I mostly read this as research for work, so it's not my topic of choice, but the book does a good job of throwing in all the dates and details and stories a fan would want to know: it's the major authority on the band's history. It really sheds some light on the strange emotional passivity and carelessness inside the band at the heart of this lovey-dovey fan phenomenon. Jerry Garcia comes off as a criminally (and ultimately fatally) passive slob in his personal life.

https://rogueliterarysociety.com/f/a-...

...But the ugly mother sure could play! . . . Verily, he was wondrous gross, was this Pigpen, yet such was the subtle alchemy of his art that the more he profaned love and beauty, the more his grossness rendered him beautiful....

Pigpen was perhaps the main reason I never was on the bandwagon early on. Some bands frightened me and the Grateful Dead was one of them. The Deadheads were likely another reason as well. I never fit in and part of that was because I came after. I was more attuned to The Beatles, The Band, Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers, Neil Young, Leo Kotkke, Jackson Browne,and Pink Floyd.

...The term “grateful dead” is about karma, and asserts that acting from soul and the heart guarantees that righteousness will result. It is about honor, compassion, and keeping promises…

It wasn’t until my personal financial crash of 2009 that I began to be interested in The Grateful Dead. It was Jerry Garcia who won me over. For an entire summer his audiobook Jerry on Jerry was a mainstay every night before bed at my cabin in northern Michigan. His guitar playing and voice soothed my apprehension going forward and I relied on his digressive lead guitar playing to take me away to places I could only dream of.

...Yoga, meditation, biofeedback, astrology, the occult, all of these alternative spiritual approaches were simply LSD without the acid…

Jerry Garcia was the essence behind my meditative life. From that day forward my daily hikes in the Huron National Forest and easy strolls along the shores of Lake Huron for the most part contained the soundtrack of the Grateful Dead playing in my head.

...Hippie antiviolence sentiments challenged sexual roles and contributed mightily to feminism and gay liberation. Perhaps more important than social developments was the evolution of the environmental movement in this country. If humans manage to avoid destroying the earth, it will be hippies and their heirs who will be significantly responsible…

The late sixties and early seventies was a wonderful time to grow up in America. Aligned with so many others on what was wrong with our country and the world was both uplifting and hopeful. Recreational drugs were not only fun but spiritual. Nature was king. Communing with others in the natural world was beneficial to our survival.

...they had tasted the wisdom of Mozart, who reflected that it is much more difficult to play slowly…

There is no doubt The Grateful Dead were onto something special. Sadly it took me too long to recognize their genius. But always better late than never.

“When the Dead are playing their best,” wrote Hunter, “blood drips from the ceiling in great, rich drops. Together we do a kind of suicide in music which requires from each of us just enough information short of dropping the body to inquire into those spaces from which come our questions . . . about how living might occur in the shadow of certain death; and that death is satisfactory or unsatisfactory according to how we’ve lived and what we yield . . . Satisfaction in itself is nothing to be sought, it’s simply an excretion of the acceptance of responsibility.”

The collaboration between Garcia and Hunter was one for the ages. Amazing body of work the two of them produced. Addiction ended it all too soon.

Regarding Jerry Garcia:...Fame, thought his old friend Bob Seidemann, had turned him into a “Flying Dutchman” of loneliness, condemned to wander without intimacy. In particular, intimacy with a lover had always been a problem for him, dating back to his shattered and never-healed relationship with his mother…

Jerry Garcia was a tragic character but certainly the coolest person I have ever witnessed on video while on stage, in interviews, or just listening on cd. There is a warmth he brings and shares, and it is hard to understand his failure at intimacy. It comes through his guitar with no strings attached.

