• https://www.dead.net/features/greatest-stories-ever-told/greatest-stories-ever-told-eleven
    Greatest Stories Ever Told - "The Eleven"

    By David Dodd

    Here’s the plan—each week, I will blog about a different song, focusing, usually, on the lyrics, but also on some other aspects of the song, including its overall impact—a truly subjective thing. Therefore, the best part, I would hope, would not be anything in particular that I might have to say, but rather, the conversation that may happen via the comments over the course of time—and since all the posts will stay up, you can feel free to weigh in any time on any of the songs! With Grateful Dead lyrics, there’s always a new and different take on what they bring up for each listener, it seems. (I’ll consider requests for particular songs—just private message me!)

    "The Eleven"

    Blair Jackson once wrote a very fun piece, “The Swirl According to Carp: A Meditation on the Grateful Dead,” under the pseudonym Jack Britton, in which he characterized Grateful Dead music as “the swirl! The swirl!”

    “The Eleven” epitomizes that sense of the swirl better than any other single piece. The composition, credited to Phil Lesh, rushes headlong into its eleven-beat time signature, carrying us madly along as we dance to its various combinations of meter. Sometimes I hear two fours and a three, sometimes three threes and a two…sometimes, I think I really do feel The Eleven.

    And that is an almost mystical state of being, when you don’t need all those intermediary anchors, but the one comes along in just the right place each time. And the other beats aren’t pretend “ones” or twos or threes or fours, but counts one through eleven.

    Live/Dead, for me, was the perfect album, which I used alongside American Beauty to demonstrate the band’s range.

    When I listen to that album’s version of “The Eleven,” I always hear something new in the dense instrumentation. I can pay attention in a focused way to any one instrument, or to the interplay, or let it all wash over me.

    And then, the vocals come in.

    Hunter’s poem seems, if not straightforward, at least semi-coherent. But that is not the way the Dead do the song. Vocal parts and sections of the lyrics are layered, in a way that mirrors the layering of the instruments. Alex Allan, on his Grateful Dead Lyric and Song-finder site, does a fine job of attempting to transcribe the lyric as sung:

    Weir & Lesh
    No more time to tell how
    This is the season of what
    Garcia
    Eight-sided whispering hallelujah hatrack
    Weir & Lesh
    Time of returning
    Thought jewels polished and gleaming
    Garcia
    Six proud walkers on the jingle-bell rainbow
    Weir & Lesh
    Time past believing
    The child has relinquished the reign
    Garcia
    Five men writing with fingers of gold
    Weir & Lesh
    Now is the test of the boomerang
    Garcia
    Three girls waiting in a foreign dominion
    {Weir & Lesh
    {Tossed in the night of redeeming
    {Garcia
    {Riding in the whalebelly, fade away in moonlight
    Garcia
    Sink beneath the waters to the coral sands below

    Comparing this version to Hunter’s published words, several things become apparent.

    First, the band made some changes just for the sake of available singing time. They left out the lines for seven (“Seven-faced marble eye transitory dream doll”), and four (”Four men tracking the great white sperm whale”). And the final lines of the counting rhyme are gone:

    Fade away in moonlight
    Sink beneath the waters
    To the coral sands below
    Now is the time of returning

    It’s too bad, in a way, given the potential link, especially with the “moonlight” phrase, to link back to “St. Stephen” and the ladyfinger line.

    But it is compact and layered. The words come at us almost as musical notes—more abstract than anything, and while we get a sense that there is some kind of profundity (“thought jewels polished and gleaming”) and counting going on, there is also the sheer profundity of the weight of the music itself, and the counting game in which we may or may not be engaged, musically, trying to figure out what the hell time signature this thing is in….oh: it’s in the title.

    It’s a fun song to talk about. For instance, there is an entry in the conversation about the song on the WELL’s ”deadsongs” conference in which the author proposed that there is numerical unity between the meter and the lyrics, which, at one point, I mentioned started with eight, not with eleven. The correspondent, Joe Vanucci, wrote:

    I wanted to offer the idea that perhaps there *is* unity in The Eleven. Hunter's counting starts at 8, not 11, but it could be thought of like this:

    8 7 6 | 5 4 3

    or

    8 7 6
    3 4 5

    where the sums of the columns each equal 11. Like bookends. Or, as Hunter alludes "Now is the time of returning". Returning to 3, the closure for 8, if you will.

