Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast
Season 8, Episode 6
Wake of the Flood 50: Stella Blue
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:14) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Wake of the Flood] (0:13-0:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: 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 Deadcast, 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 Great American Music Hall as well as the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park.
AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [Elvis Costello, 2022] (0:54-1:10)
JESSE: 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 MacManus had a revelatory experience seeing the Dead in the mud. 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 Rakow worked out to help get the whole enterprise started.
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 walked were Bark by the Jefferson Airplane —
AUDIO: “Third Week in the Chelsea” [Jefferson Airplane, Bark] (1:28-1:50) - [Spotify]
ELVIS COSTELLO: — which was completely unplayable after about a week. And Wake of the Flood was a little bit better, but I think it added to the drowsiness of some of those melodies. Like “Row 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…
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [Wake of the Flood] (5:25-5:53) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
ELVIS COSTELLO: I love “Mississippi [Half-Step] Uptown Toodeloo.” And then, probably—you’ll get a lot of readers’ letters from this—the most beautiful melody Jerry ever wrote, “Stella Blue.” I’d say it’s the most beautiful. I always heard Mel Tormé singing it. I always wished Mel Tormé would have done a version — I think he would have killed that song. In a good way. He would have absolutely taken it to a whole other audience.
JESSE: That is certainly a vocalist I had not thought about doing “Stella Blue,” though some remarkable people have sung it over the years.
ELVIS COSTELLO: I don't know whether that was ever Jerry or Robert Hunter's ambition to be brought into the Great American Songbook. But if you only took the songs from… well, maybe from the record before American Beauty, there’s a few there… but particularly from Workingman’s Dead and [From the] Mars Hotel, if you only took those songs, they belong in the Great American Songbook.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Wake of the Flood] (3:22-3:40) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: In some ways, maybe all ways, “Stella Blue” is the most straightforward and traditionally composed song on Wake of the Flood. But that doesn’t describe why it’s magical. Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: It's a quiet ballad. It's beautiful. It builds and builds and then it peaks, then it goes mellow again, but then it usually has a big outro jam. I just love the dynamics. 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [July 1978, 7/3/78] (9:25-9:55)
JESSE: That was a version from July 3rd, 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 with the mega-sized sounds of the ‘90s Dead, like this version from Pine Knob in June 1991, now on the Download Series, Vol. 11.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Download Series 11, 6/19/91] (6:42-7:10) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: 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 it.”
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Wake of the Flood] (4:58-5:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: 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.
AUDIO: “Sara” [Bob Dylan, Desire] (2:49-3:06) - [Spotify]
JESSE: While Bob Dylan surely 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 10 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 Cohen would stay there, reportedly having a fling with Janis Joplin that would result in his own “Chelsea Hotel No. 2.”
AUDIO: “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” [Leonard Cohen, New Skin for the Old Ceremony] (1:23-1:43) - [Spotify]
JESSE: And after our 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 woke.
AUDIO: “Third Week in the Chelsea” [Jefferson Airplane, Bark] (2:06-2:29) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 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 Maplethorpe, 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.
AUDIO: “Truckin’” (Demo) [American Beauty: The Angel’s Share] (1:37-1:57) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: The tour began with the band’s infamous untaped collaboration with the Buffalo Philharmonic before truckin’ back to Manhattan, where the band made their homebase at the Chelsea Hotel while playing their first shows at the newly opened Capitol Theatre 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 workin’ on “Truckin’,” Hunter would travel to London in May, where he wrote the lyrics for “To Lay Me Down,” “Ripple,” and “Brokedown Place” in a single afternoon — and perhaps other songs 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 flipside to the experience that bonds “Stella Blue” to another Garcia/Hunter song.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Workingman’s Dead] (3:00-3:24) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Robert Hunter told Blair Jackson in 1988 that the lyrics in “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 Deadcast. 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 that time.” For Hunter, “Black Peter” had started as an almost comic piece but it wound up closer to what “Stella Blue” became, too.
