What is the first and only song to use a licensed Grateful Dead sample?
Even though Swifties might argue that they’re a far greater force to be reckoned with, there frankly hasn’t ever been a more dedicated, ardent and enduring fanbase than that of the Grateful Dead.
Deadheads will chew your ear off about their favourite band upon even the faintest detection of an opportunity to talk about them. They’ll be able to tell you exactly where they were when they first listened to any given track by them, they’ll be able to tell you exactly what happens at any specific timestamp on a live bootleg album, and they’ll be able to tell you why Phish suck in comparison. They’re frankly obsessive to the point of it being impressive, it must be said.
But for all of the positive aspects of their over-the-top fandom, they can also be guilty of gatekeeping and being stuck in their ways, unwilling to entertain the suggestion that there are other acts to get obsessed with the work of. It’s all very well loving the Grateful Dead, given how there’s plenty of material to sink your teeth into, but a little bit of variation doesn’t hurt.
This attitude perhaps stems from the band themselves, who have always been protective of where their music is free to exist. For example, large portions of their extensive catalogue is only available in limited capacities, with the aim of encouraging physical sales rather than streaming or file-sharing, and it’s unlikely that their position of making some of their rarer albums any less scarce will change.
As a result, very few songs exist where another artist samples the Grateful Dead, despite the fact that their music would be ripe for being chopped up and used in a variety of contexts. Reasons for this range from them having asked for significant amounts of money in return for the rights, or having downright refused on the basis that they don’t want their work to be appropriated in such a way.
Some artists have looked beyond this stance and done it anyway, and they likely felt the repercussions of their actions, although one band managed to not only get the Dead’s seal of approval, but they remain the only act to have ever been given the permission to base a song of theirs around a Grateful Dead sample.
What is the only song to use a licensed Grateful Dead sample?
Taken from their 2009 EP Fall Be Kind, Animal Collective’s ‘What Would I Want? Sky’ is built around a repeating vocal sample of Phil Lesh uttering the title in the Grateful Dead song, ‘Unbroken Chain’. It’s only a brief snippet of the original that’s used, and yet the hypnotic and psychedelic repetition of the line turns it into something of a mantra, and is arguably one of the main focal points of the song.
The Baltimore experimental pop outfit have only just released their acclaimed album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, earlier that year, and while performing on BBC Radio 6 Music to promote the record, they ‘What Would I Want? Sky’, having only debuted the track a few weeks prior when they embarked on their tour. The song hadn’t been officially recorded at that moment in time, and band member Brian ‘Geologist’ Weitz later explained how this led to them getting the band’s blessing.
“We didn’t know that no one had sampled one of their songs before,” he told New York Magazine. “We just thought it would be really expensive to do it. We sent it over to Phil Lesh. He really liked it, and the band didn’t ask for a lot of money.”
It’s probable that the mutual appreciation of each other’s artistic ventures helped persuade Lesh into authorising the sample at a modest fee, but the fact that it remains the only song to have an approved Grateful Dead sample in it is quite remarkable considering just how popular they continue to be.
