An Ode to Brokedown Palace

Of all the songs performed by the Grateful Dead, "Brokedown Palace" may be the most poignant. Written by Robert Hunter, the Dead's lyricist one afternoon in London, it first appeared on their album, American Beauty, 50 years ago this month.

Here's a fine article about the song from Here Comes the Song. 

The broken palace is our fallen, material world away from which the narrator crawls on hand and knee, a metaphor for his impending death. Participants in the recording of American Beauty remark on the mournfulness hanging over the sessions. Garcia, who composed the music, had just lost his mother, and Phil Lesh, the bassist, had only recently sat with his dying father. A key to the Dead’s allure, both on vinyl and on stage, was their ability to intermingle shared fears and anxieties with a numinous sense of purpose and hope, something the band members experienced themselves. Brokedown Palace evokes this magic as well as anything else the Dead performed.

The band excelled playing live and indeed built a prodigious reputation on 30 years of relentless touring. No two performances of any song were the same. The Dead’s commitment to improvisation was reason enough for varied outings, but equally important was its response to unspoken communication between the band and audience at each show. Unlike much of the band’s other live offerings, however, Brokedown Palace remained much the same. What did change was the emotional resonance of Garcia’s vocal timbre and lyrical emphases, as he and the band responded to different audiences and moments, and to the effects of their own ages and sybaritic lifestyles. Nearly all of 220 known performances were taped and can be found in the Grateful Dead section of the Internet Archive (www.archive.org).