AUDIO: “Black Peter” [Workingman’s Dead] (3:25-3:51) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: 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 to mention that—for this episode—we once again have access to the multi-track recordings made for Wake of the Flood. (You can play with some of the isolated tracks from Wake of the Flood at dead.net/playingintheband, and we’ve posted a direct link to the “Stella Blue” tracks here.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (0:14-0:29) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Robert Hunter held onto the original draft of the lyrics and posted them onto his site. They are 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 in this spot.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (0:14-0:29) - [dead.net]
JESSE: 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (0:31-0:41) - [dead.net]
JESSE: One odd literary antecedent to “Stella Blue” can be found in one of the infamous end notes of Vladimir Nabakov’s masterful 1962 Pale Fire — a novel constructed in the annotations of a poem. Line 627 of the poem concerns an astronomer, “the great Starover Blue” and the note describes his father who “eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube.” Which I suppose means that Stella Blue’s maiden name was Stella Lazurchik. While I doubt that Pale Fire is the real origin of “Stella Blue,” I also kinda wonder. There’s another literary antecedent, but we’ll touch on that later.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (0:49-1:24) - [dead.net]
JESSE: 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. But 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 “Bird Song,” 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 was during the second pass through, when they played Munich in May.
AUDIO: “Morning Dew” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 18, 5/18/72] (10:56-11:14) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Jerry Garcia told Guitar Player in 1988, “When Hunter gave me the lyrics, I sat on ‘em and sat on ‘em. Then when we were in Germany, I sat down with an acoustic early in the morning, and the song just fell together. It was so effortless writing it that I don’t feel as though I wrote it.”
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Guitar 1, Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:13) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Please welcome back, from Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, LaMP, Wolf, and other projects, Scott Metzger.
SCOTT METZGER: A deceptively complicated song. When you first hear that song—[if] somebody’s learning how to play guitar or whatever—like: Oh yeah, sure, “Stella Blue,” I learned how to play that. But when you get in there, there's some advanced harmonic stuff happening: there’s sus chords; there’s the whole chromatic walkdown from the major triad to the major 7th. There’s a sus on the 4, and then the major 4.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Garcia guitar, Wake of the Flood] (0:14-0:44) - [dead.net]
JESSE: The early 1970s was a period of concept albums in rock and motifs of natural elements swarm 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 & Arts from the City College of New York, musicologist Shaugn O’Donnell.
SHAUGN 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. Particularly, for me, the things that stand out a lot are the prominence of major 7th sonorities, and diminished sonorities would be in there, too.
JESSE: Forget the natural forces of the cosmos, the concept of the Wake of the Flood is the 7th chord. And tritone substitutions.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: There's tritone substitutes used in these dominant relationships that seem… 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 it’s harmonically functioning like an F#7, but it’s a substitute. And the counterpoint is just beautiful when you hear the Bb/A# note of that chord.
JESSE: That C7 chord that Shaugn describes hits here, on the word “sings.”
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Wake of the Flood] (0:30-0:44) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Elvis Costello compared it to something out of the Great American Songbook, the body of canonical popular song from the post-jazz, pre-rock-and-roll years, often written by composers and lyricists for specific Broadway musicals and movies.
SHAUGN O’DONNELL: That's part of this new language that they're using. So these types of modal mixtures and chord substitutions, using dominant chords in these other ways, start to move you into a jazz vocabulary, in terms of harmony. It’s just the feel isn’t the same — it’s Dead feel, all the way.
JESSE: The song was debuted on June 17th, 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [6/17/72] (3:08-3:39)
JESSE: 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 Glen episodes. It resulted in Garcia getting arrested, Hunter calling the office, and Sam Cutler dispatching promoter John Scher to bail out Garcia, which would result in a lifelong friendship between Garcia and Scher. The next show was March 28th in Baltimore, now Dave’s Picks 16, and Stella Blue has a new lyric.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Dave’s Picks 16, 3/28/73] (3:33-3:50)
JESSE: 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.”
AUDIO: “Comes A Time” [Europe ‘72: The Complete Recordings, Vol. 21, 5/25/72] (0:17-0:46) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: That was from May 25th, 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.
AUDIO: “China Doll” [Dave’s Picks 21, 4/2/73] (0:36-0:51)
JESSE: “Comes A 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.