    Clearly, there are many creative minds at work on this material!

    Sometimes, given the fact that the band was recording Aoxomoxoa at the same time as they were performing the material on Live/Dead, I am tempted to try to create a suite of Hunter’s words, in which the repeated references to “the child” or “the baby” are of a piece. “What’s Become of the Baby?” belongs in this suite, as does “St. Stephen,” with its child wrapped in scarlet. The thematic motif extends outward, into “Friend of the Devil,” with the child that don’t look like me. And, just to take it a bit further—the lines addressing “mama” in “Brokedown Palace” seem to hint that, perhaps, the baby / child is the narrator. What’s become of the baby? Many many worlds I’ve come since I first left home.

    But the band went to work on the lyrics as presented by Hunter, and once again, we are left with a fragment—intriguing, but not necessarily coherent taken on its own.

    One last aspect I’d like to touch on is the role of numbers in Dead songs. For me, this comes up in a couple of ways. First is the use of non-standard time signatures, such as eleven, ten (“Playin’ in the Band”), or seven (“Estimate Prophet”) beats to the measure. These songs seemed to present no difficulty for the band, as musicians, nor for us as dancers and listeners. We just go for it, and so do they. But to me, that ease of playing in odd meters indicates a much deeper level of practice than the band is often credited with. Lesh speaks of his sense of the band as fingers, all on the same hand, and that level of cohesion is not easily achieved.

    Another angle is the use of numbers in lyrics. Hunter makes fairly frequent use of numbers, as does Barlow, over the course of their writing for the band. But it never feels mystical, or numerological, to me. “Seven come eleven…” a gambling phrase, for example.

    A search for the word “one,” however, comes up empty. There is no use of the word “one” in any Grateful Dead original.

    So, searching for that “one.” Ah—there it comes! Nine, ten, eleven, ONE.

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  • Strider 808808
    2 years 10 months ago
    7/11

    Speaking of gambling. When my older nephew was born on July 11 coming up on 50 years ago my brother went down to Golden Gate Field and placed bets on a horse that won. Hmmm, 40 years since my only time seeing the Dead perform the Eleven Jam. Might not have been the full Monty but it cut the muster. Or had it been Monty Python it might have cut the mustard.

  • Jason1969
    9 years 11 months ago
    The 11 and The Seven
    The 11 is one of my faves! Nobody has yet mentioned that the song had a companion - rare Dead tune "The Seven," that was just a jam with same feel as the 11. There are only four known performances of The Seven (according to Deadbase VII) and two of those were Mickey and the Hartbeats shows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCtfQPD73Zc
  • Default Avatar
    Steve Finney
    10 years ago
    Transition to "The Eleven"
    Jeffito and One Man get the transition right (on the Rhino CD reissue of Live/Dead, the 2 drum beats are at 3:14 of the 3rd track), but there's one other subtlety of the arrangement that nobody's noticed. After exactly 4 bars of 11 (counting the bar with the two transitional drum beats) there is exactly one bar of 12 before they settle permanently into 11. This is true of every 1968/1969 transition into the Eleven I've heard (at least 20, including, I believe, transitions from songs other than St Stephen), although Live/Dead is, to me, still the ultimate version. That is on top of the hard-to-track shiftings of time that occur before that explicit drum signal. Interviews from that period (Potrero Hill rehearsals) say that they would practice having half the band play in one rhythmic cycle and half the band in another and focus on where they both came out on the One, so my guess is that the bar of 12 somehow normalizes multiple rhythmic cycles, but I haven't analyzed to that level of detail. Pretty damned complex for a bunch of stoned hippies :-) (I am also of the opinion that Greg Allman probably got the WP intro rhythm (at least subliminally) from The Eleven).
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By David Dodd

Here’s the plan—each week, I will blog about a different song, focusing, usually, on the lyrics, but also on some other aspects of the song, including its overall impact—a truly subjective thing. Therefore, the best part, I would hope, would not be anything in particular that I might have to say, but rather, the conversation that may happen via the comments over the course of time—and since all the posts will stay up, you can feel free to weigh in any time on any of the songs! With Grateful Dead lyrics, there’s always a new and different take on what they bring up for each listener, it seems. (I’ll consider requests for particular songs—just private message me!)

