The Grateful Dead's 20 Best Versions of 'Dark Star' (2025)

August 16, 2025

• Rotterdam, 5/11/72

  

  Shall we go, you and I, and jump right into the deep end? The Europe ’72 tour is full of legendary “Dark Star” jams — we’ll be hearing more from that tour on this list. But the Rotterdam version is the longest version they’d ever attempted, at 47 wild minutes. (It would take them over a year to break that record.) It’s a freewheeling journey through sonic chaos, building up slowly until it achieves lift-off, traveling through hillbilly country twang and free-jazz interludes. It sums up all the crazed spirit of adventure that this song was always about.

  As Jerry Garcia always said, “Dark Star” was one long song the band kept playing over the years, a real-time journal of their music. “You and I are talking about two different ‘Dark Stars’,’” he told Rolling Stone in 1971. “You’re talking about the ‘Dark Star’ which you have heard formalized on a record, and I’m talking about the ‘‘Dark Star’ which I have heard in each performance as a completely improvised piece over a long period of time. So I have a long continuum of ‘Dark Stars’ which range in character from each other to real different extremes. ‘Dark Star’ has meant, while I’m playing it, almost as many things as I can sit here and imagine.” So how does he explain this song? “I can’t. It talks about itself.”

  Listen here: Part 1, Part 2

• Yale Bowl, 7/31/71

  

  The Yale Bowl version comes from the summer of 1971, when it was basically down to the Grateful Dead Quartet. Drummer Mickey Hart had left, not to return for another three years, keyboardist Tom Constanten was long gone, and Pigpen laid out when it came to the psychedelic jams. So all four players take advantage of the elbow room to stretch out in experimental directions. This “Dark Star” builds for ten minutes before Garcia reaches the first verse, but by the 16-minute point, he’s shooting fireworks across the sky. The single-drummer Dead was a real groove monster, especially since the single drummer was Bill Kreutzman, who thrived on his own. As Phil Lesh put it, “Billy was playing like a young god in those days.” But as always, “Dark Star” is the sound of the band in free slight, changing as they go. “There are certain structural poles which we have kind of set up in it, and those periodically we do away with,” Garcia said in his famous 1971 Rolling Stone interviewwith Charles Reich and Jann S. Wenner. “That’s why we came up with such a thing; there are a few things that we do which are vehicles for that openness.”
  

• Avalon Ballroom, 10/12/68

  

  “Everybody cool it,” Garcia announces as this show begins, on their home ground in San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom. “Everything’s gonna be all right. We’re gonna play here until we drop.” Then they open with a stunning 15-minute “Dark Star” that shows how far this song had evolved over the past year, even at this early stage. Strange as it seems, the song first debuted as a rough three-minute single in late 1967, then sank without a trace. But it kept expanding and growing through 1968, becoming their favorite showcase for their freewheeling improvised mind-melds. At this justly famous gig, Pigpen isn’t on hand, so there’s no organ — it’s mainly a dialogue between Garcia and Lesh, with Weir still lurking on the fringes. (Pigpen and Bobby had just rejoined, after briefly getting kicked out for lack of technical chops; neither had found their way into the song yet.)Toward the end, Garcia goes into the finger-picking arpeggio that became known as the “Sputnik” jam, a regular highlight of the song up to the end of 1972. There are other essential 1968 versions to savor, both before this show (8/24 at the Shrine) and after (10/20 in Berkeley, 11/22 in Columbus). But “Dark Star” was already speeding its way into the psychedelic beast it became just a few months later

• Miami, 10/26/89

  

  For 15 years, from October 1974 to October 1989, the Star went Dark. The Dead basically dropped it, rolling it out only for special occasions like the closing of Winterland in 1978, Jerry’s backstage wedding to Mountain Girl on New Years Eve 1981, or the full moon on Friday the 13th of July 1984.As Jerry admitted, they’d just burned out on it. But they never really left its spirit behind. “Really, ‘Dark Star’ is a little of everything we do, all the time,” he said in 1987. “So what happened to ‘Dark Star’ was, it went into everything. Everything’s got a little ‘Dark Star’ in it. I’ve never missed it, because what we were doing with it is everywhere. I mean, our whole second half is ‘Dark Star,’ you could say.”