...“[Dylan] didn’t know what he wanted to do,” thought Weir, but were anyone less adept at simple, direct verbal communication than the Dead, it might well have been Dylan. When the Dead broke up short rehearsals for long sessions with the TV to watch Bill Walton’s Boston Celtics in the NBA playoffs, Dylan would sit on a car hood in the parking lot, withdrawn, while the hookers across the street whispered among themselves about him…

In the many biographies of Dylan that I have read the common thread is these Dylan/Dead collaborations were never very good. Garcia was the huge Dylan fan and was the impetus behind the crazy idea of Dylan actually at one point joining the band. It was Dylan’s wish to be a part of this Dead phenomenon.

...Garcia, 1972: “I think basically the Grateful Dead is not for cranking out rock and roll, it’s not for going out and doing concerts or any of that stuff, I think it’s to get high . . . To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe . . . [not] unconscious or zonked out, I’m talking about being fully conscious . . . the Grateful Dead should be sponsored by the government or something. It should be a public service, you know, and they should set us up to play at places that need to get high.”

Years after the fact I believe Jerry was correct. The Grateful Dead belies any idea of normalcy and what it means to be in control. They were the epitome of chaos. Even to the end.

This is a book that I read soon after it came out about 10 years ago, and pulled off my self recently to re-read in light of the recent culminating concerts. This is a very thorough history of the band from 1965 - Garcia's death.

Whatever brownie points McNally acquired with Garcia with his excellent book on Kerouac, he squandered in this book when he inserted himself into it as a major figure (aka, "Scribe") rather than focusing solely on the history of the band (this, after all, was to be their long awaited "official biography"). While he indeed did so, there was not an awful lot said that I hadn't previously heard through other sources. It is infinitely distracting and irritating for the author of a biography to pretend they are themselves a person of interest for the person interested in buying a biography about people they're actually interested in knowing more about! I suppose one might shrug and say "well, blame that on acid" -but, ultimately, that's what wrecked this book for me. The portions regarding the 1972 Europe tour were interesting, but I passed it along to a younger friend with regrets. "Official biography" my eye.

As the band's longtime publicist, Dennis McMally had a pretty intimate perspective for telling the story of the Grateful Dead, and he makes use of it in this comprehensive biography of the band, which travels from the group's early days in San Francisco to their sad farewell to Jerry Garcia.

All of the band members get their time in the spotlight, but as the group's defining presence, Jerry is a key focus. McNally stretches back to Garcia's childhood, taking us through the loss of his father, his estrangement from his mother, an aimless adolescence, a failed stint in the military, and finally a full-bore obsession with music. Jerry started out looking to be an expert banjo picker in a bluegrass band, but a trip through the segregation-era south scared him off that audience and moved him in the direction of rock and roll instead. While giving lessons at a local guitar school, he fell in with a group of musicians that eventually included Pigpen McKernan (a local greaser kid), Bill Kreutzmann (a teen-group drummer), Bob Weir (a thrill-seeking rich kid), Phil Lesh (who went from music school to delivering the mail), and eventually Mickey Hart (a drum freak from out east).

The stories of the band jelling are richly captured by McNally, with a nice dose of commune living, free love and San Francisco psychedelia. The band is so loosely organized, and unconcerned with pleasing crowds, that it's a wonder they made a living at all. But they do, persevering to travel the world, play thousands of jams and become millionaires.

McNally is a big fan of the band, and at times his writing can be too credulous about their larger, cosmic, impact. It's hard not to scoff when you come across passages like the following: “In the course of the fall’s shows, the six of them took their new material and became the Grateful Dead. Playing together night after night while high as could be, they quite often found themselves in a state of grace, and they discovered they were on a mission from God, serving the universe and evolution.”

But "A Long Strange Trip" is a warts-and-all treatment. McNally dedicates pages to the band's self-absorption, sharing how the same all-encompassing commitment to music that fueled their careers often made a shambles of their personal lives. He also lays out decades worth of shallow pranks on the road, bad, drugged-out shows and back-stabbings delivered via the grapevine. Jerry Garcia in particular seemed to have a damning tendency to duck and run at signs of trouble, and you come away feeling the band was largely self-centered and unreliable. The good shows were great, but there were a lot of tossed-off ones too, it seems, and when their scene fell on hard drugs there were some tragic casualties.

