In an enormously generous gesture to the American people, the Grateful Dead appear to be packing it in for good this summer after three concerts in Chicago. “These will be the last shows with the four of us together,” band member Bob Weir told Billboard earlier this month. In doing so, the Dead will bring down the curtain on 50 years of plodding, limp, turgid, languid, unoriginal, inanimate, self-indulgent stoner music, an embarrassing relic from a bygone era. One can only hope that James Taylor will soon follow suit.

The appeal of the Grateful Dead has puzzled me for as long as I can remember. They were the first progressive rock band that didn’t actually rock; Jethro Tull was the second. I bought the Dead’s first album in 1968 when I was still in high school. I thought it would be daring and exciting, like the first albums by the Doors and Country Joe & the Fish and Jefferson Airplane. It wasn’t. It was amateurish and poorly produced, freighted down by nondescript vocals. It lacked oomph. It didn’t sound like the band had their hearts in it. It also had crummy cover art that looked like a grade-school collage project.

Shortly thereafter, I saw the Dead at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia. This was where I saw Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa and Chuck Berry. The Dead didn’t sound like Hendrix, Cream, Jeff Beck, Frank Zappa or Chuck Berry. They sounded like stoners. They lacked pep. They lacked vim and vigor. A lot of bands sounded like they’d missed their beauty sleep back in those days, but the Dead sounded positively catatonic.

I saw the Dead several years later at Philadelphia’s Spectrum. It was more of the same. You couldn’t hear the bass properly, and the vocal mixes were atrocious. Nobody seemed to mind, though, because by this point the band’s fiercely loyal fan base had come into existence. Deadheads didn’t care that the Dead had no juice or energy or that Jerry Garcia’s solos sometimes started in March and ended in August. As a Deadhead once explained to me, “When you go to hear the Dead, it’s not about the music.” I had heard the Dead play. Twice. I knew that it was not about the music.

The Grateful Dead and the Four Seasons are the only American bands that I unreservedly loathe. At first, I thought this was because they were the only bands that sounded like nobody in them had ever heard Sam Cooke, Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett. Then I decided it was because I disliked everyone who liked them.