course. So we went to see the dead in 77 at the mosque in Richmond. It's called something else now. It's the old classic Mosque Theater.
- [59:48]
Jesse Jarno
That's the show now known as Dave's picks 1. May 25, 1970.
- [60:22]
Bruce Hornsby
And so Molo, he was a funk, Earth, Wind and fire, jazz, rock. He grown up with Buddy Rich, big jazz fan. I met him at University of Miami. We played in the second band, second of the four bands, the next to best band. So I loved Molas playing. We became friends. We were both kind of ex jocks, you know, so we bonded in that area as well. He came down to Williamsburg to join our band, but they didn't know the Dead really at all. Molo had seen them at American University, said sometime, but he didn't take much note of it. I don't think it didn't have much.
- [60:57]
Scott Metzger
Of an effect on him.
- [60:58]
Bruce Hornsby
Because we're at the gig, sitting up there with Molo and our guitar player at the time, guy named Phil McCusker, another Miami guy. And people all around, all around us are yelling, stella. Stella. And bolo. And Phil, they look at me go, you gotta be kidding me. The Dead plays Stella. They mean Stella by Starlight. Neil Standard. That's been a go to move for jazz cocktail players since the 50s. And so, of course, I, not taking it anything too seriously, said, oh, yeah, they play Stella. Yeah, Garcia sings it. Great.
- [61:49]
Narrator/Reader
Symphonic theme. That's tell about Starlight and Not a Dream.
- [62:01]
Bruce Hornsby
Yeah, just wait. They cannot believe it, you know, because they're playing, I don't know, big railroad blues. Beat it on down the Line, whatever the Dead's playing that night. Which has nothing to do with Stella by Starlight. So anyway, I don't know if the Dead played Stella Blue that night, but that was a moment that we thought we jazz guys who were also into the Dead, thought was hilarious.
- [62:24]
Jesse Jarno
The only Wake of the Flood song they played that night was Mississippi Half Step. We've got lots more with Bruce Hornsby that we'll get to down the Line. It's time to jump back into the Stella Blue story. It was around the time of this incident with John Molo that a few things happened, possibly related to maybe not. The first is that the song developed a pretty wondrous outro guitar solo. This version is from Boulder, December 9, 1981. Now Dave's pick's 20. The other thing that happened is that it was around the time that Jerry Garcia thought he finally understood the lyrics, saying that he sung the song for three or four years before he really started to get it. He told Blair Jackson In 1988, originally, I was taken with the construction of it, which is extremely clever, if I do say so myself. I was proud of it as a composer. Hey, this is a slick song. This sucker has a very slippery harmonic thing that works nicely. That's what I liked about it. It wasn't until later that I started to find the other stuff in there. That's a good example of a song I sang before I understood it. I understood some sense of what the lyrics were about, but I didn't get into the pathos of it. It has sort of a brittle pathos in it that I didn't get until I'd been singing it. For.
- [64:26]
Narrator/Reader
There'S nothing left to see.
- [64:34]
Jesse Jarno
There'S.
- [64:34]
Narrator/Reader
Just the paving left and broken dreams.
- [64:44]
Jesse Jarno
That was from the September 20, 1982 version. Now on the in and out of the Garden box, a more lived intake by Garcia. Though the song would be taken up by many artists, one of the other aspects of Stella Blue that made it unique to the Grateful Dead was its context in their live shows, where it wasn't merely a performance of the song, but a piece of a larger tapestry. Stella Blue would come deep into shows, following long excursions into improvisational formlessness and back musical journeys that often mirrored fans own internal experiences. When it came, Stella Blue seemed to give voice to the non temporal alinear experiences not infrequently produced by psychedelics. Dead shows could move through the chaos and frenzy of space and then come back to Earth. From one of my favorite versions December 19, 1973 Dave's picks 1 this is what happens just prior to Stell some metal machine grooviness. And then for many Deadheads, Stella Blue became something like a landing pod after long journeys where they might emerge from a place of deep contemplation into something new and luminous. Which brings us to the other odd literary antecedent to Stella Blue that came from The Chelsea Room 902.
- [66:46]
Arthur C. Clarke
The space pod was resting on the polished floor of an elegant anonymous hotel suite that might have been any large city on earth. He was staring into a living room with a coffee table, a divan, a dozen chairs, a writing desk, various lamps, a half full bookcase with some magazines lying on it, and even a bowl of flowers. Van Gogh's Bridget Arles was hanging on one wall, Wyeth's Christian's World on another. He felt confident that when he pulled open the drawer of that desk, he would find a Gideon Bible inside it.
- [67:19]
Jesse Jarno
That's From Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001 A Space Odyssey, written in 1968 in the Chelsea Hotel. While Stanley Kubrick was making the film of the same name and definitely not faking the moon landing. Sorry if this spoils anything, and I'll preface it by saying that I'm not totally sure it's an accurate explanation either, but the astronaut Dave falls through a stargate, wakes up in a strange hotel where the years of his life combine.