  So it was a shocker when they brought it back in October 1989, busting it out for their famous “Formerly the Warlocks” Hampton show on the 6th. The Miami version, just a couple weeks later, is one of the wildest and craziest post-revival versions, going wild with their new arsenal of MIDI effects and digital synths. Poor Brent Mydland rarely got in on a “Dark Star” — he’d been in the band for a decade at this point, yet this was only the fifth one he got to play. (And he had only three more left in his lifetime.) But he makes up for lost time, going for nasty, frightening noise blasts, while Garcia and Weir bring the feedback, until it roils like Dark Magus-era Miles Davis getting manhandled by Sonic Youth—a late-game “Dark Star” with a mean streak. It stayed in the set until 1994—yet never sounded like this again.

• Oklahoma City, 10/19/73

  

  This starts off eerie and ominous, flowing into a space that feels downright menacing. But then the Dead catch you off-guard by swerving into the much-loved “Mind Left Body Jam,” one of the transitional jams the Dead would insert into “Dark Star,” along with the “Soulful Strut”/“Tighten Up” jam, the “Tiger” jam, or the “Feelin’ Groovy” jam. The name comes from its resemblance to a 1973 deep cut by the Jefferson Starship, “Your Mind Has Left Your Body,” although to an R&B fan, it sounds far more clearly like the 1968 Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell classic “You’re All I Need To Get By,” a song that would have been well-known to a Motown nut like Garcia. “Mind Left Body Jam” is a kick wherever it shows up — Phish covered it a few times. But it’s the moment where a spooked-out “Dark Star” moves into a heart-grabbingly emotional interlude, making this a complex mix of moods.

  Listen here: Part 1, Part 2

• Clark University, 4/20/69

  

  A mellow, underrated beauty of a “Dark Star,” from a 650-seat college theater in the factory town of Worcester, Mass. It was the finest 4/20 gig the Dead ever played, though it was decades before “4/20” meant a damn thing. It’s got its own meditative quality, with an introspective twin-guitar rumination, 22 minutes of intensely hushed focus, casting its spell in the opening minutes. You could call this the Marquee Moon “Dark Star,” as if Marquee Moon weren’t already Television translating the Dead into the urban punk grime of CBGB’s. (Compare this “Dark Star” to the 17-minute “Marquee Moon” that Television played in Portland on 7/2/78, for a taste of the Jerry Garcia/Tom Verlaine soul connection at its deepest—the kiss of death, the embrace of life.) This isn’t one of the more famous versions, but once heard, it’s never forgotten. “Last time we were here it was a colossal disaster,” Jerry tells the crowd as this show begins. “This time it’ll be worse!”

  Listen here: Part 1, Part 2

• Winterland, 2/24/74

  

  Bill Graham introduces this show at Winterland, saying, “Whatever’s going on in the rest of the world, if it’s wars or kidnappings or crimes, this is a peaceful Sunday night with the Grateful Dead.” (If “kidnappings” doesn’t ring a bell, this was during the strange saga of Patty Hearst.) But the peak is an intense “Dark Star,” giving no sign they were about to let go of this song for the next 15 years. It flows into “Morning Dew,” a truly brooding 44-minute exploration full of melancholy beauty. By the end of the year, Mickey was back for good, the one-drummer Dead was history, and “Dark Star” became a station where the train didn’t stop anymore.

  Listen here

• Fillmore East, 2/11/70

  

  The famous jam from the Fillmore East, with the Dead joined by members of the other two bands on the bill — the Allman Brothers and Fleetwood Mac. Three of the greatest psychedelic guitar voyagers who ever drew breath — Jerry Garcia, Duane Allman, Peter Green — trade licks on a 26-minute excursion into the unknown, listening hard to each other and telling the same story in their own different languages. (Green is the least famous of the three, but a guitarist’s guitarist, with classics like “Oh Well” and “Jumping at Shadows.”). The opening 10 minutes are mostly Garcia and Green, before Brother Duane steps in and starts throwing his weight around. Yet there’s no ego, no clutter — they give each other plenty of room, with wide open spaces in the music. Gregg sits in on organ. At the 16-minute point, Weir strikes up the “Spanish Jam,” a motif from their 1968 shows, and the whole room begins to shake. This “Dark Star” builds from contemplative calm to wailing move-the-crowd intensity, without losing a step along the way.

