The 10 worst Grateful Dead songs
The number of songs the Grateful Dead played over their 30-year career is nearly uncountable. When accounting for original material, cover songs, works-in-progress, teases, complete improvisations, and brief snippets, the Dead have likely played more music than any other rock band in the history of time. Whether it was finding new takes on classic songs or taking jams into far-out realms, the Dead famously never played anything the same way twice. That commitment to unique originality helped make them so endearing: no Deadhead has been able to fully absorb the entirety of the Grateful Dead, although many have tried (and probably gotten pretty close).
In that spirit, you’ll be able to find a defender for just about every song that the band ever took on. Did the Dead need to bust out questionable covers like The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’ or The Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’? Probably not, but those performances have found their way onto official releases. Were songs like ‘If I Had the World to Give’ or ‘Corrina’ worthy of making the band’s live sets? Maybe not, but they were given a shot at different points. Experimentation was central to the Grateful Dead experience, and you can’t find the best version of your band without taking a few missteps first.
Just as the band had a diverse approach to their music, so too do Deadheads. By and large, the idea of a “worst” Grateful Dead song doesn’t exist to the most committed of the band’s hardcore fans. Sure, there might have been some songs that didn’t quite work in the same way that classics like ‘China Cat Sunflower’ or ‘Dark Star’ might have, but it was all a part of the Dead experience. Then again, not everything passed the smell test, especially for more casual fans of the Dead.
Especially in the band’s last decade of existence, quite a few questionable songs were trotted out. Sometimes they were brief excursions, and other times, audiences had to plead with the band to stop playing certain tracks. While almost anything was on the table to try, three decades of work meant that there were some inevitable stinkers in the Dead’s oeuvre. If you need a look at the less-impressive side of the Grateful Dead, here are ten songs to stay away from.
The 10 worst Grateful Dead songs:
10. ‘Samba in the Rain’
Vince Welnick had an impossible position to fill when he joined the Grateful Dead in 1990. He was coming into a role that was historically “cursed”, given that three of the band’s four previous keyboard players – Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan, Keith Godchaux, and Brent Mydland – had all died young, although only Mydland was actually in the band at the time of his death. He was clearly the band’s second choice after Bruce Hornsby declined to join them full-time.
It took a while for Welnick to find his place, especially while Hornsby guested with the Dead between 1990 and 1992, but he worked hard to carry the load. That included songwriting, which Welnick embraced while the Robert Hunter/Jerry Garcia partnership began to wane. Unfortunately, ‘Samba in the Rain’ wasn’t his best outing, with a mediocre arrangement doing nothing to lift some of Hunter’s most confoundingly bland lyrics.
9. ‘Keep Your Day Job’
If ‘Keep Your Day Job’ isn’t the worst Grateful Dead song of all time, it’s probably the most infamous. Introduced into the band’s like shows in the early 1980s, the Hunter-Garcia song was a cheeky kickback at some of the more… committed fans who followed the band. While both men had a strong admiration for their followers and admirers, Hunter, in particular, took a critical eye to a subset who seemed to be full of malaise (among other substances).
‘Keep Your Day Job’ managed to get played more than 50 times between 1982 and 1986, but certain fans began to take offence to the jabs within the song’s lyrics. In his collection of lyrics, A Box of Rain, Hunter claimed that the band stopped playing the song at the request of Deadheads. That probably wasn’t the sole reason why the sluggish track eventually got the axe, but it remains the most repeated.
8. ‘Victim or the Crime’
A major factor in the Grateful Dead lasting as long as they did was their embrace of modern technology. With MIDI technology opening up a new world of technical possibilities, the Dead decided to jump headfirst into the future. Sometimes it came out sounding cheesy and stilted, but especially during the ‘Drums/Space’ sections of live shows, the band’s use of new technology created their most experimental music since their psychedelic days.
‘Victim or the Crime’ is not one of the band’s best use of sound effects. The studio version of the track, like much of 1989’s Built to Last, is dreadfully recorded. Live versions of the song don’t make much of a case for the song either, with Bob Weir spitting out overly-flowery lyrics about junkies and tom-cat hearts. The best Grateful Dead songs flow with ease; ‘Victim or the Crime’ is as stilted as the band ever got.
7. ‘Wave to the Wind’
When Garcia began to falter under the weight of heath problems in the 1990s, various other band members began to step up. One of them was Phil Lesh, who had largely stopped singing and songwriting after the band’s 1975 road hiatus. While he was once the man who brought the majestic ‘Box of Rain’ to life, Lesh’s abilities as a vocalist had taken a massive downturn by the time he stepped back up to the microphone.
