How success spoiled the Grateful Dead, according to Bob Weir
Success and the fame that comes with it can affect people in funny ways. It can bring out the worst in some people, make them crazy with presumed power or lazy with acclaim, and sometimes it can go to their head, resulting in them foolishly turning their backs on their friends and the people who helped to get them where they are.
Others are a little more positive with their positions; Elvis, surely the most successful and most famous artist of his time (and, arguably, still to this day), was able to funnel the success that he had into his life-long love of gift-giving, and would not only buy family and friends anything that they wanted on a whim (including watches and jewelry, horses, cars and motorbikes and even houses) but was also known on occasion to buy cars and other extravagances for total strangers.
He knew how lucky he had been, how far he had come and how much he had been given, and in turn, he wanted everybody else around him to feel the same things that he had. Yeah, some people go crazy with success, and some people try to share it all around, but others get wise with it and can get a little philosophical.
Bob Dylan famously said to Michael Iachetta, of the New York Daily News, in 1967, “What’s money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do”, which is a sentiment I whole-heartedly agree with, although with the caveat that it is much easier to get up and go to bed and do what you want in-between when you have the kind of money that Dylan would have been making in the mid-1960s.
Then there was Warren Zevon, who was looking over a lifetime’s worth of successes when he advised David Letterman that, in the end, what you really need to do with your life is to “enjoy every sandwich”. Charlie Watts had a similar idea when he said that “fame and glamour should not be your motives. Do things because you genuinely love them. In the end, what matters is if you are genuinely passionate about it”.
Some people, indeed, like Charlie Watts, win enormous success, fame, glamour and renown from doing the things they love. Like the Grateful Dead, who loved nothing more than taking old roots, folk and blues tunes, dropping an ungodly amount of LSD and turning those songs into rambling, meandering and seemingly never-ending slogs of sound.
Unbelievably, they found huge success in doing all that and have one of the most dedicated fan bases in popular music. More success led to more drugs, longer songs, more outlandish arrangements and an ever-expanding cast of bandmates, groupies, roadies and hangers-on.
But fame had its downsides, too. When asked if success had spoiled the Dead, band-leader Jerry Garcia just laughed and said, “Yeah”, before Bob Weir expanded on exactly how fame had gone to their heads, ballooned their egos to even bigger proportions than their songs, and made these humble musicians arrogant, lazy and profligate.
“I was noticing the other night, for instance, that when I’m going through pistachios, opening pistachios, that the hard-to-open ones, I don’t bother with them anymore,” Weir said, “Who’s got time?”
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