Dark Star

Garcia composed the first chords in May 1967. Robert Hunter heard an early instrumental version a few months later and quickly wrote the words, one of his earliest collaborations with the band, taking the chorus from the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Warner Bros. released it as a single in April 1968 backed with Weir's Born Cross-Eyed. The studio recording lasts 2:40, and Hunter recites a monologue at the end, his only appearance as a performer on a Grateful Dead record. Lesh said the single sank like a stone: of 1,600 copies shipped, only about 500 sold.

Live

On stage it grew to 20 to 30 minutes. The version on Live/Dead, from the Fillmore West on 27 February 1969, runs over 23 minutes, and at Woodstock in 1969 it lasted 19:08. Pitchfork called it the band's definitive psychedelic jam epic. The song was not played between 18 October 1974 and 31 December 1978, and fans came to call hearing it IT. It returned at Hampton Coliseum on 9 October 1989, and the last performance was at the Omni in Atlanta on 30 March 1994.

Fans often name the Fillmore East show of 13 February 1970 as the peak, and the most cited version in an unofficial survey was from Veneta, Oregon, on 27 August 1972. Pitchfork picked a version from London on 8 April 1972, in the first week of the European tour. In 1993 Lesh asked the collage artist John Oswald to rework more than a hundred performances from 1968 to 1993, which became Grayfolded, in two versions of 59:59 and 46:46.