Over the past sixty years, millions of people around the world have called themselves fans of the Grateful Dead... and these celebrities are not among them.
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00:00Over the past 60 years, millions of people around the world have called themselves fans
00:04of the Grateful Dead. And these celebrities are not among them.
00:08A vehicle for the songs of lead singer and chief songwriter Kurt Cobain, Nirvana was
00:12at the forefront of the Pacific Northwest grunge movement, a genre that definitely combined
00:16catchy pop elements, sledgey guitar riffs, and the spirit of punk rock. Cobain embraced
00:21many aspects of the punk identity, including an animosity toward older, seemingly failed
00:25cultural revolutions. In one journal entry, he wrote,
00:28I like to blame my parents' generation for coming so close to social change than giving
00:32up. And it seems that the Grateful Dead bore the brunt of much of his ire. During a Nirvana
00:36photo shoot in the early 1990s, for example, Cobain wore a T-shirt that read,
00:40"'Punk's Not Dead' and, "'Kill the Grateful Dead.'"
00:43Cobain so resented the Grateful Dead, in fact, that he openly objected to the band's iconography
00:48being connected with his own band. In 1992, he told Melody Maker,
00:52I hate tie-dyed T-shirts, too. You know there are bootleg tie-dyed T-shirts of Nirvana?
00:56I hate that. I wouldn't wear a tie-dyed T-shirt unless it was
00:59dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia.
01:05Keith Richards and Jerry Garcia rank among the most acclaimed rock guitarists of all time,
01:09and they're also two of the most successful and influential musicians of any kind to have emerged
01:13in the 1960s. Both have a signature sound and demonstrated prowess with the guitar,
01:18Richards as a purveyor of electric blues-influenced rock, and Garcia of a freewheeling,
01:22semi-improvised, complex style. One big difference between them, however,
01:26is the guitarists' opinions about each other. The Grateful Dead guitarist harbored a major
01:30love for the Stones' 1967 album Between the Buttons, and he covered some of its
01:34songs during several live shows. But Richards didn't return the sentiment,
01:38often voicing his distaste for the band, their long concerts, and the frontman's guitar skills.
01:43In 2015, he told Billboard,
01:45The Grateful Dead is where everybody got it wrong. Just poodling about for hours and hours.
01:50Jerry Garcia. Boring f----- man. Sorry, Jerry.
01:54In the late 1960s, San Francisco was the unofficial headquarters of the hippie counterculture movement,
01:59and so it naturally produced countless musicians over the course of the decade.
02:03I am a golden god!
02:07Many went on to become superstars with long careers, including both The Grateful Dead and
02:12Steve Miller, frontman of an eponymous band that would record many classic rock radio staples in
02:16the years to come. Just because they came up together in the same place at the same time,
02:20however, didn't mean Miller enjoyed Garcia's music. During a panel talk at the 2008 I Create
02:25Music exposition, Miller said,
02:27I couldn't stand that band.
02:29He also insisted that 60s San Francisco was a social phenomenon rather than an incubator for
02:33great musicians, and claimed that his band was more technically proficient than all the others
02:37that were active at the time. In the 1970s, the Ramones helped define punk rock with their
02:42stripped-down, confrontational style. A four-piece unit who all dressed the same and adopted the
02:47stage surname Ramone, the band played with unabashed amateurism, speed, and volume as
02:51they chugged their way through songs about dissatisfaction and antisocial attitudes.
02:56Punk is just a rebellious rock for all kids, all of them.
03:01Compare that to, say, the music of The Grateful Dead, when their long,
03:04meandering epic songs about love and psychedelics played on a stage filled with hippie virtuosos.
03:10When reporter Jim Sullivan asked the Ramones about other major rock bands in 1979,
03:14guitarist Johnny Ramone and bassist Dee Dee Ramone offered their pointed,
03:17withering criticism of The Grateful Dead. Dee Dee said,
03:20I guess we feel sorry for them. And Johnny added,
03:23I think they did too much LSD.
03:25Dee Dee went on to explain that he just couldn't be a fan of the group. He said,
03:29I never had any interest. I saw some pictures of them when I was a kid, and they looked so awful.
03:34I like nice, clean-looking rock stars.
03:37Anthony Bourdain made his musical preferences known on more than one occasion.
03:40The celebrity chef absorbed much of the ethos of the 1970s punk rock movement that he experienced
03:45firsthand, and so he held a special affinity with bands such as The Modern Lovers, The Stooges,
03:50Patti Smith, Talking Heads, and Bad Brains. And he hated The Grateful Dead just as passionately.
03:56During a Q&A session in 2010, Bourdain said,
03:59You know what? I may be a lefty, but I hate hippies. As a former employer,
04:03I learned very early to never hire a dead fan because arrival time was
04:06always a problem with those guys. I hate four-hour guitar solos.