- [67:44]
Arthur C. Clarke
The crystalline planes and lattices and the interlocking perspectives of moving light flickered out of existence as David Bowman moved into a realm of consciousness that no man had experienced before.
- [67:55]
Narrator/Reader
Before.
- [67:57]
Arthur C. Clarke
At first it seemed that time itself was running backward. Even this marvel he was prepared to accept before he realized a subtler truth. The springs of memory were being tapped in controlled recollection. He was reliving the past. There was the Hotel suite there, the space pod there, the burning starscapes of the red sun there, the shining core of the galaxy.
- [68:38]
Jesse Jarno
And at the end of 2001, astronaut David Bowman is reborn as a star child, which is also maybe the kind of thing that has been known to happen at Grateful Dead concerts, or even when you've maybe accidentally ingested many too many micrograms of LSD from the apple juice at the Fillmore west, as with Stella Lazerchik and Nabokov's Pale Fire or Stella Blue Cheese on sale in a supermarket near you. I have no idea if Arthur Clarke and the Chelsea Hotel were remotely on Robert Hunter's mind when he wrote the lyrics, though he was a pretty committed sci fi head. But even if they weren't, there's nothing in the lyrics to Stella Blue that suggests they couldn't be sung by the astronaut from 2001. Listen to in that context. The isolated petal steel from Stella Blue reminds me of Brian Eno and Daniel Lenoir's Apollo soundtracks. Recorded about a decade. There are many dozens of special versions and special varieties of Stella Blue from over the decades. It's a gorgeous piece of music and certainly doesn't require pondering the ancient mysteries of the lonely streets. It was also just a dramatic piece of music to be performed by the band. New Yorker staff writer Nick My first.
- [70:16]
Scott Metzger
Stella Blue was actually at my first show, and that was 2684 at Meriwether Post Pavilion. My first space into something was space into I don't need love. So that was not a Titanic moment in my Grateful Dead history. And then they did Truck and Wang Dang Doodle, and then came Stella Blue, which I hardly knew right at this point. He didn't know my way around stuff, so he totally blows the first line, just like misses it completely.
- [70:46]
Jesse Jarno
Well, it was 1984, and if life is a dream, Garcia was in the middle of one of the bumpier parts, which can also add another level of sometimes very human drama to the performances.
- [70:57]
Scott Metzger
There was a flat side to it, like a guitar string, a little bit out of tune, but then suddenly he could reach for it. So solo is really sweet. And then, you know, the drama of it all just really hits. You know, it knocked me on my ass. My first show was my first experience being bowled over by a Jerry ballad, you know, just the dynamics of it.
- [71:17]
Jesse Jarno
It was a version from later that summer that Nick really connected with when.
- [71:20]
Scott Metzger
He got it on tape a couple weeks later. They played at the Greek Theater. And there's that sort of well known show from that year. And there's a Stella Blue on that one that became a big mainstay on tape for me, for us, whatever.
- [71:35]
Narrator/Reader
All the years combined they melted to a dream A broken angel sing from a guitar.
- [72:03]
Scott Metzger
And on that recording, Healy did some reverb thing with Jerry's voice. So it echoes in a way that really gives it more body than it probably would have had. That kind of Stella blue, that mid-80s Stella blue before the coma. That's partly because he was so fragile. That's like my favorite hero of Stella Blue, Jerry sounding like some degenerate castrato with this beautiful tenor, but just, like, barely holding on, but yet.
- [72:46]
Narrator/Reader
Stella.
- [72:47]
Scott Metzger
That version of Stella Blue kind of captures that mid-80s, you know, a little bombastic, but it's got, like, the sadness and the sense of loss. Irrevocable past with some wisdom gained. It's got all of that wrapped up in the sort of the fragility of it. But the band is also big, you know, And Bobby's making weird sounds. Brent's doing stuff with electric keyboard.
- [73:15]
Narrator/Reader
I'm standing every balloon.
- [73:33]
Scott Metzger
They're like, perilously close to cliche. I mean, it's like Cheap Hotel and crying like the wind and dusted off one more Time. And I mean, it's like. It's sentimental and. But somehow it worked, I guess. He's always thinking about himself, whether he wants to be or not. But, you know, dust off those rusty strings gonna make him shine. Then he does a solo. I mean, that's. That's as much bravado as you're ever gonna get out of him. I don't think it. It didn't embarrass him because he often did rip out a very shiny.
- [74:11]
Narrator/Reader
One more time. Foreign.