SCOTT METZGER: The studio version is like… man, he really got it. It stops you dead in your tracks, his vocal delivery — on top of a great melody and a cool, great chord progression. And the instrumentation is great, right? Pedal steel on that one, that’s just great. I wouldn't change a thing.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:09) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “Stella Blue” was first on the docket on the second full day of “Wake of the Flood” sessions, Tuesday, August 7th, 1973. When we arrive at the Record Plant, midway through what’s labeled as Take 1, it’s clear the band are still warming up and figuring out their strategy.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” ((Take 1) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (0:16-0:53) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JERRY GARCIA [8/7/73]: Just fade out in this part… yeah, just keep building in that end part, we’ll fade out on a big old build… [chuckles]... yeah, just like that, you know. You know what I mean? Can you dig it?
PHIL LESH [8/7/73]: S’s’sorta.
JESSE: It’s early in the day, though, and they’re still trying to get the right sound in Studio A.
JERRY GARCIA [8/7/73]: Well, let’s get… if we’re going for the sound, shut the fuckin’ door. Somebody shut the door —
PHIL LESH [8/7/73]: Well, somebody shut the doors, man. I’m strapped in here!
JERRY GARCIA [8/7/73]: — god, where the fuck is the door monitor for god sakes? I thought this was a professional studio! I oughta call the fuckin’ union!
BOB WEIR [8/7/73]: Time to call Willie the doorman!
PHIL LESH [8/7/73]: Turn up the piano in my headphones, thanks.
BOB WEIR [8/7/73]: Where’s Willie the doorman when we need him…
JESSE: 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.
WILLIE THE DOORMAN [The Grateful Dead Movie, 1974]: Have your tickets out and ready, please. Have your tickets ready now. You cannot get back in, sorry sir. Walk right in and have a good time…
JESSE: Though the vocals would be overdubbed, it was still important for Garcia to sing live in the studio.
JERRY GARCIA [8/7/73]: [loosely begins the “Stella Blue” vocal melody] … Oh, wait a minute, let’s see… I’ve gotta remember the first line of the tune, fellas.
[Phil vocalizes with odd sounds]
[Jerry laughs]
BOB WEIR [8/7/73]: [sings to the tune of “Stella Blue”] Dog shit on my feet…
JERRY GARCIA [8/7/73]: No, that’s not it. Let me see…
BOB WEIR [8/7/73]: How about ‘the piss gets in my eyes’?
PHIL LESH [8/7/73]: ‘All the leaves are green’ — ?
JERRY GARCIA [8/7/73]: No, no…
PHIL LESH [8/7/73]: ‘All the leaves are puce…’
JERRY GARCIA [8/7/73]: Okay, I got it, guys.
JESSE: A+ “California Dreamin’” jokes, Phil. Didn’t have another “oy, fuckin’ John Philips” 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 ending they’d developed live.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” ((Take 5) - Not Slated) [Workingman’s Dead: The Angel’s Share] (6:37-7:02) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: By the tape box math, the version of “Stella Blue” that’s on Wake of the Flood is technically Take 6. Brian Kehew is the engineer responsible for cleaning up the Angel’s Share material we just heard.
BRIAN KEHEW: I'd like to hear more “Stella Blue”s. It's a great song. There's enough of it: I'm looking here and it's 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. I love to hear them working on that very minimal version of it, very straight ahead. And it doesn't need much more. It's a great track.
JESSE: Since we have access to the multi-tracks of, we used them to assemble a mix of the song that moves through the individual instruments and parts 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Guitar 1, Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:14) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (0:15-0:29) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Guitar 2, Wake of the Flood] (0:30-0:47) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Piano, Wake of the Flood] (0:47-1:20) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (1:20-1:23) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Background Vocals, Wake of the Flood] (1:26-1:35) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Organ, Wake of the Flood] (1:35-1:40) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Bass, Wake of the Flood] (1:41-2:13) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [A capella, Wake of the Flood] (2:14-2:46) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Drums, Wake of the Flood] (2:47-3:03) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Guitar 3, Wake of the Flood] (3:03-3:23) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [A capella, Wake of the Flood] (3:23-3:40) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Organ, Wake of the Flood] (3:40-3:47) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Guitar 3, Wake of the Flood] (3:47-4:16) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Piano, Wake of the Flood] (4:16-4:25) - [dead.net]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Wake of the Flood] (4:25-4:41) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (4:41-4:51) - [dead.net]
JESSE: 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 this singing — a classic studio vocal performance in the traditional sense of the concept.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Lead Vocal, Wake of the Flood] (4:58-5:24) - [dead.net]
JESSE: Scott Metzger.
