i read this after i finished cfa level 1 in 2009. it was a good antidote.

Very enjoyable and informative!

An excellent reference source for specific events in the Grateful dead's history.

I gotta say this book wasn't so good. It was a smidge biased and also glossed over a lot of the .... pain in the ass of being the dead. it glosses over things like drug use and infidelity with a soft lens that frankly left me feeling like someone didn't want me to end up hating them. in the end.... i just ended up not liking the book. I'll def. read another Dead book someday, though.

It felt a bit like reading someone's diary and I found the writing to be rudimentary at times so I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn't meant to be a novel. And when McNally tried too hard to sound literary that was almost worse than when he just gave the story plain and simple. As an 'inside history,' it does what it promises and you're so sad to see Jerry go at the end.

3 1/2 stars. It would have been more enjoyable without the "interludes" and the author injecting himself into the story. The part of the book after 1977 or so seems rushed. It took me a long time to read this as I keep stopping to listen to the concerts he was talking about on archive.org or CD. There is a lot of great stuff I had no idea about which this book turned me on to.

One of the best and most fun books I’ve ever read. Highly recommend to anyone who’s interested in the Dead, or music (specifically rock) history in general.

The greatest epic I've read since War and Peace. Sort of joking about that but only sort of. A fantastic picaresque adventure featuring a cast of charismatic characters, supremely talented and obsessive yet somehow not very ambitious, dedicated to music/magic and drugs, surrounded by all sorts of supporting acts, from other bands and musicians to their manly, ribald crew and crazy, coke-fueled managers, to all the women they leave in their wake thanks to their "emotional cowardice," a phrase the author repeatedly uses toward the end to criticize Jerry, the non-leading leader of the band at the core of this. Not at all unwilling to call the boys out on their bullshit, including crap records and shows -- but also written by someone who worked for the band as their publicist for years and definitely understood every aspect of their ethos and relays it perfectly, for the most part -- I only felt things were very occasionally slightly discolored by the author's (I wanted to write "narrator's," as though the book were written by a figment of the band's collective consciousness) choice to refer to himself in the third-person as "Scrib" instead of simply opting for the less intrusive "I," and sometimes his conservative deployment of full-throttle lyrical description of the music didn't match my understanding of the songs or the playing, especially in terms of chords and notes et cetera (I won't go back through to search for examples -- just that sometimes I felt like the flights of ecstatic descriptive fancy were technically a little off). But the overall structure seemed perfect: imagine all the other ways all this info and all these anecdotes could've been presented. There must have been a temptation to present a loose improvisational structure, form matching content, form matching the formlessness of the band's best moments. But instead, for something so voluminous, containing such multitudes, it's linear, with regularly shaped and consistently sized chapters that felt like they're each about 25 pages, interspersed with interludes detailing an abstracted representative late-'80s/early-'90s stadium show (not a particular date), including most interestingly all the gear, cords, wires, lights, on and on, through the intermission and encore and post-show escape in a van to the airport to the next city's hotel by the time most fans have finally recovered enough to hit the road home. So many great bits like Bob Weir and some unknown black guitarist at the Guild tent at the Monterrey Pop Festival, having fun making semi-hollowbody guitars feedback, playing a little duet of howls -- and of course the unknown black guitarist turns out to be Jimi Hendrix. Or how Jimi was once backstage with his guitar all set to sit in but Mickey Hart, too deep into things on a certain psychedelic, forgot to give him the signal to come on stage and so he took off. The best bits were about how the songs came together, how Jerry's old bluegrass/folk friend from Palo Alto came back around with lyric sheets that saved them from having sub-mediocre psych lyrics like in "Cream Puff War" and really made the band what it is, as much as the long jams built on what Lesh called "bleshing," all five or six or seven players playing like the fingers on a hand, all unified. But of course there's constant infighting, cliques, power struggles, a psychedelic game of Survivor played over the course of a few decades. The progression is definitely not linear -- they rise and fall (rise and fall) throughout, all of it leading to the MTV hit in '87 that makes it impossible for them to play anywhere other than massive stadiums, lawless scenes that attract tens of thousands of ticketless revelers. I particularly got a little jolt when shows I attended were mentioned, like the show at the crumbling JFK Stadium in Philly (7/7/89) or the show in Cleveland in '93 I had a ticket for that was canceled thanks to a blizzard (the band spent most of the day at a nearby movie theater). And of course there's everything about Jerry's physical dissolution that started when he started smoking heroin during the '77 spring tour -- found it very odd that the significance of that tour wasn't really covered and realized that its absence probably gave Peter Conners the idea to write the excellent Cornell '77: The Music, the Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead's Concert at Barton Hall, which I read before this and loved, which ultimately is why I decided to read this, because I wanted to delve deeper into all this, a nostalgic trip for the soundtrack and experiences of my mid-to-late teenage years I'm more than happy to revisit and appreciate these days again from a completely different perspective, on the other side of so much other music listened to and loved and so many other bands seen live -- to quote promoter Bill Graham: they're not the best at what they do, they're the only ones who do what they do. Highest recommendation to anyone who watched the documentary of the same name available now for streaming on Amazon and thought that a four-hour documentary felt kind of thin. I'll soon read the Garcia bio and then maybe read some more long-form non-fiction, which feels good these days.