- [74:42]
Jesse Jarno
Archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
- [74:45]
David Lemieux
And then it was my third show where I saw Stella Blue, and it was really good. It was a classic sequence. It was Stella Blue into Sugar Mag. And I remember it very well. It was a very humid night at a. At a. AAA baseball stadium.
- [74:58]
Jesse Jarno
A real.
- [74:59]
David Lemieux
I shouldn't say a real dump. It was great place, but it was the old Silver Stadium in Rochester, but, boy, did that play sound good. And the band was set up in the outfield, and then everybody was on the field. And then in the. In the stands where the, you know, the baseball fans would sit. There was also seating up there. But I remember it was an extremely. It might have even been raining a bit, but it was very humid and humid nights. Phil never sounds better than a humid night. And it Just every bass note just hangs in the air, and it comes right at you. And I remember that specifically during the Stella Blue, how good Phil sounded at that Rochester show.
- [75:46]
Narrator/Reader
There's nothing left to see there's just the pain.
- [76:06]
Jesse Jarno
For Jerry Garcia, the song seemed to be that special kind of magic trick in which the magician continued to discover magic not unrelated to the song's atemporal qualities. In 1988, he told John Seivert of Guitar Player, it's also one of those songs that I was born to sing. Every time I do it, I find something new in it, like a little thing in the phrasing or in the sense of it. And the way the Grateful Dead plays Stella Blue is just gorgeous. At times it seems like a moment freezes on one of those chord changes, and I have to go a long way to find where I am and where the lyric is. The song brings out a certain delicacy that only the Grateful Dead is capable of. Those guys will follow my lyric. If I change the tempo inside a phrase, they'll be right there in the next place bar. It's amazing.
- [76:58]
Narrator/Reader
It seems like all this life was just a dream.
- [77:13]
Jesse Jarno
Still. That was from Miami, October 26, 1989. When he spoke to Blair Jackson the year before that, he spoke of its musical functionality. Blair asked Garcia if he thought of songs like Stella Blue as his statement. He told Blair, I don't think of it as my statement. I think of it as a statement. I think of it as a place where the energy goes down.
- [77:36]
Narrator/Reader
Whoosh.
- [77:38]
Jesse Jarno
It's taken a long time to get to that. Ideally, there's a song in there that's so delicate that it's got a moment in it of pure silence. In a sense, it's showmanship, but it's not overt showmanship. Well, sometimes it got to overt showmanship. Robert Hunter included Stella Blue in some of his earliest live sets, from 1978 through his final tours in 2014. This is from his 1990 album Box of Rain.
- [78:40]
Narrator/Reader
All the years combined. Melt into a dream A broken angel sings from a guitar the first artist.
- [78:55]
Jesse Jarno
Who covered it outside the Dead's world, as far as I can tell, is the Italian group Howth castle and their 1994 album Good Morning, Mr. Nobody.
- [79:12]
Narrator/Reader
Melt into a dream A broken angel sings from a guitar.
- [79:26]
Jesse Jarno
It would take some time, but Stella Blue jumped the fence from the jam world into a variety of artists beyond the vocal group the persuasions, covered in 2000 at the behest of producer David Ganz.
- [79:49]
Narrator/Reader
Day through all the broken dream, though.
- [80:02]
Jesse Jarno
They never cut it in the studio. The great New Hope band Wein included it in live sets occasionally in the late 90s.
- [80:17]
Narrator/Reader
There's nothing left to see, it's just the painting trees.
- [80:38]
Jesse Jarno
In 2010, Jesse McReynolds of the bluegrass duo the McReynolds Brothers tackled it just recently. The song has been performed by previous Dead cast guest Ottil Burbridge on his new solo album A Lovely View of Heaven. The inimitable Willie Nelson included it on his 2006 album Songbird, featuring the late Neil Casal on guitar. It all rolls into one.
- [81:45]
Narrator/Reader
And nothing comes for free.
- [81:54]
Jesse Jarno
There's nothing that you can hold for very long. When it came out, Robert Hunter wrote about it in his online journal, saying, just heard Willie Nelson doing Stella Blue. I dig the way he understates and lets the words carry the message mastery. I felt somewhere around the second verse that Jerry was listening with me, an extraordinary feeling. He is very proud of our songs at their best. His melodies are as good as any and better than most. Stella Blue is unique. Nothing else like it. The major major seventh suspended four to the fourth chord which opens it, then the drop to the minor in the ninth bar set a dark and wistful mood that couldn't be more accommodating for the lyric, as well as standing beautifully without it, there's no feeling the words could exist in any other setting, or that the setting could take other words. I like that about it. It becomes a reality all its own. And earlier this year, on what would have been Robert Hunter's 83rd birthday, the song entered the live repertoire of another one of the great American voices and one of Bob Hunter's friends and collaborators.
- [83:23]
Narrator/Reader
You.
