I had a college roommate who would use a 5 CD changer to play the same Dead song from 5 different bootlegs in a row. Maybe my hair metal listening is a symptom of PTSD?

I could not tell you the name of even one of their songs. I am sure I must have heard them, though.

I have this persistent idea that they have something to do with Ben & Jerry's, but I know that's wrong.

I don't have an opinion of the Living Dead, but I am quite fond of Ben and Jerry's.

AMDG

“Something to do with Ben & Jerry’s”

Ha! It’s very funny that you think that. The reason is probably that B&J have, or had, a flavor called Cherry Garcia.

It’s not at all surprising that you’re not aware of any of their music. They were almost never heard on ordinary pop radio and in general were not that commercially successful as recording artists. Unless you personally knew about them and liked them, or had friends who listened to them a lot, you wouldn’t have heard them. I think classic rock stations play “Truckin’” sometimes. Maybe.

I used to have many, many friends who were Grateful Dead fans, but it never quite stuck to me. For some reason I have always like the song Ripple, though.

The guy vaulting over the bar is quite the inspired touch.

Robert, whether Truckin really belongs in the classic rock category is debatable. I'd say the Dead in general don't. There was a conversation about that here not long ago. There's a difference between "classic rock" and "rock classic." :-)

Let us consult the oracle:

"Classic rock is a radio format that developed from the album-oriented rock (AOR) format in the early 1980s. In the United States, it comprises rock music ranging generally from the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s, primarily focusing on commercially successful blues rock and hard rock popularized in the 1970s AOR format."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_rock

Correction: interest in the latter increased and former decreased.

There’s nothing especially weird or “psychedelic” about most of the Dead’s music! Not after about 1970 or so. Listen to American Beauty, the album that includes both Ripple and Truckin’. If it came out today it would be called Americana.

Okay. Lets just say I was into 60s and 70s rock and pop. But, as you point out, Grateful Dead isn't really rock or pop. Jugband music.

Even though I enjoy old fashioned guitars plugged into old fashioned Marshalls from 1969, I’d rather put sewing needles into my ears than sit through a GD album. Yuck. I’m totally down with a 30 minute Deep Purple jam, however.

There is only one thing worse than the Dead. Deadheads.

I think that's part of the definition of Deadhead. You aren't allowed to be one unless you've been to multiple shows, preferably demonstrating a willingness to travel a long way to do so. I don't think anyone who only knows their officially released albums qualifies.

I meant to say last night: Matt, I think your last comment is sort of a half-QED of my point that the reaction is more about the fans and the cult than the music. At least as much, anyway.

Aside from the fact that I find the Dead boring, no one in the band was particularly good at their instrument. In a time period when people were writing new rules, they seemed to be treading water. Like Vanilla Fudge. (I know that’s a low blow)

Sure, my experience with Deadheads colors it. I blame them collectively for Phish, Dave Matthews etc.

Deep Purple and Led Zep didn’t need to stretch their songs to 30 mins, but at least they had the chops to do it!

Finally, as a guitar collector, I find Garcia’s tastes in guitars abhorrent after he abandoned Gibson and Fender.

I know we are supposed to worship Duane Allman, but man, his slide guitar was sharp all over Layla. Buy a tuner…or an ear.

I think I'm roughly a decade younger than Mac, and it's interesting to read this discussion. I didn't start listening to music seriously until about 1975 (I was 14) and at that time was mostly into AOR and prog. There were some hard rock tracks that made it into the Top 40 at that time, so even if that's what you listened to you were bound to hear some from time to time.

Oddly though, the AOR stations didn't play a lot of stuff by "older" bands except for warhorse tracks. Consequently I knew many of those bands only by their "hits," and my knowledge of the music that came out between, say, 1968 and 1973/74 is pretty limited. Which is fine, because in listening to it now in my dotage I find I don't like it much. ;-) I'm far happier with the by-ways of the 80's and early 90's.

Which brings up another point. I know several guys who are in their late 30s/early 40s who are very much into music and quite eclectic in their tastes. They like classic rock, which I imagine was their parents' music, and they like various things from the 90's forward, depending on their individual tastes, but to a man they seem to have completely missed the 80's, other than the commercial stuff. They know 90's "alternative" very well, but don't seem to be aware that an 80's "alternative" even existed. I find that very interesting.

Shoegaze was mainly a 90s thing, but I wasn’t aware of it till much later.

I never liked grunge much, but I think it was something of a reaction against the overproduced and polished stuff that dominated the mid-to-late 80's. Kurt Cobain made it no secret that he was influenced by the noisier 80's bands like The Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. I was already familiar with that stuff when grunge hit the scene so I never really saw anything new or great about it. But I imagine that for younger people who'd only heard mainstream 80's music grunge must've sounded like something out of the blue. I have a friend who was in high school in 1991 when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came out, and says that he had never heard anything like it. He still likes a lot of 80's music, but it's mostly the standard stuff -- nothing really below the radar.

