Five musicians who hated the Grateful Dead with a passion: “Boring shit”
The Grateful Dead have always been a tricky band to define.
A product of the hippy movement coming out of San Francisco in the 1960s, they’re famous for their drawn-out, jammed shows, love of acid, and being persistent preachers of peace. To many, they are the epitome of music, representing free thinking, an experimental approach to sound, and real innovation in how they write. For others, they are the antithesis of good music.
In praise of the iconic band’s talismanic frontman, Jerry Garcia, the esteemed Bob Dylan famously said, “There’s no way to measure his greatness or magnitude as a person or as a player. I don’t think eulogising will do him justice He was that great – much more than a superb musician with an uncanny ear and dexterity. He is the very spirit personified of whatever is muddy river country at its core and screams up into the spheres. He really had no equal.”
With that in mind, there is no denying the Grateful Dead’s success. The fact that their music continues to be successful decades after the band’s inception and even after key members have passed away shows that their ethos lives on so long as the band keeps touring. Fans continue turning up in huge numbers, eyes wide and tie-dyed, ready to be transported by the music of their favourite band. However, this isn’t an attitude shared by everyone. Nor would they want to be, to be frank.
A lot of people, especially rock artists who worked persistently to make a snappy hit, found their drawn-out style of music boring. Not to mention, there were a lot of experimental bands at the time who also thought that the music coming from the hippy scene was both dull and disingenuous. This meant that while you don’t have to look far to find people who love the Grateful Dead, you also don’t have to look far to find people who hate them, either.
Here are some of the biggest artists in the world who took a particular dislike towards the Grateful Dead, and offered up scathing takes on the defining hippie outfit.
Artists who hated the Grateful Dead
Keith Richards
Whether it’s about his own band or other groups, Keith Richards has never been afraid to speak his mind. He hated rap music, heavy metal, and plenty of other artists for various reasons, and the constant factor was his unwavering approach to discussing that hatred. This trickled down into the Grateful Dead, as during an interview, Richards wasn’t shy about vocalising his disdain towards Jerry Garcia and Co, and their ‘hey dude’ ways.
The Grateful Dead had an interesting approach to music. Because of their affinity towards building on atmosphere and jamming depending on how a room and a crowd felt, some songs were drawn out, riffs, licks and beats repeated as the band found unison in the pocket of a specific moment. Richards wasn’t a fan of this. “The Grateful Dead is where everybody got it wrong,” he said, “Just poodling about for hours and hours. Jerry Garcia, boring shit, man. Sorry, Jerry.”
Steve Miller
Steve Miller is responsible for a plethora of different hits. While he is most famous for fronting The Steve Miller Band, he has worked with various artists, some well-known and others not so much. In doing so, he has developed a taste for the kind of music he likes and that which he doesn’t. Unfortunately, the Grateful Dead slid into the latter.
“I couldn’t stand that band,” he said during a panel at a music industry symposium. When the Grateful Dead were enjoying their rise to fame in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Miller could never quite take to them, and he described them as a “Social phenomenon” as opposed to a group of talented musicians.
Frank Zappa
Because of Frank Zappa’s innovative approach to music and willingness to embrace experimentation within his found, you would consider him and the Grateful Dead kindred spirits, but it’s quite the opposite. As many hippy bands like The Dead were making their way out of San Francisco, they developed a reputation for being draped in mysticism, bands that could induce out-of-body experiences rather than just bits of music. Zappa was left disappointed when he eventually listened.
“People think San Francisco music is supposed to be cosmic value and all that, but it is manufactured music, and manufactured music is worthless,” he said, “The problem with San Francisco groups is, I was expecting wonders, and miracles and what I heard was a bunch of white blues bands that didn’t sound as funky as my little band in high school.” He notably didn’t like their association with drugs all that much either.
Lou Reed
It’s hard to believe that Lou Reed and the Grateful Dead were once rivals, but that was precisely the case in the early days of both of their careers. When the Velvet Underground started making music, they leant into the avant-garde experimental nature of the East Coast music scene, making ten-minute-long drone music that pushed the boundaries of sonic escapism. When they went to play in San Francisco, they realised how different the city was in taste, as their music didn’t land at all. It led to a resentment of hippy culture and the music which came from it.
The hatred wasn’t just limited to Lou Reed, either. The whole of the Velvet Underground had a resentment towards hippy bands, who they saw as fake and not boundary-pushing enough. “We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco scene,” said drummer Maureen Tucker, “It’s just tedious, a lie, and untalented. They can’t play, and they certainly can’t write. The Airplane, the Dead, all of them,” the scathing New Yorker daringly decreed. But, to be fair, he also bashed The Beatles.
Kurt Cobain
Though Cobain and Garcia had a lot of similarities when it came to values and approaches to music, due to the generation-wide gap, what the Grateful Dead represented was worlds away from what Kurt Cobain looked for in his music, despite chasing the same ‘nirvana’. They were less of a band by the ‘90s and more of a nostalgia-driven travelling band preaching peace with drawn-out jam tracks. It’s all lovely in nature, but it was becoming outdated.
Cobain never held back when it came to voicing his distaste towards the band. He once wore a t-shirt that read “Kill the Grateful Dead” during a photoshoot. He was also once asked if he would even wear tie-dye, to which he responded, “I wouldn’t wear a tie-dyed tee-shirt unless it were dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia.” While he often mellowed when it came to cutting takes on the likes of Pearl Jam, he always stood by this brutal takedown.