SCOTT METZGER: The delivery… that's the thing about Garcia's vocals, right? I think the vulnerability that he had in the singing is the true X factor of his presentation as a musician. The playing, obviously great and everything. I feel like a lot of players over the years that are going for that Garcia thing—whatever that means to people—have been able to kind of dissect the guitar playing: dissect the gear Garcia used, or the kind of pick-ups and stuff. People have come close to the sound. But the one thing that I feel like is still the Holy Grail, and the thing that really is just the X factor that has not been touched, is the Garcia ballad singing. That, to me, is worth the price of admission right there. Every time.
JESSE: Darn tootin’, Mr. Metzger. This album also highlights the wonderful Grateful Dead vocal blend that existed specifically from 1972 through 1974 between Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Donna Jean Godchaux, recorded in stereo on tracks 13 and 14.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Background Vocals, Wake of the Flood] (4:56-5:27) - [dead.net]
JESSE: [Sighs] There are no guest musicians on “Stella Blue,” but there are a couple of wonderfully atmospheric overdubs that come together during the finale. Keith Godchaux 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Organ, Wake of the Flood] (5:30-6:00) - [dead.net]
JESSE: It’s not credited officially on the album, but obviously there’s pedal steel here, and it’s just gorgeous.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Guitar 3, Wake of the Flood] (5:59-6:32) - [dead.net]
JESSE: 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 Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun, credited to Paul Kantner, Grace Slick, and David Freiberg, released in May 1973. This is “Your Mind Has Left Your Body,” a name Dead tape collectors later adapted for a Dead jam that probably didn’t derive from it. Sweet pedal steel though.
AUDIO: “Your Mind Has Left Your Body” [Paul Kantner/Grace Slick/David Freiberg, Baron Von Tollbooth and the Chrome Nun] (3:47-4:10) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 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 he needed to bring in a ringer, a story we’ll get to next year. He’d play it on a few more studio sessions, including a few songs with Paul Pena in October 1973, not released until 2000, but it was disappearing from his arsenal. This is from Paul Pena’s “Venutian Lady.”
AUDIO: “Venutian Lady” [Paul Pena, New Train] (1:42-2:12)
JESSE: 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Submix with all guitars, Wake of the Flood] (6:26-7:01) - [dead.net]
JESSE: 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 18th, 1974, is now Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 3.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 3, 6/18/74] (5:55-6:25) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: “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 Dead Head 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Road Trips Vol. 2, No. 3, 6/18/74] (7:07-7:35) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: They all offer something lovely with slightly different vibes. This is from a little bit from just after the album sessions with a gentle landing.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [9/12/73] (6:24-6:49)
JESSE: That was from September 12th, 1973 at William and 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 Your 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 album sessions finished, got into the album when it came out, and also later became a touring member of the Grateful Dead. We are just beyond thrilled to welcome to the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, Bruce Hornsby. Like a lot of his early tastes, he owed the progression to his older brother Bobby.
BRUCE HORNSBY: My older brother was the resident Dead Head of 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. And we had an 8-track tape player in the car, and he put on his 8-track of this record, Tumbleweed Connection, that just floored me.
AUDIO: “Burn Down the Mission” [Elton John, Tumbleweed Connection] (4:16-4:32) - [Spotify]
BRUCE HORNSBY: Elton John's second American record — third record, actually, it 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 so many groups did. The Dead had their version of The Band-esque music, with American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead. This was Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s version, Tumbleweed 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. “Amoreena,” “Burn Down the Mission,” you could just keep going on. “My Father’s Gun” — [sings] “From this day on, I own my father’s gun…” So great.
AUDIO: “My Father’s Gun” [Elton John, Tumbleweed Connection] (0:35-0:50) - [Spotify]
BRUCE HORNSBY: Plus, he turned me on to Joe Cocker, Mad Dogs & Englishmen, with the great Leon Russell and Chris Stainton on piano. So Elton and Leon were the first guys that got me into all this.
