The Paul McCartney solo song loved by the Grateful Dead
Over the course of their 30-year performing career, the majority of the songs that the Grateful Dead performed live were covers. Sometimes the Dead played with contemporary tunes like their numerous Bob Dylan covers that became increasingly frequent in the later part of their career, and sometimes they would be so old that there was no attributable author, as was the case with ‘Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad’, ‘Jack-A-Roe’, and ‘Peggy-O’. Whoever they took on, the Grateful Dead always managed to make their covers fit into their unique jam-heavy musical style.
As a group of young men in their late teens and early 20s around the San Francisco area of the mid-1960s, the Dead got their origins as a dance band. That meant covers were vital to their existence, and on any given night, you could see Jerry Garcia busting out a version of ‘Dancing in the Streets’ in between Pigpen’s raucous rave-ups of ‘Turn On Your Lovelight’. Covers seemed to bring unlimited joy and variety to the world of the Dead, so much so that the group never stopped incorporating other artists’ material into their live shows.
Unsurprisingly, The Beatles wound up playing a major part in the Dead’s evolution from an acoustic outfit to an electric band. “The Beatles were why we turned from a jug band into a rock ‘n’ roll band,” Bob Weir explained in Blair Jackson’s Garcia: An American Life. “What we saw them doing was impossibly attractive. I couldn’t think of anything else more worth doing.”
It’s no surprise, then, that if you go poking around various tapes and live archives of the Dead, you’ll be able to find a few Beatles tunes. Pigpen tried on ‘Hey Jude’ briefly in 1969, and the Dead would later integrate the song’s coda into performances of Traffic’s ‘Dear Mr. Fantasy’. Over the years, you could also catch the Dead occasionally busting out ‘Blackbird’, ‘Day Tripper’, ‘Dear Prudence’, and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, among scores of others.
Jerry Garcia also had a fondness for one Paul McCartney solo song, in particular. During his frequent gigs with the Jerry Garcia Band during the Dead’s live hiatus in 1975, Garcia could occasionally be heard fooling around with ‘That Would Be Something’, the lo-fi and semi-improvised acoustic song that appeared as the second track on McCartney’s self-titled debut solo album in 1970.
It wouldn’t be until two decades later that Garcia first busted out the song with the Dead. At the Boston Garden in September of 1991, Garcia emerges from ‘Space’ with the choppy guitar riff to ‘That Would Be Something’ and offers up a few lines before the rest of the band dives into ‘Playing in the Band’. To hear the song’s first performance, you can refer to the 17th volume of the Dick’s Picks live series.
Over the next four years, ‘That Would Be Something’ saw some occasional plays at Dead shows. In total, there are 16 known performances of the song from live Dead concerts, with the final performance coming on June 24th, 1995, at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., just two weeks before the final Grateful Dead show.
The appreciation between Garcia and McCartney was apparently mutual. “I heard on the news that Jerry had died, and I thought, ‘Oh no, I was just about to show the film to him,’” McCartney later explained to The New York Times. “I’d been in correspondence with him because he was a painter and I thought he’d like this.” The Dead might have invented their own world, but it wasn’t impossible for some of their own heroes to take notice of them.
Check out the Dead’s version of ‘That Would Be Something’ down below.
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