How Jerry Garcia ended up featuring on CSNY’s “greatest” song
The Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had very different approaches to music, and yet, they worked harmoniously on more than one occasion.
We can sit here and compare both bands’ sounds all day long, but the way they truly differed was in their musical ethos, because the Grateful Dead were a band whose sound revolved heavily around improvisation, as while they worked in a studio and did release some well-thought-out LPs, they were most famous for their live shows, which saw them jam and make up songs on the spot.
“Live Dead explains why the Dead are one of the best-performing bands in America,” said Lenny Kaye when discussing the band’s exciting live performances. He loved how they used their recorded songs as a backbone but then built something completely unique around them during their shows. Kaye continued, “Why their music touches on ground that most other groups don’t even know exists.”
The Patti Smith guitarist also spoke about how good a band’s musical intuition needs to be in order to practice such a style of music. “A jamming band has to rely on its sense of flow,” he said. “On its talent in taking that small series of steps which will ultimately bring it to some entirely different place from where it started.”
Highlighting this aspect of the Grateful Dead’s music isn’t necessarily saying that CSNY were incapable of improvising. This was a supergroup of the highest order, made up of some of the greatest creative minds in the business; as such, if you asked them to improvise something, they would be able to.
The point isn’t that the band were incapable of improvising; it was that the strict nature of their sound meant that the band couldn’t improvise a great deal. The crooks of the band were their exciting sense of harmony, as the way that they could layer their voices was unlike what any other band could do. If you’re relying on harmony, your voices need to line up perfectly, and that means everyone needs to be on the same page with what is being sung, there is little room for harmony in the world of jamming.
That being said, despite these different approaches being shared by the bands, they were both still fans of one another and took different musical aspects from each other. For instance, when they wrote the song ‘Brokedown Palace’, the Grateful Dead borrowed from CSNY, using their sense of harmony and incorporating it into their very own Grateful Dead style. Meanwhile, Jerry Garcia lent CSNY his musical ability on what Neil Young called one of their greatest ever songs.
“For some reason, I have a vivid memory of that group of sessions. One day, after CSN had cut ‘Teach Your Children’, which they sang perfectly without me. I was in the control room, and Jerry Garcia came in and played a steel guitar part on it. It was actually on a regular guitar with a slide, as I remember it,” recalled Neil Young.
Adding, “He just sat down with it on his lap in the control room down under the speakers and put that part on. I remember that every time I hear that song, which is one of CSNY’s greatest. I am proud to have my name on it, although I didn’t play or sing a note.”
The decision was made because the album the band were working on was already inundated with the electric guitar; as such, CSNY opted for something more acoustic-sounding. “What can we do to make it different?” Nash mused, concluding. “Crosby came up, and he said, ‘Hey, I’ve heard that my friend Jerry Garcia is just learning to play the pedal steel and he’s in the next studio’.”