• The Family Dog, 11/2/69

  

  Rolling Stone’s late, great Michael Lydon described hearing the band play “Dark Star” in 1969. “Suddenly the music is not notes or a tune, but what these seven people are exactly,” he wrote. “The music is an aural holograph of the Grateful Dead. All their fibres, nuances, histories, desires, beings are clear. Jerry and his questing, Phil the loyal comrade, Tom drifting beside them both on a cloud, Pig staying stubbornly down to earth, Mickey working out furious complexities, trying to understand how Bill is so simple; and Bob succumbing inevitably to Jerry and Phil and joining them.”

  That’s exactly what happens in this version, from the Family Dog, the DIY hippie dance hall of Bay Area legend Chet Helms. By the fall of 1969, the band was getting bolder about drifting into space, while Tom Constanten was stepping out on organ far more assertively than he did earlier in the year. Like many of the best 1969 versions, this “aural holograph” has a prayerful tone that holds up all the way through, as you hear them throw ideas back and forth. In the words of a song they were just on the verge of writing, the premise is “think this through with me,” and that’s just how this sounds.

  Listen here

• Nassau Coliseum, 3/29/90

  

  A highlight of what might be the Dead’s best-loved Nineties show, starring Branford Marsalis as the special-and-then-some guest. “Dark Star” opens up with this sax legend pushing the entire band to reactivate everything they ever learned from their Coltrane and Miles albums. Marsalis dukes it out with the MIDI-warped guitars, driving them even harder than David Murray did when he sat in for “Dark Star.” (Ornette Coleman sadly didn’t do “Dark Star,” when he joined them in New Orleans in 1993, but added his genius to “The Other One.”) Brent throws himself into the jam with a downright boyish enthusiasm, after waiting so long for his ride on the Star ship, though sadly he was close to the end of his story.

• Kansas City, 11/13/72

  

  A hugely underrated sleeper of a show, mostly because the sound quality is rough, especially early on — it sounds like somebody smuggled a tape deck hidden inside a veggie burrito. So adjust your ears accordingly. But the whole night kicks. Don’t skip the first set, with a bang-up version of Dolly Parton’s “Tomorrow Is Forever.” (Jerry worshipped Dolly from the beginning, and the Dead played this minor 1970 hit for years. There’s a Playboy interview where he insists on playing this album for the skeptical reporter until they’re both in tears.) But the 33-minute “Dark Star” is a totally unique gem, building layer by layer, full of slow-boiling dissonance, until Phil leaps into the high-speed riff got called the “Philo Stomp” (as named by archivist Dick Latvala). Then it explodes into the fastest version of the “Feelin’ Groovy” jam you’ve ever heard. The final 13 minutes of this are pure bliss–the upside of the audience recording is that you can hear the crowd cheer them on every step of the journey, until all is groovy. Then they slide right into a soul-crushing “Morning Dew.”

  Also not to be be missed: this 12-hour mix of every 1972 “Dark Star,” all 31 of them, merged into one long jam by SonicWallpaper. Who then did the same with 1973, for 6 hours.

  Listen here

• Capitol Theater, 6/24/70

  

  “We have a little bit of technical preparation,” Garcia tells the crowd. “Mickey has to get his gongs all together — we’re gonna do ‘Dark Star.’” As the fans roar, he adds, “There’ll be a minute or two of respectful silence, while Mickey fiddles aimlessly around the stage.” But there’s nothing aimless about this one. It’s a real roller coaster, a unique version with surprise twists that never showed up again. It also works in rough drafts of two brand new originals, with licks from “Sugar Magnolia” and “Attics of My Life,” both destined for their November 1970 album American Beauty. (Or American Reality, as the cover says if you look at it right.) It’s also got some of the riffs the Dead were weaving into “Dark Star” in these days. Garcia brings in the groove known as the “Soulful Strut” jam, a funky R&B riff from the 1968 instrumental smash by Young-Holt Unlimited. (The same track became a hit again in 1969, as the backing track for Barbara Acklin’s “Am I the Same Girl?”) Other fans call it the “Tighten Up” jam, after the Archie Bell and the Drells hit. But whatever you call it, they ride it for three minutes, driving this version home beautifully. A truly ferocious “Dark Star”—right after the first verse, at the 8:40 point you can hear a fan mutter, “Oh my God!”

