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Every anti-war song released by the Grateful Dead

Sat 28 September 2024 20:15, UK

From their earliest acid-fuelled escapades with the Merry Pranksters in Palo Alto to their communal freakouts with tens of thousands of Deadheads in stadiums around the world, the Grateful Dead were a band hellbent on sticking it to the man in their own face-stealing way. But while they may have been anti-establishment to their core, it’s hard to say the Dead were ever overtly political.

They were a psychedelic, experimental blues outfit forged in the heat of 1960s counterculture when struggles for civil rights and against the US military campaign in Vietnam were burning questions of the day. Yet the Dead often seemed more preoccupied with their own bohemian lifestyle, making playing mind-expanding music on the road to nowhere both a raison d’être and a cause célèbre in its own right.

That’s not to say they were blind or deaf to what was going on outside their own musical bubble or even that they didn’t speak up for political causes through their music. Such a suggestion would be doing a disservice to the peace and freedom-loving figureheads the Dead became, not least thanks to their lyrical statements against warfare.

It was their commitment to the cause of peace that led the band to start performing their own rendition of Bonnie Dobson’s protest song against nuclear warheads ‘Morning Dew’ in 1967. The Dead are responsible for the first electric version of this song, which leading lights of the peace movement like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs had previously covered. They played it live a whopping 274 times on stage during their time together, with one famous performance reducing lead singer Jerry Garcia to tears.

So, how many anti-war songs did they perform?

‘Morning Dew’ was just one of six songs that the Grateful Dead included in their live sets and on their records which display a clear anti-war stance. The other five were all written by Garcia and his co-songwriter Robert Hunter, or by fellow Dead member Bob Weir and lyricist John Perry Barlow.

Weir wrote both of his two diatribes against violent military conflict during the sessions for the band’s 1987 album In the Dark. ‘Throwing Stones’, arguably the Dead’s most significant political statement, includes the barbed lyrical couplet:

“A peaceful place, or so it looks from space
A closer look reveals the human race”

In a later verse, the song also refers back to “petty wars”. Meanwhile, ‘My Brother Esau’, which ended up as the B-side for the hit single ‘Touch of Grey’, tells a parable about the biblical brothers Jacob and Esau, who fought a “silent war” against each other despite belonging to the same family. Weir and Barlow use this story as a metaphor for the futile conflicts between different peoples in the modern world.

The Dead released two tracks Garcia and Hunter wrote with an anti-war bent to them in the mid-1970s – the opener for their 1974 studio album From the Mars Hotel and the title track of its follow-up Blues for Allah. ‘US Blues’ is a satirical swipe at the flag-waving jingoism of the American establishment, who, as Garcia sings, are ultimately only in it to “light your fuse” and send you to war among other things. And ‘Blues for Allah’ appears to be a meditation on conflicts in the Middle East under the guise of Arabian folkloric traditions. “What good is spilling blood?” Garcia asks in desperation. We’ve yet to hear a satisfactory answer from anyone.

Five years before his untimely death, Garcia wrote the last of the Dead’s songs about war, ‘Standing on the Moon’, which appears on the album Built to Last. Sung from the perspective of someone dwelling on the lunar surface, the track talks about seeing “the battle rage below” on Earth as “soldiers come and go”, their violent actions in the name of their respective countries getting us nowhere.

From this spread of compositions, we can see that peace was a concern for the Grateful Dead throughout their 30 years of playing and recording music. They might not have fitted the traditional model of peace activists, yet it was their cause just as much as any of their contemporaries in the countercultural movement that spawned them.