Day 317: Stella Blue, 11/4/77

I feel like I’ve had a good representation of Stella Blue to this point. This is the third selection and only now are we getting to the 1970s. I did not see that coming.

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I love me some Jerry ballads. I tend to think a lot of people do. Of course, an entire show of just ballads wouldn’t be as much fun. It might be very intense, but that is the sort of thing that I would expect to hear in a coffee house somewhere. While all the rocking and dancing is certainly fun there comes a time (excuse the pun) where you need a breather. I went to see Railroad Earth and Yonder Mountain String Band at Red Rocks a few years ago. Yonder put their foot to the floorboard right away and never let up. It was exhausting! Maybe I’m just getting old, but after a while everything started to sound the same to me and it wasn’t that fun. I needed a break! That experience just reinforced to me how important it is to work in those mid tempo songs and ballads.

It seems to me that Hunter’s most poignant lyrics and some of Garcia’s most beautiful melodies show up in ballads. There is a sense of contemplation, fragility, and emotion concomitant with ballads that serve as an important juxtaposition to non-ballads. Coming out of drums was often the Jerry ballad slot, and it makes sense. Ballads offer a way to ease back into the groove of the show, especially if they build dynamically like a lot of the Dead’s ballads do. This Stella Blue is a prime example of all these ideas.

I hope you enjoy it!

There is about a minute of slow, focused jamming before the recognizable strains of Stella Blue first hit the ear. The verses are pretty straightforward here. The playing is light and airy and the players are clearly focused on what the song needs and not what they need. The result is a beautifully executed Jerry ballad. You can sense a bit of a shift follow the “blue light cheap hotel” line. Weir throws in a gorgeous lick and Keith adds some of his own. Jerry takes up the mantle during the solo but listen to the stops Keith instigates right after the 6 minute mark. They’re intense and punchy, not to mention brief, but make a major contribution to the uniqueness of this Stella Blue. Whatever dynamism was generated during that instrumental section was quickly scuttled during the next verse, but this is more of a challenge to rebuild it as opposed to an attempt to abandon ship. And rebuilding is exactly what the band does, following the lead of Mssrs Garcia and Godchaux the song reaches a new series of highs. It quickly peters out, however, in order to tie up some loose ends and finish the Playing In the Band that started the set.