“St. Stephen” by The Grateful Dead

"St. Stephen" is the Grateful Dead reaching for scripture on Aoxomoxoa, their 1969 studio album, with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh building the music and Robert Hunter supplying the words. Hunter's lyric circles the last days and trial of Stephen, the first martyr of the New Testament, who died under a hail of stones, and the band bends that old story into a ringing, twisting psychedelic hymn.

A live take turned up that same year on Live/Dead, the group's first concert album, and onstage the song kept growing: live versions usually carried a passage called the "William Tell Bridge" that slid the band straight into "The Eleven". It stayed a regular in their sets from the late '60s into the early '70s, and Japan even got it as a single, sharing the A-side with "China Cat Sunflower".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.