(Credits: Far Out / Alamy / Press)
Sat 17 January 2026 0:00, UK
If there were ever two bands who, on the face of it, don’t quite line up, it’s the Grateful Dead and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
That’s not necessarily me saying that one band’s music is good and the other’s is bad; rather, it’s me saying that there is no escaping the fact that both musical outfits have very different approaches to music. This applies not only to the way that they make it, but also how they perform it live. While one is free-flowing, the other is much more structured.
The free-flowing approach is clearly championed by the Grateful Dead. Granted, the band did release some pretty good studio albums that people continue to listen to decades later, but there is no escaping that their true appeal was their live performances. The band didn’t just play their songs one after the other when they took to the stage; instead, those songs formed a very unstable structure which they built upon.
At their heart, the Grateful Dead were a jam band, and that means they didn’t just take from their back catalogue, but they also improvised a great deal when it came to putting shows together. They drew from the atmosphere in the room, what was happening in the world at that current moment, and what specific members of the band they had on stage with them when putting together these exceptional live shows. It made for a truly exceptional listen and is something fans still revere today because of the spontaneity of it all.
“A list of song titles would mean very little in terms of what actually goes on inside the album,” said Lenny Kaye when discussing the band’s live album Live / Dead. “Like the early Cream, the Dead in concert tends to use their regular material as a jumping-off point, as little frameworks that exist only for what can be built on top of them.”
Meanwhile, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young might certainly be musicians capable of improvising, but their music didn’t allow for it quite as much. Graham Nash said the main pull of the band, and their quality, which led to him relocating to America to make music with them, was the beautiful harmonies they made when they combined their voices. The Grateful Dead had some harmonies in their music, too, but they weren’t as reliant on them as CSNY was. The latter made those harmonies a trademark, and they became so well respected throughout music that they stood at the heart of every track the band made.
When your sound is so reliant on the use of great harmonies, you don’t have as much room for improvising, especially when it comes to playing live. You need to be a bit more rigid than that, as everything needs to be, quite literally, pitch-perfect.
However, despite both bands being quite different from one another, that didn’t mean that they weren’t mutual fans, and that they couldn’t learn from their different approaches, because in 1970, the two bands had been spending a lot of time together, and CSNY’s influence meant that the Grateful Dead decided they wanted to work on their harmonies more. You can hear that wonderfully in the track ‘Brokedown Palace’, which features some of the Dead’s greatest intertwined harmonies ever committed to wax.
The song itself is about the passing of Jerry Garcia’s mother, and as such, those harmonies sound even more meaningful. There is something angelic about different voices overlapping to become one, and that’s what the Grateful Dead were able to take from CSNY. Different bands, sure, but music remains as universal as ever.
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