Still, it's fascinating to read about the Grateful Dead's unlikely ascent, and it's nice to get a firsthand look at the circumstances behind some of their biggest successes. McNally focuses largely on the concerts and the music, leaving out much exploration of the Dead's ties to cultural of industry trends beyond the initial Haight-Ashbury scene. But their long career gives him plenty of fodder, even if the book may be overly detailed for a casual fan.

In the end, Robert Hunter's "Ten Commandments of Rock and Roll," recorded here, just about sum it up. The group is far from perfect, but they were fiercely independent and in a class of their own.

1. Suck up to the Top Cats.
2. Do not express independent opinions.
3. Do not work for common interest, only factional interests.
4. If there’s nothing to complain about, dig up some old gripe.
5. Do not respect property or persons other than band property or personnel.
6. Make devastating judgments on persons and situations without adequate information.
7. Discourage and confound personal, technical and/or creative projects.
8. Single out absent persons for intense criticism.
9. Remember that anything you don’t understand is trying to fuck with you.
10. Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.


Additional Quotes

“Born Wolfgang Grajonza in Berlin in 1931, [Bill Graham] was sent to a Parisian orphanage ahead of the Nazis in 1939, soon joining sixty-three other children in a terrifying escape from Paris to Lisbon by foot, bus, and train. From Lisbon they traveled to Casablanca, from there to Dakar, then to New York. Only eleven children survived the trip. At that, he was luckier than many of his relatives, some of whom died, or his sister Ester, who endured and somehow survived the concentration camp at Auschwitz. In New York he grew up to be a pugnacious Bronx hustler, interested in sports, Latin dancing, and gambling. He waited tables and ran a gambling sideline in the Catskills, then served in Korea, where he earned one Bronze Star for bravery and two courts-martial for insubordination.”

“Stephen Gasking, a power in the freak community, replied, ‘Bill, we’ve heard that rap many times before. You took the choice between love and money. You got the money—don’t come looking for the love.’”

A great overview of the history of this seminal band and the era that spawned it.

I love the Grateful Dead and loved this backstage look at the life of the Grateful Dead from their beginnings through their entire long strange trip. I used to follow them a bit when I was in college, yes I was a "deadhead", and it's fun to remember those times.

It was a decent book. It taught me much more than I would ever expect to know about the Grateful Dead. I enjoyed following their journey from a member of the "family." I wish the writer was better and he had a much, much better editor. There were times when it was hard to understand the meaning of the sentence. I think a little to much time with the heavy stuff has caused there to be some writing issues. Read this book if you enjoy the GD or if you want to experience the 60's and 70's!

This is a very comprehensive history of the Grateful Dead, concentrating especially on their start-up years of 1965-1973. It's well-written and fair---not always complimentary to this beast of a band that consumed so many lives on its way to becoming one of the top touring acts of the 1980s and 1990s. Lots of fun anecdotes, as well, and if you are at all interested in 1960s history, it does a good job of showing their place in those turbulent, fascinating times.

Great book, but I don't remember reading it! :-)

As an avid explorer of everything Beatnik/counter-culture/Gonzo, words from The Dead's official biographer were a must-read. If your curiosities follow a similar path, or if you're just a human (and, therefore, appreciative of GD melody), I'd recommend "A Long Strange Trip."

I really debated whether to give this "inside history" three or four stars. I settled on four because I often couldn't put it down. It's a good read despite its many flaws.

But flawed it is; McNally sets the scene well but often fails to deliver in great detail. Moreover, when he does, it's marred by a weird mix of banal language and SAT vocabulary words.

Overall, I'm glad I read A Long Strange Trip, but I wouldn't recommend it to many others. McNally tries too hard at times, needs to put down the thesaurus, and could use a few lessons in pacing his story; I'm pretty sure it's over two thirds in when Pigpen kicks.

Spoiler alert: Jerry dies at the end.