  Listen here

• The Spectrum, 9/21/72

  

  For the first 27 minutes this is merely one of the greatest “Dark Stars” they ever played. Garcia’s guitar hits high-lonesome melodic ripples that seem to echo on into the stratosphere. But it really takes off in the famous final climax with a beatific “Mind Left Body Jam” that starts off resembling the Allman Brothers’ “Mountain Jam” but soon leaves the mountains behind. It speeds up into a country-fried psychedelic hoedown, with a banjo effect that brings all Jerry’s bluegrass picking into a whole new corner of the galaxy. The audience whoops and claps like they’re getting set on fire. One for the ages.
  

• Winterland, 11/11/73

  

  “We have a kind of continuity, from off the street to outer space, so to speak,” Garcia said in a 1972 interview, quoted in Jesse Jarnow’s indispensable book Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America. But then do they come back from space? “Sometimes, but then sometimes we just hang out there. It’s not so organized.” This “Dark Star” is one of those performances where they hang out there. By the time it rolls around to the 31-minute point, you can’t imagine Jerry anywhere but space — he’s been there so long, he’s got to calling it home. The band sounds fearless, as if energized by their home ground of Winterland. (The entire three-night run is on Winterland 1973.) But this already-monumental “Dark Star” takes a bold turn in the final 7 minutes and splashes down to earth. It’s one of their most beautiful renditions of the “Mind Left Body Jam,” bubbling with Motown soul, until it glides nice and easy into “Eyes of the World” and “China Doll.” A version that brings all the band’s contradictions together, without resolving any of them.
  

• Columbus, 10/31/71

  

  1971 was a strange year for “Dark Star” — they played it only a dozen times, yet always brought something unique to it. Mickey Hart departed in February, Tom Constanten was gone, so for much of the year, they were back to their lean, mean original five-man configuration, never a bad thing. They were rocking harder — “a regular shoot-‘em-up saloon band,” as Garcia put it. So they focused on their succinct new material rather than the cosmic flights of “Dark Star.” When fans yelled for it at an April gig, Garcia asked, “Where were all you ‘Dark Star’ people two years ago when we were playing it all the time? Too bad, man, too bad!”

  But the saloon-band Dead could kick more ass in “Dark Star” than ever before, and never more so than in this Halloween version. It’s an exhilarating ride all the way. It’s one of Keith Godchaux’s first shows, and he’s mighty low in the mix, but you can already hear how he adds new kinds of propulsion on piano. It peaks highest when Garcia swerves into the funked-up riff known as the “Soulful Strut” jam at the 13-minute point—the most exuberant and urgent this jam ever got, six minutes of bliss. It cooks right up to the final notes, when it slams into “Sugar Magnolia.” You just can’t beat a Halloween “Dark Star.” Twenty years later to the day, they did played it in New York as a tribute to the recently deceased Bill Graham, with Ken Kesey declaiming an E.E. Cummings poem, asking, “What do you think of your blue-eyed boy now, Mr. Death?”

• Wembley, 4/8/72

  

  The Dead’s fabled Europe ’72 summer run was one of the best things that ever happened to “Dark Star.” As the shaggy hippie horde rampaged across the continent, wreaking havoc on one town after another, they left brilliant Stars in their wake — from Copenhagen to Dusseldorf, from Paris to Wigan, from Hamburg to Rotterdam. Each one tells a different story, exploring a different path through the song. But the most brutal “Dark Star” was the first one of the tour, from London’s Wembley Stadium. It’s one of the most terrifying things they ever played, with so much sonic destruction in the guitars, it unfolds like a horror movie, one long sweaty night of fear packed. And just when you’re ready to give up hope, they dispel the clouds with a jubilant closing jam.

  It got released on the box Steppin’ Out with the Grateful Dead: England ’72, as well as the Complete Europe ’72. Visit the Paris version for finesse, the Copenhagen one for clever idea-juggling, but the Wembley version is raw emotion at both extremes — not for the faint of heart.

• Fillmore East, 2/13/70

  

  “You have to remember that we live in a universe that doesn’t have any Grateful Dead in it,” Garcia told New York radio audiences in 1970. “We don’t know who the hell we are.” But in this late show at NYC’s Fillmore East, they take their time figuring it out, in one of the most beloved versions of “Dark Star.” It gets off to a quiet start, building a sense of ominous calm in the extended intro—nobody’s in a hurry, or in the mood for noisy havoc, just exploring inner space. After stretches of near-silence, 18 minutes in, Weir starts playing the riff dubbed the “Feelin’ Groovy” jam, named for its similarity to the Simon & Garfunkel hit “The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy),” one of the regular themes they’d bring into “Dark Star” for a year or so starting in late 1969. It’s one of the most uplifting versions of this always-welcome jam. (Is this the closest they ever played it to the actual 59th Street Bridge? Somebody probably knows.) They swing and lilt all the way to a knockdown rock finale — a “Dark Star” where they go from a whisper to a scream in half an hour, fully in control all the way through.