This is a great history of the band, their 'family', insights into their music, and a pretty well rounded description of the psychedelic trip called the GD. Lots of names and places, info behind the songs and happenings, and overall an impressive bit of work by the guy who was their observer/archivist of happenings from the start. Starting in 1962 and through the time up to and beyond Garcia's death, this book greatly enhanced my love and appreciation for the music, the band, and the brilliance of JG. A must read for all deadheads.

It is interesting comparing McNally's account to Rock Scully's. There are definitely some inconsistencies, most notably for me being the retelling of Kreutzmann's outburst in Paris where he smashed a window. According to Scully it happened in their Europe '72 tour out of frustration in not being able to pick up any women, while according to McNally it was in a later Europe tour in '74, motivated by desperation in becoming lost. Another notable difference is how Owsley was manufacturing the Sunshine acid back when the band was living with them.

Anyway, McNally's book is exhaustive in its minute details, not shying away from the Dead's esoteric business practices, which I have mixed feelings about being privy to. I guess ultimately I'm glad they were included.

One major gripe I have with both Rock Scully and Dennis McNally's accounts for the Dead is taking their subjective opinions as objective. Everyone has their own idea about what the best album or live show was. I think instead of saying "they played like crap on X day" they could have instead focus on how the band members themselves felt. Also everyone seems to be so down on Aoxomoxoa for some reason (including GD themselves) which sort of perplexes me because it's such a fantastic record. Oh well.

McNally was really into the synchronicity thing, and was really into taking note of outside events that paralleled things going on with the band. While such information is good to know, I think he perhaps might have overemphasized some of their connections. Of course, one can't know for sure without any direct quotes. Which is why I generally have come to prefer the method of interweaving of interviews, like with Please Kill Me.

It is only natural for Rock Scully, in his book Living With the Dead, to have spent more time talking about the heavy drug use, having been an addict himself (his very sobering confession regarding his negative influence on Jerry was commendable). McNally's drug talk emphasized heavily on the mind expanding nature of LSD, while shying away from the heroin which is a balance I ultimately find preferable.

Overall a well put together book, although the Interlude chapters seemed a bit out of place at times. On several occasions they retreaded ground that had already been covered which was a little bit annoying. It is such an exhaustive account, yet also made me realize how impossible it is to really fit the whole story into one book. I feel that further reading is in order somewhere down the line. Maybe I'll read Mickey Hart's or Phil Lesh's autobiography next time. 3.75/5

Confession: I've been a Deadhead since the mid-'80s and I adore their music and everything they stood for. But even if you're not a Deadhead, this book is an amazing read. The author was "family", so he writes with authority and passion about this cultural phenomenon that will never be duplicated. I could hardly put this book down, even though I knew the story very well before I read it!

Way too long/ exhaustive. Think it sensationalized things. And, I still don't get the obsession w/ the Dead. I guess you either get it or you don't... man.