As grunge music began to take over music in the early 1990s, the various bands took different approaches to their shared love of classic rock. Some groups that lacked the major punk ties of the genre, like Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, felt no need to kick back at the bands that came before them. But for someone like Kurt Cobain, anything even smelling like flower power was to be condemned to death.
Cobain wasn’t completely scorched earth about the music of the past – he famously had a soft spot for The Beatles, wrote ‘Aero Zeppelin’ as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith, and even referred to old-school folk singer Lead Belly as his favourite artist during the filming for Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged appearance. But those were all artists with at least some form of hardened edge or rebellious stream. Compared to those guys, Cobain had no time for the Grateful Dead.
The truth is, had Cobain looked under the hood, he probably would have found something to enjoy about the Dead. Their live shows from the late 1960s were energetic, raw, and almost proto-punk, with their experimental ‘Feedback’ excursions being early precursors to noise rock. The Dead were also anti-authoritarian in the same way that Cobain was, with Cobain and Jerry Garcia sharing similar views on musical expression, drug use, and the trappings of fame.
The similarities between Cobain and Garcia were actually much bigger than Cobain probably ever wanted to admit. That said, the Dead never really had a chance with the Nirvana frontman. By the early 1990s, the Dead were more of a business and a travelling nostalgia act representing the worst elements of the 1960s than a real counter-culture band. The limp jam-heavy songs and hordes of Deadheads following them preaching peace and love were enough for Cobain to permanently sour on the Grateful Dead.
“I wouldn’t wear a tie-dyed tee-shirt unless it was dyed with the urine of Phil Collins and the blood of Jerry Garcia,” Cobain famously told Melody Maker in 1992. During that same interview, it’s pointed out that Cobain actually has more of a direct connection to the Dead world than he might want to admit. Courtney Love’s father, Hank Harrison, was a one-time road manager for the Dead, even though he left their orbit in the late 1960s and remained controversial thanks to his unauthorised and factually inaccurate books on the band that were published in the 1980s.
Still, Cobain remained a steadfast hater of all things Grateful Dead. He was known to rock a “Kill the Grateful Dead” shirt during a 1992 photoshoot, one of the more direct attacks on the hippie icons. It doesn’t appear as though Garcia ever commented on the rise of grunge or the apparent hatred that the genre’s figurehead had for him and his band, but in any case, Garcia and Cobain weren’t rivals for long.
In April of 1994, Cobain took his own life in his Seattle home. The Dead were playing down in Florida while this happened and failed to make any direct or indirect (‘He’s Gone’) mention of the event. A little over a year later, Garcia himself passed away in August of 1995, ending any kind of animosity between the two camps for good.
Check out ‘He’s Gone’ down below.
