My Top 1000 Songs #768: St. Stephen

[I've been writing up my Top 1000 songs on a daily basis--you can see them all in descending order by hitting the All My Favorite Songs tag.]

Like a lot of Grateful Dead converts of my generation, I first got into the band (following years of visceral disdain) in the mid-80s after being turned on to a few live shows circulating on hissy cassettes. San Francisco '75 (officially released on 1991's One From The Vault) helped turn me from a hater to a lifelong obsessive, but the legendary Cornell '77 show (which similarly finally got an official release a couple years back) was also part of that initial batch of tapes a college friend handed me. That was the version of "St. Stephen" I first really listened to--it'd be awhile before I picked up the '69 studio album Aoxomoxoa where it first saw official release--and it's pretty clear, with hindsight, why that track would help win me over. It's a gentle, beautiful rendition, though the fact that by the late 70s it was no longer a live mainstay made it all the more special.

Naturally, I then worked my way back to the earlier, late 60s iterations--best captured on the official Live Dead album and since documented on countless archival releases--a very different vibe, raw and primal, part of the sweeping "Dark Star > St. Stephen > The Eleven" suite that encapsulates the band's psychedelic origins. But it's hard to pick a favorite era for the song--and even the studio version, while lacking the same breathing room, is quite magical--because, at heart, there's always that enduring hook. It's a reminder that, for all the mystique around the Dead's live shows, Jerry Garcia could pen a hell of a melody, and it was always about the songs.

Studio version:

Live '69, at the Playboy Mansion(!):

Slowed-down '74:

The classic late 60s Dark Star/St. Stephen/Eleven opus: