If You Get Confused #059: What's the Grateful Dead's Best Song?
A Long Strange Trip to Answer an Impossible Question
“What’s their best song?”
This is nearly impossible to answer for most bands. Sure, there’s some one-hit wonders and some bands who have a standout track. But for most successful groups, this question will also be surrounded by subjectivity, ambiguity and debate.
I would argue (proudly, with clear bias) that this question is most difficult for the Grateful Dead.
They are one of the most well-known bands of all time. Yet, I would guess that, more than any other band, there are people out there who know who they are without knowing any of their music.
They don’t have radio hits or songs that show up in typical places. Other famous bands of their era still have tunes that are regularly played and known by today’s generation. But to the general public, the Grateful Dead are more known for who they were, rather than the music they made.
But the general public shouldn’t matter that much either. Even among the most passionate of Dead Heads, this question is truly anyone’s guess.
Not only does the Grateful Dead catalog go quite deep, but due to the nature of their music, there is so much diversity among individual songs based on the era it was played or recorded, the members of the band at that time, the style in which they played the song, and even how it sounds on a recording.
There’s virtually no way to determine the right answer of “What is the Grateful Dead’s best song?” because there really is no right answer. Some answers might be:
The Cop-Out Answer: “Music is art, and art is means something different to everyone. The best song is the one YOU like the most!”
The Hippy Answer: “Who cares, man? Can’t you just enjoy the music?”
The Stoner Answer: “It’s all one song”
The Wrong Answer: “Keep Your Day Job”, this Grateful Dead song kinda stinks.
Despite the lack of a true right answer, I’ll try my best to explore different ways someone could define their best song. Ultimately, I’ll attempt to deduce what the closest thing to a correct answer might be...
Most Performed: Not Fade Away
Some might argue that a band’s best song is the one they play the most often. Especially for a band that puts so much emphasis on the live show, where every set list is different, there’s something to be said for the song that comes out most often. It’s likely that being played most often is a result of fans thoroughly enjoying it and the band perfecting how it’s played.
“Not Fade Away” was played 664 times in the Grateful Dead’s history, more than any other song. Other songs played over 600 times include “Me and My Uncle” and “The Other One”.
While all great tracks (and ironically, all very different), these all share one thing in common. These songs were ones that were created early on in the Dead’s history and lived on throughout the entire lifespan of the band (and beyond).
The fact that these songs remained so popular for the entire history of the Grateful Dead says a lot, but it also means that their ranking among top played should not necessarily mean these songs were their best. They were played so often a they simply had the benefit of being part of the rotation for the longest time
Most Streamed - Friend Of The Devil
In the modern era, the most common way someone would answer the question, “what’s their best song?” is to quickly check their Spotify profile. This is an easy way to see which songs are the most popular by the amount of plays they’ve each received.
And so, a visit to the Grateful Dead’s Spotify page reveals that their most played song is “Friend Of The Devil” with over 128.4M streams.
There’s obviously plenty of flaws with using Spotify streams to determine what song is “best”. First and foremost, best and popular are often very different. I’ve found with most music out there, an artist or band’s most popular song is rarely the one I like best.
The Grateful Dead are also a unique subject for this measurement too considering how much of their music is actually available on Spotify. All of the bands recorded albums are available, but again, live performances are where most fans will direct their attention. There’s a plethora of live albums available as well, so much so that it’s nearly impossible to listen to it all.
As a result, a lot of listening on Spotify is scattered. I’d assume that the top percentile of listeners are streaming live albums, but since there are so many, this fragments the Spotify steams. At the same time, studio albums are the most common and accessible, especially for casual fans. It’s easy to understand why the band’s most played songs are all from studio albums on Spotify.
Are they the best music the band ever made? Nope, far from it.
Most Watched - Touch of Grey
We are lucky to live at a time where technology and media has made a limitless amount of things accessible to us within just a few seconds. With music, we are able to listen to pretty much anything we want instantly.
We are also able to even watch performances from past generations with a level of quality that I don’t think many truly appreciate.
The Grateful Dead played over 2,000 concerts in their history. While most of those are not available, many of them are. Which makes YouTube a time machine for people wanting to get a little taste from iconic moments of the band’s history.
I hypothesized that perhaps YouTube could be a good source of truth for finding the best Grateful Dead song, thinking it might show which live performance is revisited the most. I thought this might be the perfect combo of modern day streaming while maintaining the importance of live performances of the band.
However, I was quite wrong.
The most watched Grateful Dead video on YouTube is the music video for “Touch of Grey”. Which, in hindsight, makes a lot of sense.