AUDIO: “Feelin’ Alright” [Joe Cocker, Mad Dogs & Englishmen] (1:54-2:16) - [Spotify]
BRUCE HORNSBY: 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 my next move into a pine box. It’s been a lifelong obsession 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, Joni Mitchell, etc.
JESSE: But then the Hornsby brothers discovered the Grateful Dead.
BRUCE HORNSBY: Then my brother turned me on to… all I remember is that when I got to college — my one year, lost year of real college, University of Richmond, which confirmed to me that this was not my path, that I needed to cast my lot with the musos, and I went to music school from then on until I graduated from Suntan U, University of Miami. But my brother turned me on to the Dead, because I know that I was really listening to, say, Europe ‘72. That was a big record for me, the first one that really got me.
AUDIO: “Ramble On Rose” [Europe ‘72] (3:52-4:10) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: As a young piano player, Bruce couldn’t help but notice Keith Godchaux.
BRUCE HORNSBY: Europe ‘72, that was my entree. And that was really not a showcase for Keith, but he was well-heard. He was so in the mix, and such a key sonic element. I still… like at Fare Thee Well, I guarantee you, I’m still playing Keith’s licks on certain songs that I remembered from my youth because it always felt right. He knew the right thing to play, to me.
AUDIO: “I Know You Rider” [Europe ‘72] (2:27-2:49) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: But even when he was discovering the Dead, his ears were immersed in a wider world of piano players.
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. McCoy Tyner. The four one-named icons who are known by just their first name: Herbie, Chick, Keith, and McCoy.
AUDIO: “Bremen, Part 1” [Keith Jarrett, Solo-Concerts Bremen/Lausanne, 7/12/73] (14:47-15:17) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 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.
BRUCE HORNSBY: I had seen the Dead, maybe [in] ‘73 in the Cap Center, Baltimore.
JESSE: That’d be the March 26th, 1973 show, probably, the day before Garcia’s bust in New Jersey and Hunter possibly wrote that final line for “Stella Blue.”
BRUCE HORNSBY: But then what really turned me out: they came and played William and Mary in my hometown here in Williamsburg, VA. William and Mary Hall, the basketball arena at College of William and Mary. 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, we were really close. And we loved it.
AUDIO: “Row Jimmy” [9/11/73] (1:40-1:58)
JESSE: That’s September 11th, 1973, where Bruce heard most of the Wake of the Flood songs for the first time.
BRUCE HORNSBY: In my experience, it was the first time I'd seen the Wall of Sound: all the little amps, all the little speakers, piled high to the sky, way up there. So that was amazing, just visually, to me. 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 a 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 her tomorrow night and play, maybe for free, take out all the seats and just have a big party.”
JESSE: Lesh made the announcement, but Bruce’s memory is pretty spot on.
PHIL LESH [9/11/73]: We’d kind of like to come on in here tomorrow, a sort of an unscheduled event, and play here — same thing, like tonight, but for three dollars, take all the chairs out and everybody have a good time.
[audience cheers]
PHIL LESH [9/11/73]: If y’all dig that idea, you can all come back tomorrow night! It’ll be cheaper.
BOB WEIR [9/11/73]: We’re warmed up, you’re warmed up, and we should have a pretty good time.
BRUCE HORNSBY: When you're 19 years old, you're a freshman in college… that was totally it 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. So, that's when I was in.
JESSE: 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.
BRUCE HORNSBY: And then Wake of the Flood came a little bit after that, that’s my memory. So then I got very much interested in the Dead. I loved Wake of the Flood. Mostly, what I remember, before looking it up, is the record started out with “[Mississippi] Half-Step.” And that remains one of the greats, one of my favorites.
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (3:02-3:16) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Once again, it was his brother who pulled him deeper.
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 Hi-Test and the Octane Kids was the name of the band. It’s something I was totally immersed in — in that world, the musical world of the Dead.
AUDIO: “Playing in the Band” [Bruce Hornsby with Bobby Hi-Test and the Octane Kids, Grateful Dead Hour #265, 1974] - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was Bruce Hornsby singing live with the Octane Kids in 1974. You can hear more of that on Grateful Dead Hour #265. There are some fun photos online of Bobby Hi-Test and the Octane Kids, too.
