(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Tue 12 August 2025 20:04, UK
If a song got dropped from the live repertoire of the Grateful Dead, you knew there was a problem with it.
As perhaps the most legendary live band of all time, the Dead prided themselves on providing unique experiences that couldn’t be heard or felt just by listening to the band’s studio discography. The maxim “there is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert” is well-known lore, and the Dead proved it every time they took the stage.
So for the band to drop a song from its live rotation was notable. A number of classic tracks had long gaps between plays, with songs like ‘Dark Star’ and ‘St. Stephen’ coming and going from the band’s live sets. Those particular compositions suffered from overplay and boredom: they were performed on a near-nightly basis throughout the 1960s before being retired at different points in the 1970s. But what happens when songs never stick in the first place?
Of the original songs written for the Grateful Dead, a few notable tracks only saw one official live performance. The band’s March 18th, 1977, concert is credited as being the only appearance of ‘Alhambra’ (also known as ‘L’Alhambra’), although it’s occasionally credited as the ‘Terrapin Station section ‘At a Siding’.
The early band composition ‘Can’t Come Down’ only has one official recording available on tapes, from the band’s January 7th gig at The Matrix club in 1966. The song likely saw additional plays, but only a single live performance is currently on record. Similarly, Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan’s ‘You See a Broken Heart’ was likely played a few times but only has one recording from the Dead’s March 12th, 1966, concert.
Another track that falls into a strange grey area is Bob Weir’s ‘This Time Forever’. Even though it was written by Weir and in-house Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, ‘This Time Forever’ was never technically played by “The Grateful Dead”. Instead, Weir played the song with Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, and Robert Hunter at a November 17th, 1978, show billed as “Bob Weir and Friends”.
The most famous original composition to only get a single live performance was the Aoxomoxoa track ‘What’s Become of the Baby’. One of the most experimental tracks that the Dead ever released, ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ was such a studio-specific composition that it would have been impossible to replicate live. However, the Dead were on a mission to push the boundaries at their April 24th, 1969, show in Chicago.
The night before, the band were prevented from playing their standard set by co-headliners The Velvet Underground. Instead, the Velvets played for so long that the Dead were only able to play a few songs before the venue’s curfew. Intent on revenge, the Dead served The Velvet Underground a taste of their own medicine when they took the stage the following day.
In order to prevent the Velvets from taking the stage, the Dead played an extended show that pushed well beyond the three-hour mark. Nearly all of Aoxomoxoa was played, with the exceptions of ‘Rosemary’ and ‘Cosmic Charlie’, a full two months before the album was released. Just to drive the point home, the Dead performed an extended and highly experimental encore that was heavily reliant on feedback.
Sandwiched between screeching walls of feedback, the studio version of ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ was played over the PA system while the Dead improvised more feedback overtop of it. That makes the song’s sole “performance” technically a version of ‘Feedback’ that happened while ‘What’s Become of the Baby’ was played over the speakers, but it was inarguably the only time live audiences heard the Dead play the track.
These kinds of fleeting performances occupy a strange, almost mythical space in Grateful Dead history. Part of the band’s charm was the way songs could vanish for years before making a triumphant return, but the “one-and-done” performances have a different kind of allure. For fans and tape collectors, these moments are treasure hunts—rare fossils from the ever-shifting terrain of the Dead’s setlists. Sometimes, a track’s absence was the result of practical limitations, like the complex arrangements of ‘What’s Become of the Baby’, while in other cases, it may have simply failed to inspire the improvisational spark that fuelled so much of the band’s live magic.
It’s worth noting that not all rare tracks were originals. The Dead’s cover repertoire also produced similar anomalies, songs they toyed with once and then left behind. A blues standard might appear in a single 1966 club gig, never to resurface, or a folk ballad might be trialled in front of an unsuspecting audience before fading away. These experiments, successful or not, underscored the band’s restless spirit. For the Dead, the live stage was both a laboratory and a playground, and every once in a while, an experiment was left behind as a curious footnote in the band’s sprawling, unpredictable legacy.
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