"The Eleven"

Blair Jackson once wrote a very fun piece, “The Swirl According to Carp: A Meditation on the Grateful Dead,” under the pseudonym Jack Britton, in which he characterized Grateful Dead music as “the swirl! The swirl!”

“The Eleven” epitomizes that sense of the swirl better than any other single piece. The composition, credited to Phil Lesh, rushes headlong into its eleven-beat time signature, carrying us madly along as we dance to its various combinations of meter. Sometimes I hear two fours and a three, sometimes three threes and a two…sometimes, I think I really do feel The Eleven.

And that is an almost mystical state of being, when you don’t need all those intermediary anchors, but the one comes along in just the right place each time. And the other beats aren’t pretend “ones” or twos or threes or fours, but counts one through eleven.

Live/Dead, for me, was the perfect album, which I used alongside American Beauty to demonstrate the band’s range.

When I listen to that album’s version of “The Eleven,” I always hear something new in the dense instrumentation. I can pay attention in a focused way to any one instrument, or to the interplay, or let it all wash over me.

And then, the vocals come in.

Hunter’s poem seems, if not straightforward, at least semi-coherent. But that is not the way the Dead do the song. Vocal parts and sections of the lyrics are layered, in a way that mirrors the layering of the instruments. Alex Allan, on his Grateful Dead Lyric and Song-finder site, does a fine job of attempting to transcribe the lyric as sung:

Weir & Lesh
No more time to tell how
This is the season of what
Garcia
Eight-sided whispering hallelujah hatrack
Weir & Lesh
Time of returning
Thought jewels polished and gleaming
Garcia
Six proud walkers on the jingle-bell rainbow
Weir & Lesh
Time past believing
The child has relinquished the reign
Garcia
Five men writing with fingers of gold
Weir & Lesh
Now is the test of the boomerang
Garcia
Three girls waiting in a foreign dominion
{Weir & Lesh
{Tossed in the night of redeeming
{Garcia
{Riding in the whalebelly, fade away in moonlight
Garcia
Sink beneath the waters to the coral sands below

Comparing this version to Hunter’s published words, several things become apparent.

First, the band made some changes just for the sake of available singing time. They left out the lines for seven (“Seven-faced marble eye transitory dream doll”), and four (”Four men tracking the great white sperm whale”). And the final lines of the counting rhyme are gone:

Fade away in moonlight
Sink beneath the waters
To the coral sands below
Now is the time of returning

It’s too bad, in a way, given the potential link, especially with the “moonlight” phrase, to link back to “St. Stephen” and the ladyfinger line.

But it is compact and layered. The words come at us almost as musical notes—more abstract than anything, and while we get a sense that there is some kind of profundity (“thought jewels polished and gleaming”) and counting going on, there is also the sheer profundity of the weight of the music itself, and the counting game in which we may or may not be engaged, musically, trying to figure out what the hell time signature this thing is in….oh: it’s in the title.

It’s a fun song to talk about. For instance, there is an entry in the conversation about the song on the WELL’s ”deadsongs” conference in which the author proposed that there is numerical unity between the meter and the lyrics, which, at one point, I mentioned started with eight, not with eleven. The correspondent, Joe Vanucci, wrote:

I wanted to offer the idea that perhaps there *is* unity in The Eleven. Hunter's counting starts at 8, not 11, but it could be thought of like this:

8 7 6 | 5 4 3

or

8 7 6
3 4 5

where the sums of the columns each equal 11. Like bookends. Or, as Hunter alludes "Now is the time of returning". Returning to 3, the closure for 8, if you will.

Clearly, there are many creative minds at work on this material!

