Grateful Dead To NPR: You Scratch Our Back, We’ll Lightly Pat Yours
Former Sleater-Kinney guitarist/vocalist Carrie Brownstein blogs at NPR, and her latest post has a fully cleared MP3 mix that has tracks by the likes of Pylon and Wire, and is appended with a note: “This mix was supposed to have the Grateful Dead on it, whose music I really love, but they refused unless we promised to do a piece on them on All Things Considered. In addition, we would need to run a feature on The Dead on the site. Here’s a sentence I’ve never written: Someone needs to take a bong hit and chill out. Just a simple ‘no thanks’ would have sufficed. Are The Dead really in need of publicity? Because I swear there’s a dancing bear sticker on every third car I see in Portland.” Hey, they’re just trying to take blog payola to the next level! Never underestimate those dancing bears’ marketing savvy. [Monitor Mix; HT BV]
