Dark Star.
The Other One.
Born of the same intensely creative era, they debuted just weeks apart late in 1967. While each is a masterwork at providing huge spaces for improvisation, neither tune started out that way. Listen to these early versions: the first live The Other One on 10/22/67; there's no audio of the first Dark Star, so here's #2 from 1/17/68.
They also both have very distinctive musical themes that bookend the jam segments. Even though improvisation ended up dominating all but the earliest performances, a savvy listener would generally not conflate them. Clearly jazz influenced, I think of Dark Star as John Coltrane meets Sun Ra whereas The Other One is (literally) McCoy Tyner.
Numbers vary depending on the source, but it's safe to say The Grateful Dead played Dark Star ~225 times and The Other One ~600 times. There were repeated, significant gaps in the performance of Dark Star between 1967 and 1994 (with only 5 between 1975-1988) whereas The Other One suffered no such lapses between 1967 and 1995 (1975 is the only year w/no sung version).
With over 800 combined performances and several years where both tunes were played very often, it may surprise you to learn that there were only 78 or 79 shows where both songs appeared (somewhere in the show). FAR more rare are the 9 shows where Dark Star (DS) and The Other One (O1) segued into one another (no Cryptical allowed). These performances are the focus of today's broadcast.
The band played:
4 versions of DS>O1 - 6/15/68, 6/22/69, 7/12/69, 3/23/70
2 of DS>O1>DS - 11/8/69, 12/31/78
3 O1>DS - 11/5/70, 1/20/79, 9/26/91
I think it's curious that none of these fall under Brent's tenure.
The audio capturing these historic shows is a mixed bag. There's no known audio for the first DS>O1, the next one has poor audio and the next one is listenable, but not good enough to broadcast. Five in total have broadcast quality audio and I can fit most of those in today. But to do so I need to stay off the microphone much more than usual, so a lot of 'talk' will be in the live chat at our Facebook page. Join in!
- KBOO
- KBOO