Which cover have the Grateful Dead played live the most?
Years ago, an acquaintance told me that he’d gotten his dad tickets to see The Cure for his birthday. With a look in his eye only previously seen when treating veterans of the Battle of the Somme for shell-shock, he told me, “They played for three hours!” He should have been thankful that his dad wasn’t a diehard ‘Deadhead’ because a Grateful Dead concert would only be a meagre three hours long in the event of a catastrophic power failure or a Spinal Tap-style drummer combustion.
So, what exactly made up those titanic setlists? The Dead were pretty prolific, but to make setlists that capacious out of just their own songs they’d have to make Guided by Voices look like My Bloody Valentine. No, they had two secret weapons to their name. The first was their ability to jam. The Dead arguably invented the concept of the ‘jam band’, and their natural telepathy, along with considerable instrumental ability, meant that they could noodle to their hearts’ content.
And noodle they did. In the more extreme cases, they could take single songs and turn them into nearly a quarter of their whole set. Which, let’s not forget, basically means they’re taking a single song and making what is an entire set for most bands out of it. In one memorable case, they made an entire live album out of one 46-minute version of their song ‘Playing in the Band’ from a concert in Seattle, Washington.
Their other secret weapon was their ability to do covers. That same instrumental mastery meant that they could learn a new song with minimum prep. When you have hour’s show to plan out and the vast, vast majority of the audience has seen you live before, at least five times, you’d best have something new for them.
Most of the time, these were the songs of their heroes: Chuck Berry and Bob Dylan songs make up a large portion of their covers. However, they also paid tribute to their friends and peers as well. In fact, one particular song from a close friend of the band became the cover that most often graced the stage at Grateful Dead shows.
Which cover have the Grateful Dead played live the most?
The story goes that The Mamas and The Papas frontman John Collins wrote ‘Me and My Uncle’ in a hotel room in 1963, surrounded by the likes of Neil Young, Stephen Stills and the first artist to actually record the song, Judy Collins. Her version became a favourite of the Dead singer and guitarist Bob Weir, who introduced it to the band with the idea of covering it themselves.
Clearly, the band were all in on this because the song became a standard feature in the band’s repertoire. With 616 total appearances at Grateful Dead shows, according to Setlist.FM, it’s the band’s most played cover and fourth most played song outright, with the aforementioned classic ‘Playing in the Band’ pipping it to third place by a mere eight shows.
They weren’t alone either; the likes of Joni Mitchell, John Denver and Billy Strings all tried their hand at ‘Me and My Uncle’. Yet, even with a line-up like that, none of them could do it like the Dead.
