“All these incredible artists”: Jeff Bridges names the greatest era in music history
Before Jeff Bridges was an actor, he was an aspiring musician.
In fact, as the son of actors Lloyd and Dorothy Bridges, Hollywood was the family business, and like all self-respecting teens, young Jeff wasn’t particularly interested in following in his parents’ footsteps. It was hard to resist, though, especially considering that he had his first role when he was six months old, before he could physically walk off a film set or form the sentence ‘I quit’.
Bridges has called himself a “reluctant” actor, revealing that it took him a long time to accept that his acting had become a career. For a while, he was simply moving from project to project, and even when he earned an Oscar nomination for Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, he wasn’t convinced that movies were the right line of work for him.
From an early age, though, his love for music was set in stone; he learned to play piano and guitar as a kid, and even sold two of his songs to Quincy Jones, who used one of them in the soundtrack of the 1969 Mia Farrow, Dustin Hoffman drama John and Mary. Ironically, it was partly his love of music that pushed him to commit to Hollywood, as according to Bridges, his father convinced him that acting would give him the flexibility to pursue his other passions.
In interviews, he rarely goes into as much passionate detail about acting as he does about music, and once you get him talking about it, you probably won’t have to ask any follow-up questions. In some cases, he’s been able to blend music and acting, such as when he played a washed-up country star in 2009’s Crazy Heart, where he performed all the songs and, not surprisingly, won the Oscar for ‘Best Actor’.
As you might expect, Bridges has some pretty entrenched opinions about music, and in a 2025 interview with Los Angeles Magazine, the Big Lebowski star talked about the era of music that he grew up in, and how it continues to define his tastes.
As a kid, he was initially drawn to the music that his older brother, Beau, was listening to, namely Chuck Berry, James Brown, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly, but Jeff was eight years younger, and those years made a big difference. “It’s hard to beat that original sound,” he said of the music that his sibling introduced him to, “But my generation was The Beatles, [Bob] Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen; all these really incredible artists.”
Although he conceded that every generation probably thinks that they had the best music, his generation was “really something”, and it’s hard to argue with that. They may have been heavily influenced by the artists who came before them, but The Beatles, Dylan, the Stones, and Motown (which Bridges also name-checked) completely upended music.
It’s true that most generations will argue that their youth had the definitive musical canon, but if you ask most people to name the greatest bands and artists of all time, chances are, they will name at least one entry in the list that Bridges rattled off. The ‘60s and early ‘70s remain unparalleled for their sheer depth and breadth of talent, and every successive generation of artists has owed them an immense creative debt.
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