While Hunter’s lyrics certainly aren’t his most inspired, that’s not what makes ‘Wave to the Wind’ so unbearable. It’s Lesh’s meandering chord progression (which shameless apes Peter Gabriel’s ‘Solisbury Hill’) and tuneless lead vocals that make the song one of the more difficult listens in the Dead’s set lists.
6. ‘Liberty’
Every Deadhead had their unpopular opinion about the band, and here’s mine: ‘Liberty’ is a terrible song. While it continues to live on as an encore favourite for Dead & Co., the late-period Grateful Dead track has some of the most ridiculous and embarrassing lyrics that Robert Hunter ever allowed Garcia to sing.
While some fans might delight in hearing Garcia croak out images of eagles dressed like ducks and lizards honking like trucks, ‘Liberty’ represents Hunter at his most inane. At best, ‘Liberty’ is a weak substitute for the awesomely muscular ‘U.S. Blues’. At worst, it’s the Dead at their most willingly stupid.
5. ‘Easy Answers’
Most Grateful Dead songs are written in duos: the band member who sings the track usually writes the music, while in-house lyricists Robert Hunter and John Perry Barlow picked up the words. There are a few exceptions, but this was the standard set-up that the band used throughout most of their existence, and it’s worked phenomenally well for them.
That makes the five different songwriters on ‘Easy Answers’ a bit of a bad omen. Band members Bob Weir, Robert Hunter, and Vince Welnick all contribute to the track, as do Rob Wasserman and Bob Bralove, the latter of whom helped shepherd the band into the MIDI-controlled future. ‘Easy Answers’ is a mess of a song that can’t find one coherent thought from five talented writers.
4. ‘We Can Run’
Brent Mydland provided the spark that the Dead desperately needed in the 1980s. With a raspy tenor singing voice and a prodigious ability on the keyboards (especially the B-3 organ), Mydland reinvigorated the Dead during a time when they needed it the most. His musical connection with Garcia was obvious, and his take on songs like ‘Dear Mr Fantasy’ and ‘Cassidy’ soon turned into concert favourites.
But Mydland’s talents didn’t often carry over to songwriting. While songs like ‘I Will Take You Home’ were at least noble stabs at heartfelt messages, most of Mydland’s songs sounded like they came straight out of a 1980s Budweiser advert. ‘We Can Run’ is the absolute nadir of this sound, transforming one of music’s most timeless bands into a bizarre rehash of a bygone era.
3. ‘Picasso Moon’
Bob Weir loved his clunky blues-rock tunes. Most of these infamous tracks were covers like ‘C.C. Rider’ and ‘Little Red Rooster’, and his originals in this particular genre were at least goofy fun like ‘Hell in a Bucket’. ‘Picasso Moon’, on the other hand, was nothing but pure clap-trap from Weir, especially when he hammed it up while singing the song in a live setting. The Weir Ham Sandwich is beloved, but it never worked on ‘Picasso Moon’.
Despite the fact that ‘Picasso Moon’ never found its footing, Weir never stopped trying to make it a standard. The track was played more than 70 times by the Dead, all the way to their final year in 1995. Once the Dead disbanded, Weir abandoned ‘Picasso Moon’, much to the relief of everyone who ever had to sit through it.
2. ‘When Push Comes to Shove’
Robert Hunter had a very revealing interview for the band’s Classic Albums episode covering the period of time between Anthem of the Sun and American Beauty. While discussing the day when he wrote ‘Ripple’, ‘To Lay Me Down’, and ‘Brokedown Palace’, Hunter openly wished for those creatively fertile days to return. He observed that they will still happen for a new generation of writers, but his time had come and gone.
It’s a remarkable insight from one of the best lyricists of all time, but it speaks volumes about inspiration and the potential loss of a mastered skill. The synthesis between Hunter’s lyrics and Garcia’s music created material that will stand the test of time, but there inevitably came a period when both men were past their collective primes. ‘When Push Comes to Shove’ represents the worst thing that can happen to a writer: descent into laziness. From the plodding bluesy shuffle to some uncharacteristically surface-level lyrics from Hunter, ‘When Push Comes to Shove’ is a low point.
1. ‘Money Money’
Most of the Dead’s worst songs came when the members themselves had their glory days in the rearview mirror. But that wasn’t always the case: songs like ‘France’ and ‘Let Me Sing Your Blues Away’ found their way onto albums that were made while the Dead were still at their collective apex. Especially in the studio environment, there was plenty of room for poor decisions.
John Perry Barlow is responsible for what remains the worst set of lyrics ever sung on a Grateful Dead song. ‘Money Money’ is nothing more than a basic, boring, and relatively sexist song about a cash-hungry gold digger. Rhyming “bank” with “bank” and taking an unwarranted swipe at the Women’s Liberation Movement doomed ‘Money Money’ from the start, and after just three performances, the song was forever banished from the Dead’s live sets.