- [83:34]
Jesse Jarno
That was Bob Dylan debuting Stella Blue in Spain in June 2023, one of several Dead and Dead affiliated songs that he introduced to his otherwise static set list during the recent Legs of his Rough and Rowdy Ways tour. Though neither Jerry Garcia nor Robert Hunter are here to hear it, there's little higher tribute they could receive as songwriters.
- [84:15]
Narrator/Reader
Just a three.
- [84:22]
Jesse Jarno
Thinking about the history of Stella Blue is a bit like standing between two mirrors, a long chain of listeners finding themselves inside the timeless night of Robert Hunter's blue light, Cheap Hotel and the eternal glow beyond. Nick Bush left us this message@stories.dead.net where you can leave your stories about the songs on side B of Wake of the Flood.
- [84:42]
Nick Bush
So it's the spring of 2018. I was going to college at SIU Carbondale. I was sitting in my apartment with my roommate and I noticed he had a Grateful Dead. Like, it was like a Life magazine or like a Rolling Stone magazine. And I was like, these dudes look pretty dope. So we decided to go to the record store just to see if they had, you know, a Grateful Dead record there. And I go to their New Arrivals section, and lo and behold, there's a copy of. I was sitting in my apartment with my roommate, and I noticed he had a. You know, I didn't know any of the songs. I never heard Grateful Dead before. I was just like, this album cover is pretty cool. I don't really. You know, it's like an ocean. She's carrying some wheat or something. So I bought it, took it home, gave it a little wipe down, put it on the old Kenwood turntable.
- [85:39]
Narrator/Reader
On the day when I was born.
- [85:43]
Nick Bush
And I was like, holy cow. This is not what I was expecting at all. I don't know what I expected from a band called the Grateful Dead, but it was not that. And I loved every second of it. But the two major ones that really got me going, like on the bus with the Grateful Dead, were the next two. It was Bro, Jimmy, and then Stella Blue. Oh, my gosh. You can. You can't even put into words, like, what Stella Blue means to me. Like, I. I, like, replayed side A, like, five times in a row. I never even got to side B. I played the first side just over and over again when all the.
- [86:27]
Narrator/Reader
Left To See.
- [86:43]
Nick Bush
It's just such a beautiful song. And the guitar and the lyrics, man, all the years combined, they melt into a dream that just hits so hard. And, you know, I was young. You know, I'm still young, but as I'm getting older, it just becomes more real and real. You know, all the years we've lived, they just. They just melt together.
- [87:07]
Jesse Jarno
Nick Palmgarten.
- [87:08]
Scott Metzger
I had a numinous experience that still blue once. Yeah. Not long after I saw those shows. Fall of 84, 15 years old, still a kid. I fell asleep on a couch or half asleep. Had a numinous experience. Kind of a Kubla Khan kind of experience. I was high on something, and I had a kind of dream or vision while listening to Stella Blue. That would have been the Greek one. Like that scene that trippy 1983 wind in the Willows film. You ever see that? The part of it that's called the Piper at the Gates of Dawn, where Mole and Ratty are out in the woods on this pond, and they encounter some cosmic pan in the woods at daybreak? It's such like a gentle piece of entertainment. And yet the scene is so trippy.
- [87:57]
Narrator/Reader
And then a voice too, a voice.
- [87:59]
Arthur C. Clarke
That began to whisper on the wind.
- [88:02]
Narrator/Reader
Lest the ore should dwell and turn your frolic to fret.
- [88:08]
Elvis Costello
You shall look on my power at.
- [88:10]
Narrator/Reader
The helping hour, but then you shall forget, Forget, Forget.
- [88:21]
Jesse Jarno
Betty, I'm afraid.
- [88:24]
Narrator/Reader
No, not afraid. Something else, but not afraid.
- [88:31]
Scott Metzger
Right at the at some moment I had an encounter with the Godhead. It was that moment in the song where it's like, it seems like all this life, which is that, you know, C7 chord to the B7 chord. And then under the dream, just a dream, and then the E major resolution of Stella Blue. Like that was when I saw this God which had the answer to everything, which then when I woke up, I couldn't. I would never know what it was, but it's like written in my soul.
- [89:04]
Narrator/Reader
And when you hear that song crying like the wind, it seems like all this life was just a dream. Stella Blue.
- [89:38]
Jesse Jarno
Stella.
- [90:18]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode Elvis Costello, Bruce Hornsby, David Lemieux, Nick Palmgarden, Scott Metzger, Sean o' Donnell and Nick Bush. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast David Gans, for contributing audio from his interview archive. Thanks very much for tuning in. Don't forget to, like, subscribe and share an episode of the Dead cast on your social media. And give us your side b Wake of the Flood related stories by recording yours over@stories.dead.net Executive Producers for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus and Doran Tyson, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Productions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux. All rights reserved.