Sometimes, given the fact that the band was recording Aoxomoxoa at the same time as they were performing the material on Live/Dead, I am tempted to try to create a suite of Hunter’s words, in which the repeated references to “the child” or “the baby” are of a piece. “What’s Become of the Baby?” belongs in this suite, as does “St. Stephen,” with its child wrapped in scarlet. The thematic motif extends outward, into “Friend of the Devil,” with the child that don’t look like me. And, just to take it a bit further—the lines addressing “mama” in “Brokedown Palace” seem to hint that, perhaps, the baby / child is the narrator. What’s become of the baby? Many many worlds I’ve come since I first left home.

But the band went to work on the lyrics as presented by Hunter, and once again, we are left with a fragment—intriguing, but not necessarily coherent taken on its own.

One last aspect I’d like to touch on is the role of numbers in Dead songs. For me, this comes up in a couple of ways. First is the use of non-standard time signatures, such as eleven, ten (“Playin’ in the Band”), or seven (“Estimate Prophet”) beats to the measure. These songs seemed to present no difficulty for the band, as musicians, nor for us as dancers and listeners. We just go for it, and so do they. But to me, that ease of playing in odd meters indicates a much deeper level of practice than the band is often credited with. Lesh speaks of his sense of the band as fingers, all on the same hand, and that level of cohesion is not easily achieved.

Another angle is the use of numbers in lyrics. Hunter makes fairly frequent use of numbers, as does Barlow, over the course of their writing for the band. But it never feels mystical, or numerological, to me. “Seven come eleven…” a gambling phrase, for example.

A search for the word “one,” however, comes up empty. There is no use of the word “one” in any Grateful Dead original.

So, searching for that “one.” Ah—there it comes! Nine, ten, eleven, ONE.

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Blair Jackson once wrote a very fun piece, “The Swirl According to Carp: A Meditation on the Grateful Dead,” under the pseudonym Jack Britton, in which he characterized Grateful Dead music as “the swirl! The swirl!”
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Greatest Stories Ever Told - "The Eleven"
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Blair Jackson once wrote a very fun piece, “The Swirl According to Carp: A Meditation on the Grateful Dead,” under the pseudonym Jack Britton, in which he characterized Grateful Dead music as “the swirl! The swirl!”
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Blair Jackson once wrote a very fun piece, “The Swirl According to Carp: A Meditation on the Grateful Dead,” under the pseudonym Jack Britton, in which he characterized Grateful Dead music as “the swirl! The swirl!”

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What a fantastic song this is, in so many ways. I may have some thoughts to contribute later, but for now I have a question. Can anyone tell me who the fuck Samuel is? As David points out, the boys have always sung the song differently than Hunter wrote it. And this "difference" continues. What I'm talking about is Bobby singing "what now" instead of "what" and then wailing about "poor old Samuel." Can anyone tell me: 1. When Bobby started with these embellishments (this should have a definite answer)? 2. Who Samuel is (my Biblical knowledge fails here, plenty of Samuels but no one obvious)? 3. Why did Bobby add these lines? 4. Is Bobby out to kill Hunter with his embellishments or what? 5. How can Bobby forget the words to Truckin' and remember all the words to Desolation Row? My opinion is that this is further proof that Bobby does some weird things sometimes ... a good deal of which work, that's why we love him. But I can just imagine Bobby trying this in practice and having Jerry, etc. yell at him to STFU. Then Jerry wasn't there and Bob went off the reservation. Or maybe there's something even more sinister involved... Whatever. Bobby, sing it however you like, it's a fantastic song! It's the folk process at work here. I especially love Sunshine and JeffP singing Garcia's part like an old nursery rhyme.
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Oh well..just saying... Unless you define Grateful Dead originals to exclude the songs on Ace.
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when Hunter does it live--or at least the lyrics and their internal logic stand out more. The 1978 My Father's Place broadcast has a great version, if I recall correctly. Also Hunter seems to especially love the line about eight-sided whispering hallelujah hatrack, as well he might.
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I love that Blair story at the beginning; "the swirl," or I prefer spiral, is one of the fore-most of my visualizations of this song, as well as a few others. I always heard the line "the child has relinquished the reins," which to me was an invitation to all of us to let go of whatever illusion of control we were holding on to, and just enjoy the ride; or swirl, as the case may be. In regards to the Samuel, I would really love some elucidation as to what Bobby's on about. And, as usual, I'd like to point to an amazing Furthur show I was at. I saw them in Syracuse, NY at the OnCenter (formerly Onondaga County War Memorial) on 11/11/11, and they did the Eleven > US Blues as the encore to celebrate the double-significance of the date (Veteran's Day as well as the 11's). They teased the Whipping Post theme in the Eleven as well, that being another song to use the 11/4 time signature.
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In reply to by 21st Century Dead

