The Grateful Dead Couldn’t Find This Song a Home

The Grateful Dead killed this song three times in 15 years — twice on Halloween, 12 years to the day apart. In all 189 plays, it never once closed a set. The band built three different homes for it, and all three collapsed. The song was St. Stephen.

St. Stephen was the first song the band tackled for their third album, Aoxomoxoa — work began September 5, 1968 at Pacific Recording in San Mateo, from lyrics Robert Hunter had mailed Jerry Garcia from Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1967. When the studio took delivery of a new 16-track Ampex mid-session, the band rolled their eight-track work up and kept layering. Eight months and $180,000 later, Aoxomoxoa peaked at #73 on Billboard and took 28 years to go gold. Warner Bros. executive Joe Smith — in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview with David Browne — described chasing the band’s managers down a Burbank sidewalk: “Frank would make six albums on what they spent.”

The version every Deadhead knows came from the live life, not the studio one. Recorded February 27, 1969 at the Fillmore West for Live/Dead — the first live rock album cut on 16-track — St. Stephen lived inside one precise architecture: Dark Star going in, The Eleven coming out. Dark Star segued into St. Stephen 52 times; St. Stephen into The Eleven 54 times — 106 structural placements. Then the architecture died before the song did. The Eleven was retired, then Dark Star, and on October 31, 1971 — Halloween, at the Ohio Theater in Columbus — St. Stephen played for the last time