" I have a friend who was in high school in 1991 when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" came out, and says that he had never heard anything like it. "

I've heard similar things. I just don't get it. Led Zeppelin. Black Sabbath. Bad Company. I mean, Nirvana doesn't sound just like those, but it's not night-and-day different, either.

"gear that made the sounds of everything from Def Leppard to Janet Jackson happen"

Alas. There was so much more interesting music being made in the '80s. It wasn't necessarily brilliant or striking in the guitar department, but in overall musical interest. Possibly relevant: I hated Van Halen, the band, though Eddie's playing was interesting.

Sure, lots happened in the 80s. I like the roots rock that Springsteen and Melencamp made happen. I like the new breed of country guys like Steve Earle. I like the pop that used tech like Duran Duran. I like the college scene with The Replacements. I just happen to prefer hairspray and spandex.

In my experience a 43 y.o. who knows 80's music backwards and forwards is a rarity, the exception thereby proving the rule.

I couldn't stand Van Halen either. To me the guitar work was literally the only interesting thing about them. I don't recall exactly when they arrived on the scene, but in the mid-to-late 70's when I was in high school my favorite bands were probably Kansas, Yes, and Boston. Never cared much for either Zeppelin or Rush, due to not liking either lead singer's voice.

I read someone say recently, I forget where, that the surprising thing about Nirvana wasn't their music per se, but the fact that it caught on so quickly and made it into the mainstream. That makes a good deal of sense to me.

Are you calling me strange, Rob?

Mac and I tried to see King Crimson but then the world ended in 2020 just in time to cancel the show.

As much as I disliked 70s and 80s hard rock, I disliked 90's rock even more. I was rather indifferent to Brit Pop -- didn't hate it but didn't care for it much either -- but the stuff that came after grunge I thought was just terrible for the most part. I pretty much ignored it all until the later 90's when I heard OK Computer which, while I didn't really like it entirely, I could at least respect. I think The Verve's Urban Hymns came out around that same time, and I liked that one too.

From about 1993 to 1998 I was listening mostly to alt country and Americana.

The 90s? The Dark Ages.

In the UK in terms of BritPop it was mostly the "battle" between Oasis and Blur -- I wasn't much impressed by either, or by most of the lesser lights of the movement.

Besides trip-hop and shoegaze the 90's also produced some good "indie pop" (at least that's what it would be called nowadays) -- The Sundays, Belle & Sebastian, Lush, Innocence Mission, Ocean Blue, Cranberries, etc.

All three Lush LP's were just reissued -- I picked up the first two. The third one is more Brit Pop oriented and I don't care for it much. Really like the first two though. They're one of those bands that I missed at the time for whatever reason.

Apparently there was a big division in England in the 90's between the Oasis fans and the Blur fans. Wasn't so pronounced over here, as Oasis seemed to get a lot more attention.

Was that meant for Oasis and Blur, or the other stuff mentioned just prior to that? If it's the former, well, I can't take too seriously the judgments of someone who likes some of the stuff you like. :-)

Is Radiohead considered "shoegaze", Rob?
I'm stuck in the 1960s and 1970s and more concerned with Hackney Diamonds. Octogenarian rock! :-)

"If it came out between 1992-2000...." I hope that just means that there's a lot of music you didn't hear. If not, then your taste is worse than I realized.

Stu, if you go to YouTube and search for the three bands Rob named, you'll probably get a fairly good picture of what shoegaze is. Personally I rate MBV (and I think Rob concurs) way below the others though that seems to be a minority opinion. I think you're more likely to like Slowdive than the others. Wistful and noisy.

Well, let me save you the trouble: this is one of the defining songs of Slowdive:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkM3M3zGcGE

Of the three tracks linked to above, the last one conforms most closely to the sort-of-textbook idea of shoegaze: a haze of loud distorted guitars and distant vocals, yet melodic. That band, by the way, Blankenberge, is Russian. The guitar player sort of looks it, doesn't he?

That Ride song doesn't even seem all that shoegaze-y to me, though I like it. Man, they were kids!

Yeah, at the beginning there really wasn't a "textbook sound." The common points seemed to be loud, layered guitars, soft vocals, and drums less out front and more in the background. Obviously you could apply that in a number of ways.

I read an interview with one of the guys from Ride, and he said that when they first went into the studio and tried to explain the sound they wanted the producer, or maybe the engineer, just couldn't get it. Iirc, he couldn't understand why they wanted the drums so far behind the guitars in the mix.

" I hope that just means that there's a lot of music you didn't hear."

That's what I always say to people who claim that all 80's music was bad: "If you think it's bad you're listening to the wrong stuff!"