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Thank you for adding your analysis of “The Child has relinquished the reigns”
I concur and have a bit more to offer on that thread….
What if we are all one, and duality is the ultimate illusion and when the child inside each of us that has polished our thought jewels until gleaming, awakens to the moment when the boomerangs test returns ( Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion… Mirror shatters in formless reflections of matter…Lady in velvet recedes in the nights of good-bye) with the answers to our deepest inquiry.

What if the song is about that moment? A time we become willing and curious enough to live outside of believing, and an invitation to lose the illusion of self into the “night” ? Shall we go? You and I while we can? Into the swirl, the transitive nightfall of Diamond's.

After all William Tell has stretched his bow
Till it won't stretch no further Requiring a change that has yet to come.

This is the Season of what now.

The time has come

Lets keep seeking this mystery together and perhaps we will loosen our collective grips on the reigns that are driving us as a race into extinction.

I imagine in the awakening that inspired this Family and has bound the wheel together for so long.

We have much more ground to cover.

K

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In reply to by 21st Century Dead

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.

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What it's all about...at least to me. Followed up by another stellar one exactly a year later aaaaall the way on the other coast.
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Listening to Live Dead all these years, I always viewed the William Tell Bridge as a sort of launching pad for The Eleven, though it seems that most view it as a post St Stephen rant. To me it is more a part of The Eleven. Either way it is a bridge that connects two all time GD songs. I have always found The Eleven so mysterious, and so powerful. The jam for me showcases the boys at their finest. It peaks so beautifully with so much power and energy, and when they can't sustain it anymore it, it just melts into some of Hunters most intriguing lyrics sung in an way only this band could get away with. This song sounds like no other, and for me has no equal. Would have loved to seen them do it live, but I give very high praise to the renditions done by ratdog, phil and furthur.
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Love the Furthur version of this song, was able to see them do it live twice. That is what made Furthur so special. Taking great lesser known/played songs like these had having Bobby embellish them further. So true about Desolation Row! Stuck inside of Mobile... is another wonder! Get back together, Furthur, please!
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I remember singing this song at church camp in the early 70s, it was a favorite... I'll sing you twelve, Ho Green grow the rushes, Ho What are your twelve, Ho? Twelve for the twelve Apostles Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven, Ten for the ten commandments, Nine for the nine bright shiners, Eight for the April Rainers, Seven for the seven stars in the sky, Six for the six proud walkers, Five for the symbols at your door, Four for the Gospel makers, Three, three, the rivals, Two, two, the lily-white boys, Clothèd all in green, Ho Ho One is one and all alone And evermore shall be so And who can forget the Furthur show where they did The Eleven at 11 pm on Nov 11, 2011...?! Incredible.
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This is one of my favorite Dead songs-- I seek out 1969 shows with The Eleven. Just an amazing jamming vessel. As 11allnite implies, the start of The Eleven is flexible when coming out of St. Stephen. For me, it starts right after the William Tell bridge, but when I look at the timing of the cd, that jam out is usually still St. Stephen for awhile until they officially change the timing. Being too young to see them play the Eleven live during Primal Dead period, my first live glimpse was at the Alpine Valley reunion shows in 2002. I recall a fairly mediocre show the first night-- spotty singing and Jimmy Herring just noodling for the sake of noodling. Night two, however, saw them get in the groove and The Eleven was where it was at, man!! They nailed it perfectly that night.
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Hey Bach to Bach I 'Can't Forget' but Remember it differently. The Dark Star Orchestra played their 11th Anniversary Show on Nov. 11 and at 11 O'Clock (or so) played The Eleven. I remember because it happened in my home town of Concord, New Hampshire at the Capital Theater. The phone number is (603) 225-1111
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David...I can think of a couple lyrics with "One" in them. Stella Blue has the great line "It all rolls into One" someone described it as a "Complex Singularity" which explains everything...if you look at it right. Also in The New Speedway Boogie... "One way or another, one way or another, One way or another, this darkness got to give."
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Also, in Let Me Sing Your Blues Away... "I sent a letter to a man I know Said one for the money and two for the show I wait all summer for his reply Said three to get ready and four to fly" and Stella Blue has... "It all rolls into one And nothing comes for free"
