Animal Collective samples the Grateful Dead‘s “Unbroken Chain” on their new Fall Be Kind EP. It’s apparently the first time the band has allowed the use of one of their songs as a sample. New York Magazine talked to Animal Collective’s Geologist about it:
We didn’t know that no one had sampled one of their songs before; we just thought it would be really expensive to do it. We had recorded a version of the track live on the BBC, and we sent it over to Phil Lesh. He really liked it, and the band didn’t ask for a lot of money. […] I have respect for the way that they did things. It’s weird to me that punks hated the Grateful Dead so much. They had the same spirit as punk rock. They would put on free concerts, and when they became a huge megaband, they stood up to giant ticket companies. They did things their own way. They were punk before punk existed.
I was initially going to make fun of him for confusing the “spirit of punk rock” with standard, run of the mill hippiedom, but then I thought about it a little more and realized that two of the major tenets of punk were D/I/Y and V/F/M (“do it yourself” and “value for money”). So yeah, I guess the Dead were kinda punk. While at the same time being the polar opposite of punk.
MP3: Grateful Dead – “Unbroken Chain > Sugar Magnolia” (live at Soldier Field on 1995-07-09)