(Credits: Far Out / Harry Chase / UCLA Library)
Fri 24 October 2025 14:15, UK
Recently, I was chatting with Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy, and he coyly and candidly explained, “The motivation has evolved through the decades. It has to, because the motivation at the start is, ‘How do I get laid?’”.
Would there be any rock ‘n’ roll bands without it?
So tied is the genre to youth culture that teenage kicks, cash, and kudos are key driving forces behind angsty, growling epics like ‘My Generation’. As Pete Townshend once put it, “Rock ‘n’ roll might not solve your problems, but it does let you dance all over them.” One band who were more concerned about bringing that to the masses than seizing upon it themselves were the Grateful Dead.
These hippie nomads, led by Jerry Garcia, didn’t really seem to concern themselves with fame, fortune, and crafting pristine records that promised them their fair share of both. Instead, their primary goal as a group was to get wasted in a field with however many like-minded folks cared to attend, and rattle off rock ‘n’ roll that facilitated the greatest get-togethers of them all.
At a time when the new-fangled LP and increasingly professional music industry ushered people in more of a product-based direction, Pete Townshend proved to be puzzled by the strange attitude of the hairy and haphazard guys in the Dead. But he certainly didn‘t look upon them snobbishly. “The commitment of their fans was something that was interesting,” he said of the Dead on Broken Record.
Adding, “The big thing about the Dead I remember was that they gave their road crew the same share that they got themselves. Did you know that? Yeah, it was a true cooperative, so nobody got rich. Nobody. They made a living, but they didn’t get rich.”
The Grateful Dead performing live in the 1970s. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
It wasn’t an easy living, either. The band played over 2,300 shows in less than 30 years and toured in modest conditions. They did this to ensure that their fans got a phenomenal show, and the fact that even now the still lives on in an undead incarnation is proof that plenty of people will be forever grateful.
So, despite the lack of money, this sense of a higher calling to the cooperative movement beyond mere charting tunes made Townshend somewhat jealous. “They were real contemporaries of The Band,” he said, “and they were a challenge in a sense because they had a connection with their audience that I was envious of.”
However, they were simply different folks with a different focus. They began playing acid Kool Aid parties in the fields, and they never wavered from that vision of hippie utopia and total freedom. They didn’t care as much about the studio and stately art in a ‘recorded for posterity’ sense.
This, naturally, confused Townshend at a time when everyone else was trying to play catch-up with The Beatles and their commercial mania. “I didn’t really understand what the Dead were doing. I didn’t understand the San Francisco scene at all. (…) It seemed scruffy, it seemed disorganised, and it seemed to need focus.”
It certainly did from an outside perspective – all of those are patently obvious points. Their records, certainly in the early days, were full of quality, but not a great deal of evident quality control. Their concerts were renowned, but never really regimented. They were, simply, high hillbillies happily reimagining Weird Old America, in the hope of promoting a deeper sense of freedom, and that was always going to look scruffy and ragtag by nature.
In truth, even the band didn’t really understand it, as Garcia said in one of his closing remarks, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”
Related Topics