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When the Eleven begins is definitely a point of minor contention. To me, in the case of St. Stephen > William Tell Bridge > the Eleven, William Tell is it's own entity, though for the sake of limiting the number of tracks it should be included in St. Stephen. In this situation, the Eleven starts as soon as William Tell ends, even though it takes them a bit to swirl into the 11/4 time signature. Of course, many people feel different ways about this, and the official releases all differ as well, with some "St. Stephen" listings clearly infringing on the Eleven's territory. When it comes out of something else like The Other One, Caution, Alligator, China Cat, etc., the pre-time-signature bit is even more clearly a part of the Eleven, if only because it's so different from what came before it.
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"One pane of glass in the window...." Another "one".
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"One heat up and one cool down...." I think your search engine may be wonky!
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...just ONE more time. Gonna make 'em shine. another 'one' from 'Stella' P.S. 'One Pane of Glass in the window' is from 'The Roses' + 'Ten Years the wind rolls (waves rolled?) the ships home from the sea' = 11
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Off the top of my head I can count at least a few references to the word "one" in Grateful Dead tunes. In We Can Run: "Then I heard the sound of one child crying" In Let me sing your Blues Away: "One for the money, two for the show..." In To Lay Me Down: "One last time" The word simply doesn't turn up any search results on Alex Allan's site because it is -too- commonly used.
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Hey David, clearly the time for that concordance we discussed at Berigan's in 1983 has come!
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Grateful Dead 1. The Golden Road (To Unlimited Devotion) 1 song Anthem of the Sun 1. Born Cross Eyed 2. The Other One 3. New Potato Caboose 4. Caution 4 songs Aoxomoxoa 1. Saint Stephen 2. China Cat Sunflower 3. Doin' That Rag 4. Rosemary 4 songs Live Dead 1. Dark Star 2. The Eleven 2 songs Workingman's Dead 1. Uncle John's Band 2. High Time 3. Easy Wind 4. Black Peter 4 songs American Beauty 1. Box Of Rain 2. Sugar Magnolia 3. Operator 4. Candyman 5. Ripple 6. Brokedown Palace 7. Attics Of My Life 8. Truckin' 8 songs Grateful Dead (SkullFuck) 1. Wharf Rat 2. Not Fade Away 3. Me And My Uncle 3 songs Europe 72 1. Ramble On Rose 2. Jack Straw 3. Brown Eyed Women 4. Tennessee Jed 4 songs Wake Of The Flood 1. Weather Report Suite 2. Unbroken Chain 3. Eyes Of The World 4. Let Me Sing You're Blues Away 5. Stella Blue 5 songs Mars Hotel 1. Scarlet Begonias 2. U.S Blues 3. Loose Lucy 4. Ship Of Fools 5. Pride Of Cucamonga 6. China Doll 6 songs Blues For Allah 1. Crazy Fingers 2. The Music Never Stopped 3. Help On The Way> Slipknot! 4. Franklin's Tower 4 songs Steal Your Face 1. Big River 1 song Terrapin Station 1. Estimated Prophet 2. Passenger 3. Side 2 3 songs Shakedown Street 1. I Need A Miracle 2. Shakedown Street 3. Fire On The Mountain 3 songs Go To Heaven 1.Feel Like A Stranger 2. Lost Sailor> Saint Of Circumstance 3. My Brother Easu 4 songs In The Dark 1. Tons Of Steel 2. Throwing Stones 3. When Push Comes To Shove 4. Hell In A Bucket 5. Black Muddy River 5 songs Built to last 1. Victim Or The Crime 2. Just A Little Light 3. Picasso Moon 4. Foolish Heart 4 songs Ace (Bobby) 1. Cassidy 2. Playing In The Band 3. One More Saturday Night 4. Greatest Story Ever Told 5. Black Throated Wind 5 songs Garcia (Jerry) 1. Deal 2. To Lay Me Down 2 songs Reflections (Jerry) 1. They Love Each Other 2. Mission In The Rain 3. Comes A Time 4. Oh Babe It Ain"t No Lie (Bonus Track) also on Reckoning 4 songs KingFish 1. Lazy Lightning > Supplication 2 songs Warlocks (Birth Of The Dead) 1. Can't Come Down 1 song Unreleased 1. The Stranger 2. The Days Between 3. Eternity 3 songs Well here it is. I was feeling bored on this rainy Sunday. I might have missed a song or two. I seem to remember Cream Puff War but I couldn't find it. 72 songs covered so far David. If I've made a mistake anybody,feel free to correct. Peace
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It has been nice start."Fade away in moonlight"
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David, you said it all. Great post. I hear the time signature shift into The Eleven when one of the drummers (sounds like Mickey to me) raps two beats on his snare drum. These represent the last 2 beats in the 11. From there, the next beat is one, etc. So I hear 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2, in time with the chord changes. But I should relax that thought and try to hear it more as a flow of 11 beats as you suggest.
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Well, I've done 81 blogs so far, but three of them were devoted to Terrapin Station. So, there should be 78 listed. I have them in a spreadsheet... Thanks for the fun listing, Poncho Bill!
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Oh my. Mea culpa. Interesting to think that a concordance might still actually be useful as a printed or separate online object. How weird that "one" is just too frequently used to be caught by Alex's wonderful search engine! It did seem a bit unbelievable when I got zero results. I should clearly have spent just a wee bit of time actually thinking, instead of relyng on computing... Sigh. But I love the corrections!
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at the time we had the conversation, the technology was just around the corner. A few years later I realized that one could generate a quick, dirty, but effective concordance by typing all the lyrics into FileMaker, by song, and then searching on whatever word you liked. I think that would still work, but there's probably a better way now. I don't know if a print concordance is the kind of thing people go for any more, but an online one would be great.