BRUCE HORNSBY: I have no shirt on, probably, playing the Rhodes, my glasses. Yeah, that was a grain alcohol party out in Lake Reynovia, outside of Charlottesville. Just a big hippie time. It was really right in the heart [of that time]. 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 fucked people up, to be honest. And then, to me, it ended around ‘74-’75. The ‘60s to me didn’t end in ‘69, because a whole lot of great music was made that was very much what you’d call counterculture, bohemian music, in the ‘70s, this time we’re talking about. And the Dead was no different — they were the flagship group. The Dead, and 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 in Animal House. It was called the Dying Cockroach here in Virginia.
JESSE: I asked a little more about Wake of the Flood, because, well, you know.
BRUCE HORNSBY: Well, I love “Row Jimmy.” And “Stella Blue”? Come on with it… I mean, one of the great songs. Here’s a funny-ass story about “Stella Blue.” So, I graduated from University of Miami in 1977, came back here and started a band with some people. This is a great story because the Grateful Dead 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. We started this band in ‘77 — we’re playing the local hotel lounge circuit, playing “Shake Your Booty” “That’s the Way,” and also “I Know You Rider.” An odd mix, of course. We went to see the Dead in ‘77 at the Mosque in Richmond. It’s called something else [now], but it’s the old classic Mosque Theater.
JESSE: That’s the show now known as Dave’s Picks 1, May 25th, 1977.
AUDIO: “Jack Straw” [Dave’s Picks 1, 5/25/77] (4:50-5:20)
BRUCE HORNSBY: And so, Molo, he was a funk [guy] — Earth, Wind and Fire, jazz, rock. He grew up with Buddy Rich, big jazz fan. I met him at University of Miami. We played in the second band, the second of the four bands, the next-to-best band. I loved Molo’s playing. We became friends. We were both kind of ex-jocks, so we bonded in that era as well. He came down to Williamsburg to join our band. But he didn’t know the Dead really at all. Molo had seen them at American University some time, but he didn’t take much note of it, I don’t think. It didn’t have much of an effect on him. We’re at the gig, sitting up there with Molo and our guitar player at the time, a guy named Phil McCusker, another Miami guy. And people all around us are yelling, “‘Stella’! ‘Stella’!” And Molo and Phil, they look at me and go, “You’ve got to be kidding me: the Dead play ‘Stella’?” They mean “Stella By Starlight,” the old standard that’s a go-to move for jazz cocktail players since the ‘50s. And so of course, I, not taking anything too seriously, said, “oh yeah, they play ‘Stella’! Garcia sings it great!” [vocalizes “Stella By Starlight” melody]
AUDIO: “Stella By Starlight” [Ella Fitzgerald, Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie!] (0:52-1:08) - [Spotify]
BRUCE HORNSBY: “Yeah, just wait…” They cannot believe it. They’re playing, I don’t know, “Big Railroad Blues,” “Beat It On Down the Line” — whatever the Dead are 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 jazz guys, who were also into the Dead, thought was hilarious.
JESSE: The only Wake of the Flood song they played that night was “Mississippi Half-Step.”
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Dave’s Picks 1, 5/25/77] (8:05-8:35)
JESSE: 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, maybe not. The first is that the song developed a pretty wondrous outro guitar solo. This version is from Boulder, December 9th, 1981, now Dave’s Picks 20.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Dave’s Picks 20, 12/9/81] (8:13-8:29)
JESSE: 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 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 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 a sort of brittle pathos in it that I didn’t get until I’d been singing it for a while.”
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [In and Out of the Garden, 9/20/82] (1:41-2:08) - [dead.net]
JESSE: That was from the September 20th, 1982 version, now on the In and Out of the Garden box, a more lived-in take by Garcia. Though the song would be taken up by many artists, one of the 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 a 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 19th, 1973, [Dick’s] Picks 1. This is what happens just prior to “Stella Blue.”
AUDIO: “Jam” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (2:43-3:01) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: Some metal machine grooviness. And then!