• Capitol Theater, 2/18/71

  

  The Dead spent so many magical nights at the Capitol Theater, their beloved haunt just north of NYC. It was one of their favorite rooms; the last time Bob Dylan played there, in 2023, he sang “Stella Blue” as a tribute. But tonight was something special. For one thing, it was Mickey Hart’s last gig before quitting the band. For another, they debuted a slew of jaw-droppingly great new songs, including “Bertha,” “Playing in the Band,” “Loser,” and “Greatest Story Ever Told.” But this “Dark Star” is where they really kissed the sky. Garcia hits painfully beautiful guitar chimes, with avant-garde pal Ned Lagin joining on clavichord. When the band slides into a new tune, the segue makes the crowd erupt, even though it’s a new song none of them have heard yet — the premiere of “Wharf Rat.” Even if they stopped here, this version would still be an all-timer.

  But the best is yet to come, as they return to “Dark Star” and Garcia strikes up a riff that leads them into a jam they only played once, a gorgeously lilting seven-minute fantasy that’s gone down in history as the “Beautiful Jam.” (It was released as a stand-alone track on the So Many Roads box.) Virtuoso keyboardist Holly Bowling even arranged it as a solo piano piece. They never played it again, but it’s the Dead at their most exquisite.

  Decades later, Phil Lesh heard this jam for the first time since playing it, on the radio show of legendary Dead scholar David Gans. “Oh…that’s just gorgeous,” Lesh said, for once at a loss for words. “That’s…I’m sorry…that just, that brought tears to my eyes.” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hzZc8-s4So] He’s not the only one.

  Listen here: Part 1, Part 2

• Fillmore West, 2/27/69

  

  Well, obviously. By far the most famous version — this “Dark Star” led off Live/Dead, the album that came out in November 1969 and forever established the mystique of the Grateful Dead as the livest of live bands, the merry cosmic travelers who couldn’t be tamed in the studio. For decades, this was the first “Dark Star” that most Deadheads heard, and for many, the ONLY one they heard. More than any other performance they ever played, this “Dark Star” created the legend of the Dead as we know them. It had almost nothing to do with the three-minute studio single that was the song’s official debut; this was the real-deal version, the shot heard around the world. It’s the reason “There Is Nothing Like a Grateful Dead Concert” was a simple statement of fact. But if it’s the only “Dark Star” you ever hear, it’s enough to keep your ears feasting forever. Jerry Garcia rambles from the country blues to Alpha Centauri in a mere 23 minutes. The entire band takes so many twists and turns, hits so many peaks and plumbs so many depths, that you can keep exploring forever without running out of surprises. One reason is the sheer bravado of it—they knew the tapes were rolling, they knew this was their shot, their excitement is utterly electric. The entire Fillmore run that gave us this “Dark Star” is full of classic versions, but there’s a reason this one became the shall-we-go motherlode.
  

• Veneta, Oregon, 8/27/72

  

  “Well, the sun’s making our instruments get mighty strange,” Bobby tells the crowd. He isn’t joking. It’s a blistering hot summer day in Veneta, Oregon, in the Old Renaissance Faire Grounds. The Dead traveled here because their old friend Ken Kesey asked them to come play a benefit for the local Springfield Creamery, so here they are in a field full of hippies, everyone fried in the 104-degree heat. The sun is warping their guitars out of tune, there’s no drinking water, and the legendary Naked Pole Guy is swaying behind the stage, wearing only slightly less clothes than the rest of the crowd. The Dead complain constantly about the unbearable heat — yet they can hear it, something’s happening today. And as the sun starts to set on Veneta, after what’s already been a day full of glorious peaks, they decide to obliterate everyone’s last remaining brain cell with the most celestial “Dark Star” they’ll ever play — all 32 beautiful minutes of it. So much dread. So much mirth. And at the end — almost as if they scared themselves with how deep they voyage into this song—Bobby lurches into (of all things) “El Paso,” a real “never trust a prankster” move. It’s the ultimate trip through their ultimate psychedelic epic. It’s one of the all-time great moments in the history of the guitar. So dark. So stellar. Shall we go?