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Although The Eleven is the band's most well-known tune in an "odd" time signature, it seems like Clementine (in 3/4?) was an earlier original composition done front to end in what many non-Jazz trained players would likely find a challenging meter. Apparently Lesh modeled the music on a few Coltrane numbers (Greensleeves, etc.), which opened it up to interesting jamming possibilities, too bad the boys didn't keep it in the rotation longer.
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10 years 4 months
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I wonder if Greg Allman was thinking about The Eleven when he came up with the Whipping Post intro. I always thought of The Eleven the same way he describe the three sets of 3 with 2 for the 4th set to make the turn around. I find it much easier to break it down than counting out 11. From wiki.. "I didn't know the intro was in 11/4 time. I just saw it as three sets of three, and then two to jump on the next three sets with: it was like 1,2,3—1,2,3—1,2,3—1,2. I didn't count it as 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. It was one beat short, but it didn't feel one short, because to get back to the triad, you had two steps to go up. You'd really hit those two hard, to accent them, so that would separate the threes. ... [Duane] said, 'That's good man, I didn't know that you understood 11/4.' Of course I said something intelligent like, 'What's 11/4?' Duane just said, 'Okay, dumbass, I'll try to draw it up on paper for you.'"[10]
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17 years 4 months
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The only time I saw the Dead perform the Eleven. Have listened on Archives.com and also have an old cassette from that night. My first time to the Oakland Auditorium. Strange that all the times I saw the band with Pigpen no Dark Star-St. S.- Eleven-Lovelight classic Live/Dead stylie. Was at 9/17/70 and 9/19/70, so I'm not complaining for lack of seeing a full bodied Eleven. How about that goof ball movie "10" with Bo Derek. Not sure if I made 10 minutes or 11 minutes through it.
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17 years 5 months
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Rather belatedly, I've deleted "one" from the list of small words that aren't in the searches on my site. So if you go to www.whitegum.com/intro.htm and search for 'one', you'll now find all the (many) occurences.
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16 years 11 months
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Songs in 3/4 time are not that hard for non-jazz trained musicians to figure out -- it's just a waltz, after all. Clementine does exhibit a 6-against-4 polyrhythm that you get from Coltrane on some songs, probably most notably My Favorite Things. The Eleven also retains some of the 6 against 4 feeling, available for the musicians to refer to if/when they want. Straightforward and driving, phrased mainly as 3-3-3-2 as noted towards the end they slip into something more ambiguous, though still 11, before they drop into whatever comes next (think the Eleven --> Lovelight transition on Live/Dead). The St Stephen --> Eleven transition: 'swirl' is very apt. When I first heard Live/Dead, and didn't know 11/4 from a hole in the floor, I just felt the transition as a descent into a chaotic celebratory maelstrom. Unanalyzed, it was a great ride. Later on I got to know about meters and could break it down to understand what they were doing. The first bit after "William Tell", to me, is St Stephen. It has that same feeling as the normal St Stephen instrumental section (Bam-ba-dum! ba-da-dee-dah, etc.) all 4/4, but then Phil starts playing triplet-based lines across/underneath the 4/4 and gradually everyone picks up, and they're all in 12 