AUDIO: “Jam” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (5:56-6:11) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Dick’s Picks 1, 12/19/73] (0:00-0:16) - [Spotify] [YouTube]
JESSE: For many Dead Heads, “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 Hotel, Room 902.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE [2001: A Space Odyssey]: The space pod was resting on the polished floor of an elegant, anonymous hotel suite that might have been in 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-filled bookcase with some magazines lying on it, and even a bowl of flowers. Van Gogh's Bridge at Arles was hanging on one wall - Wyeth's Christina'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…
JESSE: 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 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.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE [2001: A Space Odyssey]: 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. At first, it seemed that Time itself was running backward. Even this marvel he was prepared to accept, before he realized the 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Guitar 3, Wake of the Flood] (3:03-3:21) - [dead.net]
JESSE: 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 during 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 Lasurchik in Nabakov’s Pale Fire, or Stella Blue Cheese, on sale in a supermarket near you, I have no idea of 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’re not, there’s nothing in the lyrics to “Stella Blue” that suggests they couldn’t be sung by the astronaut from 2001. Listened to in that context, the isolated pedal steel from “Stella Blue” reminds me of Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’s Apollo Soundtracks, recorded about a decade later.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Guitar 3, Wake of the Flood] (3:25-3:55) - [dead.net]
JESSE: 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 Paumgarten.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: My first “Stella Blue” was actually at my first show, and that was 6/26/84, Merriweather Post Pavilion. My first “Space”-into-something was “Space” into “I Don’t Need Love.” That was not a titanic moment in my Grateful Dead history. And then they did “Truckin’,” “Wang Dang Doodle,” and then came “Stella Blue,” which I hardly knew at this point. I didn’t know my way around stuff. So, he totally blows the first line — just, like, misses it completely.
JESSE: 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.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: 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. The solo was really sweet, and then the drama of it all just really hits. It knocked me on my ass. It was my first show, my first experience being bowled over by a Jerry ballad. Just the dynamics of it.
JESSE: It was a version from later that summer that he really connected with when he got it on tape.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: A couple of weeks later, they played at the Greek Theatre. There's that sort of well-known show from that year, and there’s a “Stella Blue” on that one that became a big mainstage on tape — for me, for us, whatever.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [7/13/84] (0:26-0:57)
NICK PAUMGARTEN: And on that recording, Healy did some reverb-y thing with Jerry's voice. 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, partly because he was so fragile—that’s my favorite “Stella Blue.” Jerry sang like some degenerate castrato, with this beautiful tenor just barely holding on.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [7/13/84] (1:14-1:32)
NICK PAUMGARTEN: That version of “Stella Blue” kind of captures that mid-’80s [vibe]: a little bombastic, it’s got the sadness and the sense of loss, the irrevocable past with some wisdom gained. It’s got all of that wrapped up in the fragility of it. But the band is also big — Bobby’s making weird songs, Brent’s doing stuff with electric keyboard.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [7/13/84] (3:04-3:26)
NICK PAUMGARTEN: They're perilously close to cliche. It’s like, “cheap hotel” and “crying like the wind,” “dust it off one more time…” It’s sentimental, but somehow it works. He’s always singing about himself, whether he wants to be or not. “Dust off those rusty strings, gonna make ‘em shine” — then he does a solo. I mean, that’s as much bravado as you’re ever gonna get out of him. I don’t think it embarrassed him, because he often did whip out a very shiny solo.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [7/13/84] (3:25-4:00)
JESSE: Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager David Lemieux.
DAVID LEMIEUX: 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[nolia],” and I remember it very well. It was a very humid night at a triple A baseball stadium, a real… I shouldn’t say a real dump… it was a great place… but it was the old Silver Stadium in Rochester. But boy, did the place sound good. The band was set up in the outfield, and everybody was on the field, in the stands where the baseball fans would sit, there was also seating up there. But I remember it was extremely—it might have even been raining a bit—humid. Humid nights… Phil never sounds better than on a humid night. 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [7/2/87] (1:40-2:14)
JESSE: 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 Jon Sievert 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 lyrics. If I change the tempo inside a phrase, they’ll be right there in the next bar. It’s amazing.”
