Has The World – Including Skiing – Gone Too Far With Grateful Dead Branding?

When I heard the news that Arc’teryx and the Grateful Dead had collaborated on a $900 co-branded ski jacket, I was shocked. As both a lifelong skier and jamband fan, the blending of skiing’s conspicuous side with a mutated modern Deadhead ethos left me reeling. Both in the sticker shock sense, and of the soul.

But in a world often bound by the ever quantifiable measurements of social media metrics and SEO, where a bloated conformity in page views, likes, and reshares marks the moment above all else, I shouldn’t have been surprised. 

In this new age of look-at-me visibility wrought with the waning appeal of going off-piste in mind as much as soul in favor of the chance at going viral, “selling out” has all but left the vernacular, replaced with a this-is-how-it-is nihilism endemic of our less idealistic, everything-as-commodity time.

But to think that the modern tide of indifferent consumerism would come for an anachronistic vestige of The Summer of Love; that this machine would subsume both–of all things–the Grateful Dead and skiing? 

Indeed, it has. And the Dead’s (and skiing’s) shift toward the middle has been long in the making. Because it’s not just Trey and the late, great Bill Walton who have courted the heady band; Jerry’s crew has long twirled alongside the mainstream. Tipper and Al Gore were hangers-on, and–of all people–Tucker Carlson counts himself a Deadhead. And the band later broke bread with a teen idol of whom no one would have then predicted; the writer of all songs “Your Body Is A Wonderland” –one John Mayer. 

And skiing’s backslide is little different. Lift tickets, ski passes, accommodations, food, and, worst of all, beer, have all reached gouging price points for normal folks. Perhaps if one counts themselves amongst the cohort the ski industry markets to most, the affluent, then perhaps skiing remains affordable and accessible. But for everyone else…

At first, both simply point to the Dead’s popularity and snow sports’ evolving economic realities. But below the surface, there’s more. And together they show a brutal tide of skull-and-bear branding that has even touched the skiing world in this recent colab that can be all yours for just under a cool G.

Is what Jerry would have wanted? Is this what any of us want, let alone need? A countercultural icon worshiped not for their music and off-the-beaten track ethos, but their logo? 

Alas, this is nothing new. As the counterculture has ever faded from relevance, the Dead have long found themselves noodling along deeper into the purview of the straight and narrow. In Strategy + Business’ January 1997 issue (a publication that touts its very un-jamband ability “to define and shape the top management agenda”) writer Glenn Rifkin–writing not long after Jerry passed away–used what he characterized as “sound marketing principles from an unlikely source, the Grateful Dead rock group” as a b-school learning moment.

Any misgivings aside for using a cadre of Aquarians for such a cause, Rifkin poignantly noted the already in motion mainstreaming of the Dead catalyzed by, of all things, “a single, clear, intuitively compelling message or symbol.” 

Rifkin then set the table for the modern, main line, consumerist Deadhead. “The Dead annually mounted four regional tours, which had, for their fans, the lure of a spiritual crusade. Tens of thousands of otherwise rational adults poured their souls–and their wallets–into the worship of the band. Well-coiffed baby-boomer stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors and academics now wear Jerry Garcia ties to their offices,” Rifkin noted.

Years before, Don Henley–of all people–was perhaps the most precinct sage of the sell-out to come, one that would include the very San Francisco band that once rubbed shoulders with the likes of acid-testing revolutionary Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. “I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac,” the founding member of perhaps the 1970’s most cool-or-die band of all ironically (actually ironic, not hipster ironic) sang in 1984. “A little voice inside my head said ‘don’t look back, you can never look back.’”

But no matter how long in the making, the Grateful Dead’s brutal commoditization somehow feels different in skiing. At their best, both entities have long embodied not brand-name posturing and make-a-buck opportunism, but something deeper, and something more meaningful. 

Both can be freewheeling, improvisational, and transcend the normalcy of the everyday. Just as no one knew where Jerry might jam off to next, or what song might thread into another, skiing–and especially the ski life–has a way of naturally putting everything together while focusing on the soulful things, no senior year internship or suit-and-tie job right out of college required, thank you.

But at their worst, both the monetized Grateful Dead and skiing have let cash be the chief determinant. Exorbitant ticket prices–whether at The Sphere or Vail–are ills both share, just as the overwrought branding of all our favorite outerwear companies have become symbols of our own personal brand, but in the end are simply something we bought. And now, that can include a Grateful Dead insignia. Not as a patch sewn by a homebrewed fan, but for someone who has $900 to drop on a single garment.

Still, the Dead mean more than that; they always have and always will. At their roots they exemplify freedom on one’s terms, no one else’s. And skiing has long embodied that, and still can. Steve Barnett, who helped usher on the heady telemark revolution of the 70s that presaged the backcountry movement we know today, didn’t thank one Bill Nicolai for Grateful Dead tickets in the introduction of his free-heel, countercultural opus Cross-Country Downhill and Other Nordic Mountain Techniques for no reason. And as visionary Paul Parker told Descender decades ago when telemark was then rising, and subject to its own version of commoditization and muddied motivations, below the surface, the soul still lived. 

“In the big picture, I’m glad to see freeheel–and skiing in general–get some attention. Skiing is cool again,” he said. “Along with that attention–always–goes hype. Personally I don’t care for that part; too much hype can obscure the soul of it. But peel that hype away and I think that there is a lot of good energy today in freeheel, a lot of skiers following tele as an alternative, a challenge, many of the reasons that we’ve been doing it for years. I just hope to keep sight of that.”

Just like Parker said long ago, peel away the retail hype of skiing and the Grateful Dead branding, and you find two things that aren’t just vehicles for consumption, but have a soul and meaning all their own. And, just like Parker said of telemark, hopefully we can keep sight of that, too.