then, Jerry starts playing that figure atop it all, and they build up and then kick out the last beat of the 12, and bam!, they're straight out into 11-land, while Jerry keeps on playing that figure which now goes in and out of cycle as he crosses the 11-bar lines. Great stuff when it works -- it doesn't all the time. Being able to hear the changes as they occur doesn't dim the experience for me, either. Just makes me appreciate them all the more as musicians. BTW, more people would probably be familiar with Playin', which is in 10, but even more would know Uncle John's Band which is ostensibly a nice little 4/4 ditty, except that occasionally they drop a beat out of a measure, and the last instrumental bit is in 7. Oh, and how could Jerry forget the words to, say, Casey Jones, but yet nail Tangled Up in Blue? Bob isn't alone in this game...
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11 years 6 months
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In this Eleven, the band goes into a jam after the initial countdown lyrics are completed, but unlike any other Eleven I've ever heard, Weir comes back and sings the first verse, and then repeats, "This is the season of what now, this is the season of what now, what now, what now..." It's a great version, and comes out of a hypnotic What's Become of the Baby. I was in the second row, right in front of Bobby. This was the show with Elvis Costello, Diana Krall, and Larry Campbell. But I've always been taken by how Weir keeps repeating and therefore emphasizing What now, what now. Indeed. One could say that every moment of ones life is the Season of What Now.
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10 years
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Jeffito and One Man get the transition right (on the Rhino CD reissue of Live/Dead, the 2 drum beats are at 3:14 of the 3rd track), but there's one other subtlety of the arrangement that nobody's noticed. After exactly 4 bars of 11 (counting the bar with the two transitional drum beats) there is exactly one bar of 12 before they settle permanently into 11. This is true of every 1968/1969 transition into the Eleven I've heard (at least 20, including, I believe, transitions from songs other than St Stephen), although Live/Dead is, to me, still the ultimate version. That is on top of the hard-to-track shiftings of time that occur before that explicit drum signal. Interviews from that period (Potrero Hill rehearsals) say that they would practice having half the band play in one rhythmic cycle and half the band in another and focus on where they both came out on the One, so my guess is that the bar of 12 somehow normalizes multiple rhythmic cycles, but I haven't analyzed to that level of detail. Pretty damned complex for a bunch of stoned hippies :-) (I am also of the opinion that Greg Allman probably got the WP intro rhythm (at least subliminally) from The Eleven).
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14 years 9 months
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The 11 is one of my faves! Nobody has yet mentioned that the song had a companion - rare Dead tune "The Seven," that was just a jam with same feel as the 11. There are only four known performances of The Seven (according to Deadbase VII) and two of those were Mickey and the Hartbeats shows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCtfQPD73Zc
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17 years 4 months
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Speaking of gambling. When my older nephew was born on July 11 coming up on 50 years ago my brother went down to Golden Gate Field and placed bets on a horse that won. Hmmm, 40 years since my only time seeing the Dead perform the Eleven Jam. Might not have been the full Monty but it cut the muster. Or had it been Monty Python it might have cut the mustard.