Grateful Dead – Ripple

It’s one of the most beloved songs the Grateful Dead ever recorded — and they played it live only eleven times before dropping it for nearly a decade.

Ask a Deadhead for a favorite, and “Ripple” comes up as fast as any song in the catalog. Yet for a band that played more than 2,300 concerts across thirty years, they almost never performed it. By the count of the band’s own archivist, David Lemieux, “Ripple” was played just eleven times in 1970 and 1971, then vanished from the setlists entirely — gone for nearly a decade — before returning in 1980 as the quiet closer of the band’s acoustic sets. It surfaced one last time in 1988 and was then retired for good. The gentle, universally loved song was, on stage, one of the rarest things the Grateful Dead had.

Keep watching: Grateful Dead – Truckin’ · explore more Rock →

“Ripple” comes from American Beauty, the album the Grateful Dead released on November 1, 1970 — the second of two records that year, after Workingman’s Dead, that turned the band away from acid-rock sprawl toward something rooted, acoustic, and song-shaped. Music by Jerry Garcia, words by Robert Hunter, the band’s non-performing lyricist and Garcia’s most important creative partner. It was never a hit in the conventional sense; it never charted, and it reached the public tucked away as the B-side of the “Truckin'” single. Its life was always going to be quieter than that — a song people found and held onto rather than one radio pushed at them.

Written in an afternoon, set to music at sunrise

The two halves of the song were born far apart. Hunter wrote the lyrics on his first trip to England, in a single sitting, alongside the words to “Brokedown Palace” and “To Lay Me Down” — by his own account he opened a case of Greek retsina, felt the creative energy start racing through him, and could do no wrong. Garcia found the melody somewhere else entirely: on the 1970 Festival Express, the legendary train tour rolling across Canada, he sat out on the tracks one morning in the sunrise and set Hunter’s words to music. The result is deceptively simple — an acoustic frame, a gently rising melody, close harmonies the band had spent that year perfecting — carrying lyrics about music in the air and the road each person has to walk alone. Hunter offered no single meaning and invited listeners to find their own, which may be why the song has lasted the way it has.

Radio City, Halloween 1980

The performance preserved here belongs to the song’s brief second life. In the fall of 1980, celebrating fifteen years as a band, the Grateful Dead played a run of three-set shows — one acoustic set followed by two electric — including eight nights at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Each acoustic set closed with “Ripple,” and cameras were rolling for the concert film Dead Ahead, directed by Len Dell’Amico and drawn from the final two nights, October 30 and 31. This is the Halloween-night performance: a rarely played song, given a hushed acoustic reading, in the middle of the only stretch of years the band regularly performed it at all. Jerry Garcia, born August 1, 1942, would keep the Dead on the road until his death in 1995, but “Ripple” mostly stayed in the vault — which is exactly what makes a filmed performance of it something to hold onto.