Bill Weld says he duped the media about his reputation as a Grateful Dead fan
"I would say, 'Oh, I'm sorry I couldn't answer that.'"
Bill Weld says he likes the Grateful Dead — just not as much as he perhaps led us all to believe.
During his time in office in the 1990s, the now former Massachusetts governor was perhaps the state’s top “Deadhead,” the term for fans of the influential counterculture jam band. Weld told The Boston Globe that they were his favorite musical group. He shook hands with the band backstage at one of their Boston Garden concerts. He even wrote an ode to Jerry Garcia in the Globe after the Grateful Dead frontman’s death in 1995.
“Garcia and the Grateful Dead have been a constant in my life from the time I first heard them in the ’60s,” the Republican governor wrote at the time.
But apparently, he had us all fooled.
During an appearance on WMUR’s “Candidate Cafe” series earlier this month, Weld — who is now challenging President Donald Trump in the GOP primary — said he cultivated his Deadhead reputation to muddy his Brahmin image and appeal to the Bay State’s “ethnic” electorate during his first campaign in 1990.
“The problem with me running in Massachusetts, which is a very ethnic state, is here I am just, you know, a thin-blooded, limp-wristed, blue-blood Yankee in a very Irish-Italian state,” he said. “Anything that varied that image would be good for me politically.”
Weld said he “really did like” several Grateful Dead albums, specifically naming two 197o hit releases, “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty.”
Still, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Canton resident — who often jokes that his ancestors sent servants to America on the Mayflower to prepare their cottage — said the “odd” detail about his Grateful Dead fandom took hold when it leaked out. And he did nothing to extinguish the rumor.
“The press would say, ‘Well, Mr. Weld, how many Grateful Dead concerts have you been to in your life?’ And I would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry I couldn’t answer that.’ So they thought it was something like 110,” Weld said to laughs from his diner audience in Manchester, New Hampshire.
“The correct answer, which the press never learned, was zero,” Weld added.
Well, now we’ve learned.
The truth comes out… https://t.co/MnDk29XHzp
— Gov. Bill Weld (@GovBillWeld) January 23, 2020
To the extent that Weld’s affiliation with the Grateful Dead contributed to his 3 percentage point win in 1990 — becoming the first Republican governor of Massachusetts in more than 25 years — remains unclear.
Weld did rectify that “zero” number shortly after his inauguration, attending a Grateful Dead concert in September 1991 during one of the band’s several runs at the Garden, according to reports at the time.
But to this day, his Deadhead reputation continues to proceed him. During an interview last month, Weld was asked how many Grateful Dead concerts he had attended.
“Just a handful,” he said.
“So a handful is like 50?” the interviewer, Ian Bremmer, asked somewhat incredulously.
“Four or five,” Weld said.
In a 2016 interview, Weld said he now listens to “whatever I want” on Spotify. Desmond Dekker and The Proclaimers are his new favorites, he added.
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