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 10/26/89] (5:26-5:54)
JESSE: That was from Miami, October 26th, 1989. When he spoke to Blair Jackson the year before that, he spoke of its musical functionality. Blair asked Garcia if 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 – whoosh … 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [30 Trips Around the Sun, 10/26/89] (7:45-8:16)
JESSE: 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Robert Hunter, Box of Rain] (0:00-0:23)
JESSE: The first artist who covered it outside the Dead’s world, as far as I can figure, is the Italian group Howth Castle, on their 1994 album, Good Morning, Mr. Nobody.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Howth Castle, Good Morning, Mr. Nobody] (1:18-1:41)
JESSE: It would take some time, but “Stella Blue” jumped the fence from the jam world into a variety of artists beyond. The doo-wop group the Persuasions covered it in 2000, at the behest of producer David Gans.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [The Persuasions, Persuasions of the Dead: The Grateful Dead Sessions] (0:48-1:14) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Though they never recorded it in the studio, the great New Hope band Ween included it in live sets occasionally in the late ‘90s.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Ween, 3/12/98] (2:11-2:42)
JESSE: In 2010, Jesse McReynolds of the bluegrass duo the McReynolds Brothers tackled it.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Jesse McReynolds, Songs of the Grateful Dead] (3:28-3:46) - [Spotify]
JESSE: Just recently, the song has been performed by previous Deadcast guest Oteil Burbridge, on his new solo album Lovely View of Heaven.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Oteil Burbridge, Lovely View of Heaven] (3:54-4:13) - [Spotify]
JESSE: The inimitable Willie Nelson included it on his 2006 album Songbird, featuring the late Neal Casal on guitar.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Willie Nelson, Songbird] (4:29-4:57) - [Spotify]
JESSE: 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 was 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 7th, suspended four to the 4th 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Bob Dylan, 6/23/23] (1:27-1:57)
JESSE: 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 setlists during 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.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Bob Dylan, 6/23/23] (5:09-5:39)
JESSE: 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 at stories.dead.net, where you can leave your stories about the songs on Side B of the Wake of the Flood.
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 Life magazine, or like a Rolling Stone magazine. I was like, “These dudes look pretty dope.” We decided to go to the record store just to see if they had a Grateful Dead record there. I go to their new arrivals section. And lo and behold, there's a copy of Wake of the Flood there for $20. I didn’t know any of the songs; I’d never heard the Grateful Dead before. I was just like, this album cover’s pretty cool! I don’t really… just, like, an ocean, 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…
AUDIO: “Mississippi Half-Step” [Wake of the Flood] (0:00-0:14) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
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 goin on the Bus with the Grateful Dead were the next two: it was “Row Jimmy,” and then “Stella Blue.” Oh my gosh, you can’t… you can’t even put it into words what “Stella Blue” means to me. I replayed Side A like five times in a row. I never even got to Side B. I played the first side over and over again.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Wake of the Flood] (1:40-2:06) - [dead.net] [Spotify] [YouTube]
NICK BUSH: It's just such a beautiful song. 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. I'm still young. But as I'm getting older, it just becomes more real and real. All the years we've lived, they just melt together.
JESSE: Nick Paumgarten.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: I had a numinous experience to “Stella 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, and had a numinous experience — kind of a Kubla Khan 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 [Theatre] one. You know that scene in that trippy 1983 Wind in the Willows film? There’s a part of it that’s called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, where Mole and Ratty are out in the woods on the pond, and they encounter some cosmic Pan in the woods at daybreak. It’s such a gentle piece of entertainment, and yet this scene is so trippy.
AUDIO: “Wind in the Willows” (1:17-1:51)
NARRATOR [Wind in the Willows]: And then a voice, too — a voice began to whisper on the wind.
VOICE [Wind in the Willows]: Lest we all should dwell, and turn your frolic to fret, you shall look on my power at the helping hour, then you shall forget and forget. Forget…
MOLE [Wind in the Willows]: Ratty, I’m afraid.
RATTY [Wind in the Willows]: Oh, not afraid… something else, but not afraid.
NICK PAUMGARTEN: Right at the… at some moment, I had an encounter with a godhead. It was that moment in the song where it’s like: “It seems like all this life”—C7 chord, there’s a B7 chord, and then under the “dream” in “just a dream,” and the the E major resolution of “Stella Blue”—that was when I saw this godhead that had the answer to everything. Which then, when I woke up, I would never know what it was. But it’s written in my soul.
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [7/13/84] (5:10-5:43)
JESSE: Man, “Stella Blue.”
AUDIO: “Stella Blue” [Guitar 3, Wake of the Flood] (6:23-6:48) - [dead.net]