“A foolish time”: When the FBI attempted to infiltrate Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead
Any concerned parent would get very sniffy around what kind of dangerous music their kids might be listening to. It might all be innocent fun, but there are so many times that you can listen to a song with a drug-addled lyric sheet and not think that something fishy might be going on behind the scenes. Although it may have been a different time when acts like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were dominating the charts, the FBI thought they could be a threat to national security.
If you know anything about the hippie generation, the thought of them sparking any threat of anything is honestly laughable. These were kids who based their lifestyle on peace, love and understanding, so why the hell would they want to go against the very thing they just prophesized?
Nevertheless, law enforcement was convinced that most of the band’s drug intake was causing various kids to succumb to the darker side of life and corrupt their minds. While you can’t arrest someone on suspicion of doing something illegal or morally questionable, the FBI did the next best thing by having various undercover agents dress up to blend in with the crowds.
According to various undercover agents, acts like Jefferson Airplane went against what the youth of America should be doing with their lives, but their most cutting criticism was for the Grateful Dead. Despite their reputation for being one of the biggest “druggy” bands of them all, the FBI went so far as to bring them up on charges, saying in a report that “LSD originates from San Francisco through a renowned rock group called the Grateful Dead”.
Granted, it’s not like the bands weren’t going to at least have some fun with the controversy. Since Jefferson Airplane frontwoman Grace Slick was friends with Richard Nixon’s daughter, she was invited to The White House around the same time, bringing with her activist Abbie Hoffman and allegedly arriving stocked with a few hits of acid in her pocket.
For all of the people trying to rid the world of dirty rock and roll, even the FBI later said that they were a bit too paranoid, saying, “It’s easy to say that it was a foolish time for unwarranted investigation, but I think you have to look at this in the context of the times”. If fans thought that was the last the government would get involved in music, oh boy, they would be mistaken.
As trends changed and artists started branching out in the coming decades, law enforcement did everything they could to keep the youth of the world behaving like good little sheep, including coming out with the Parental Advisory sticker in the 1980s and banning songs that they deemed to be too offensive. It’s also hilarious seeing that they did absolutely nothing to change the status quo, either, with kids still flocking to these bands because of how edgy they were compared to everything else they heard.
They wanted to do the right thing by their children by not exposing them to anything too harsh, but they forgot the golden rule of all good controversial albums: The more that you talk about how dangerous it is, the more that you guarantee that the band will be around forever.