“Touch of Grey” was by far the band’s biggest commercial success. It was the band’s only Top 10 hit, released as a single in 1987;
With most of their music not meant for radio, “Touch of Grey” became the first song from the band that made its way to the masses. A big reason for that was likely this very music video. This video was prominently featured on MTV, which helped spread the music and culture of the Grateful Dead to a whole new audience.
This song and its video launched the band into a new stratosphere of popularity.
Most Archived - Dark Star
Not only have Spotify and YouTube given us a massive amount of music content to consume, but in typical Dead Head fashion, those massive media outlets are not enough.
One of my favorite things about the Grateful Dead is that the band’s fans have collectively archived essentially the band’s entire history through live recordings. On Archive.org, you can find a recording of pretty much any Grateful Dead performance you can think of.
For example, I was amazed to learn that the Grateful Dead played a concert at my tiny Pennsylvania college in 1971. Insignificant to many in the broad history of the band, but wildly important to me. While not important enough to have its own live album made for streaming services, I am lucky that the Internet Archive exists.
With just a few clicks, I could listen to a fan recording of the band’s show at East Hall, Franklin & Marshall College on 1971-04-10
Needless to say, Archive.org has plenty to choose from. And this is where a lot of true fans are listening to some performances they know are worth digging up. So, maybe the most “archived” - or the song most listened to via Archive.org - is their best song?
According to Grateful Stats, that song is “Dark Star”. Which does not surprise me. This song is the most psychedelic and improvisational one in the catalog, and one that I find passionate Dead Heads talk about the most. It captures so much of the essence of what made the Grateful Dead unique and innovative.
However, I feel that a lot of what makes “Dark Star” so great is less about the “song” and more about it serving as a vehicle for improvisation. People love the jams attached to “Dark Star”, but does that make the song their best?
I would say no, since its popularity is more about what happens after the band leaves the structure of “Dark Star” and goes into the unknown to explore new jams.
Most Heady - Playing In The Band
Another amazing fan-generated resource for Grateful Dead music is HeadyVersion.com.
This site is made to help fans navigate the ocean of music that’s available to us in an effort to find the best versions of every song. Fans vote and rank individual performances of songs across their history to help identify which are the most “heady”.
On Heady Version, the song with the most ranked versions is “Playing in the Band”. I would interpret this statistic to mean that out of all times played, “Playing In The Band” had the most notable performances that were significant enough to be ranked/rated. It’s one thing to be played most often, but another to be played so well that fans want to rank it among the best.
There are 522 versions of “Playing in the Band” that have been rated on Heady Versions. The one with the highest rating is from the Dead’s famous 1972 concert at the Old Renaissance Faire Grounds in Veneta, Oregon.
While the audio version is available to us, I could not find a video. However, I am always so intrigued by videos from this concert. It’s often what I picture when thinking of what Grateful Dead concerts were like in 1970’s.
The naked man standing on top of a pole behind Jerry Garcia in this video is a great example:
Most Opened: Jack Straw
Sometimes a band tells you what they think their best song is by where they play it in the set lists. Some bands will open with their best song, in order to start off with a bang.
The song the Dead most often used as an opener was “Jack Straw”. While a great song, it’s far from their best. It surprises me that this is the song they most often used to start shows off. It’s likely that it helped the band get into a groove.
It was used as an opener 195 times in the history of the Grateful Dead.
Most Closed: Sugar Magnolia
Sometimes a show closer is where a band break out their top song. Saving the best for last, right?
The song most often used to close shows was by far Sugar Magnolia, with 386 being played in the show closing position.
Most Encored: U.S. Blues
“One more song! One more song!” Perhaps the best for last is really the encore?
The song the Dead most often used as an encore was U.S. Blues
Final Answer: Brown-Eyed Women
So, again, there’s no right answer. We are back where we started. But I’ll simply give my answer, without anything but my own damn opinion.
The Grateful Dead’s best song is “Brown-Eyed Women”.
This version from the Dead’s most famous concert at Cornell in 1977 is the exact song that turned me into a fan. I still listen to it all the time. I love everything about this song, and I am so glad I discovered it. It changed the course of my musical journey. Without this version of “Brown-Eyed Women”, there would be no newsletter.
If you made it this far, and choose to listen to any song from this newsletter, make it this one. It’s their best song 😉
Thanks for reading! Until next week.
Brown-Eyed Women is a perfectly acceptable answer...I would have also accepted Scarlett > Fire, Althea, Bertha, Franklin's Tower, Eyes of the World, China > Rider, Tennessee Jed, etc, etc, etc...I think you get the point. I appreciate the article, especially the stats on the openers, closers, and encores...awesome job, my friend!