All the years combine
they melt into a dream
A broken angel sings
from a guitar
In the end there’s just a song
comes crying like the wind
through all the broken dreams
and vanished years
When all the cards are down
there’s nothing left to see
There’s just the pavement left
and broken dreams
In the end there’s still that song
comes crying like the wind
down every lonely street
that’s ever been
Stella Blue
I’ve stayed in every blue-light cheap hotel3
Can’t win for tryin’4
Dust off those rusty strings just5
one more time
Gonna make ’em shine
and nothing comes for free
There’s nothing you can hold
for very long
And when you hear that song
come crying like the wind
it seems like all this life
was just a dream6
Stella Blue
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Jerry Garcia
Stella is Latin for “star.”
The Stella brand guitar was “particularly popular among blues players during the 1920s and 1930s.” (Evans) Evans also notes that Leadbelly played a Stella 12-string, while Blind Blake and Blind Willie McTell also played Stellas. Great-sounding, cheap (about $15 new), and cheaply made guitars, Stellas were manufactured by the Oscar Schmidt Company of Jersey City, New Jersey.
Note the lines “A broken angel sings / from a guitar,” and “Dust off those rusty strings just / one more time”: The song has a strong connection to guitars and guitar players. Whether Stella manufactured a guitar with a blue finish is one for the guitar fanatics to figure out. It seems more likely that the color reference is to “the blues,” rather than to the color of the guitar if, indeed, it is a reference to the guitar.
The guitar-woman double meaning in “Stella Blue” is historically interesting as well. Leadbelly affectionately referred to his 12-string as “Stella” (and where would B. B. King be without “Lucille”?).
Compare lines from the 1937 poem by Wallace Stevens called “The Man with the Blue Guitar”:
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.” 53
Stevens’s inspiration for the poem was one of the many paintings of guitars by Picasso (Stevens said he didn’t have any one in particular in mind). The most famous, of course, is his Old Man with a Guitar, which was painted during Picasso’s “blue period”—which is interesting in itself: Picasso’s blue period occurred historically before the term the blues took hold in the American lexicon—and Picasso was living between Paris and Spain at the time. His blue period was an artistic response to his depression over a friend’s suicide.
On the surface, “Stella Blue” sounds like a name of a woman, or the nickname of a woman. The most famous Stella in American literature must be Tennessee Williams’s character in the 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire. Her name is shouted, in a famous and all-too-easily imitated scene, by Marlon Brando in the film (1951) version.
However, there is also a character named Stella Blue in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962). In the “Commentary” portion of the novel, in the note to line 627, which discusses the “great Starover Blue,” an astronomer, Nabokov writes:
The star over the blue eminently suits an astronomer though actually neither his first nor second name bears any relation to the celestial vault: the first was given him in memory of his grandfather, a Russian starover . . . , that is, Old Believer (member of a schismatic sect), named Sinyavin, from siniy, Russ. “Blue.” This Sinyavin migrated from Saratov to Seattle and begot a son who eventually changed his name to Blue and married Stella Lazurchik, an Americanized Kashube.
Additionally, there are two very famous Stellas in English literature, both pseudonymous names for actual women in the lives of the poets who addressed them, Sir Philip Sidney and Jonathan Swift. Sidney’s Stella was celebrated in his sonnet sequence “Astrophel and Stella,” and the real-life Stella was Lady Penelope Devereux. Swift’s Stella, in real life, was Esther Johnson.
Dr. Jill L. Morton, an expert on color, provided the following insight:
I might suggest that there is a psycho/physiological link. Psychologically, blue relaxes the mind. However, after ten minutes of treatment with blue rays, most people tire and begin to feel depressed. Color is electromagnetic energy and affects the hypothalamus gland. Blood pressure, respiratory rate, pulse, appetite, and mood are altered by the presence of large quantities of specific colors or colored rays. (Morton) 54
Compare T. S. Eliot’s line in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels. . . .”
Pigpen sang, “working in a house of blue lights,” in “Operator,” which in turn seems to take its cue from the 1947 song “House of Blue Lights” (words and music by Freddie Slack and Don Raye). The “house of blue lights” seems to be a dance hall in this context.
A saying signifying futility: “No matter how hard I try, I can’t win.” A relative of “Can’t win for losing.”
As far as “Dust[ing] off those rusty strings” is concerned, history has pretty much forgotten how important the advent of the steel guitar string was to the development of popular music. Before the twentieth century, the guitar was a polite parlor instrument strung with gut. And even in the early decades of this century, the guitar was nothing, as far as popularity, compared to the banjo and mandolin (which were steel-stringed instruments). It wasn’t until the bluesmen came along and started experimenting with steel strings on guitars that a particular sound was born. Steel gave the guitar a brighter and louder sound. According to Wolfe and Lornel:
the use of steel strings probably came into Texas and Louisiana from Mexico, and it is quite likely that blacks in the area had been experimenting with them long before the guitar makers began to switch over to them.
Compare to several quotations:
Is all our Life, then, but a dream
Seen faintly in the golden gleam
Athwart Time’s dark resistless stream?
—Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno
“Row, row, row”: The famous folk song round with the surreal “Life is but a dream” tag.
His life was a sort of dream, as are most lives with the mainspring left out.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough: for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
—Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1600– 1681), Life Is a Dream
Written, according to A Box of Rain, at the Chelsea Hotel in New York in 1970. This places “Stella Blue” in distinguished company. It’s where Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, Bob Dylan wrote “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and Arthur Miller wrote After the Fall. It’s been home, in its hundred-year-plus history (built in 1883), to Mark Twain, Sarah Bernhardt, O. Henry, Hart Crane, Nelson Algren, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Vladimir Nabokov (see note under “Stella Blue,” above, for more on Nabokov), Jane Fonda, Charles Jackson, Milos Forman, Edie Sedgwick, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Brendan Behan, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, Edgar Lee Masters, and a slew of others. The Grateful Dead played on the rooftop of the Chelsea on August 10, 1967. Lesh says:
[The Diggers’] chief honcho, Emmett Grogan, knew some people in New York and set up a sort of benefit on the roof of the Chelsea, attended by such luminaries as Shirley Clarke, the theatrical director, and artist Andy Warhol, who entered looking like an ambulatory black hole. . . . It was kind of cool, playing on a rooftop in New York, but whatever energy we could muster fell flat on the floor, oozing over to Warhol’s feet where it disappeared into the singularity. Not a fun event. . . . (Lesh) 95
Studio recording: Wake of the Flood (November 15, 1973).
First performance: June 17, 1972, at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. (This was Pigpen’s last show with the band. He was found dead of complications arising from liver failure on March 8, 1973.) It remained a staple of the live repertoire thereafter.