No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead

 

For almost three decades, the Grateful Dead was America's most popular touring band. No Simple Highway is the first book to ask the simple question of why―and attempt to answer it. Drawing on new research, interviews, and a fresh supply of material from the Grateful Dead archives, author Peter Richardson vividly recounts the Dead's colorful history, adding new insight into everything from the Acid Tests to the band's formation of their own record label to their massive late career success, while probing the riddle of the Dead's vast and durable appeal.

Arguing that the band successfully tapped three powerful utopian ideals―for ecstasy, mobility, and community―it also shows how the Dead's lived experience with these ideals struck deep chords with two generations of American youth and continues today.

Routinely caricatured by the mainstream media, the Grateful Dead are often portrayed as grizzled hippy throwbacks with a cult following of burned-out stoners. No Simple Highway corrects that impression, revealing them to be one of the most popular, versatile, and resilient music ensembles in the second half of the twentieth century. The band's history has been well-documented by insiders, but its unique and sustained appeal has yet to be explored fully. At last, this legendary American musical institution is given the serious and entertaining examination it richly deserves.

 

Peter Richardson (Author) 

 

The Ultimate Music Guide Grateful Dead

 

Presenting the Ultimate Music Guide to one of the world’s most pioneering and historic bands: the Grateful Dead. From the dawn of expanded consciousness with Ken Kesey’s “acid tests” all the way to their huge hit “Touch Of Grey” and beyond – what a long, strange trip it’s been… Featuring an exclusive introduction by Bob Weir: “My spine became electric, it was no longer matter…” Bob tells us what it was really like to be on stage during “Dark Star”. Plus a series of new interviews in which a cast of band members, producers and workingmen (and women) recall for us just how far the band travelled It’s now 25 years since Garcia’s death (we’re a month or so after what would have been his 78th birthday), but his presence beams from the archive interviews and the music we give detailed attention to in this new publication. Always old heads on young shoulders, the band he led had lived a life on a tightrope between musical scholarship and chemical-sociological change before they even recorded their debut album. Advertisement If it was hard for them to fit in the sum of their experience into that debut, it was a struggle which informed and energised rather than troubled the band from that point on. The next 30 years were spent chasing something down in their music, which blossomed ever outward. Their releases span official live albums like the superb Live/Dead or Skull & Roses. There are great studio records like Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, both now 50 years old. And all this ran parallel to an unofficial history of live recordings, all – with some foresight – permitted by the band. The band saw themselves as fingers on a hand, which you might see guiding the music along its way, a journey which may not be completely done. As Bob Weir tells us in his exclusive introduction to this issue, he doesn’t only think about what Grateful Dead music has done so far, but also about what’s next, “where it wants to go…”

 

Uncut Magazine (Author)  

 

A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

 

 

The complete history of one of the most long-lived and legendary bands in rock history, written by its official historian and publicist—a must-have chronicle for all Dead Heads, and for students of rock and the 1960s’ counterculture.

From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplished musical entities to ever grace American culture. The creative synchronicity among Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan exploded out of the artistic ferment of the early sixties’ roots and folk scene, providing the soundtrack for the Dionysian revels of the counterculture. To those in the know, the Dead was an ongoing tour de force: a band whose constant commitment to exploring new realms lay at the center of a thirty-year journey through an ever-shifting array of musical, cultural, and mental landscapes.

Dennis McNally, the band’s historian and publicist for more than twenty years, takes readers back through the Dead’s history in A Long Strange Trip. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, McNally not only chronicles their experiences in a fascinatingly detailed fashion, but veers off into side trips on the band’s intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience, or metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members. He brings to vivid life the Dead’s early days in late-sixties San Francisco—an era of astounding creativity and change that reverberates to this day. Here we see the group at its most raw and powerful, playing as the house band at Ken Kesey’s acid tests, mingling with such legendary psychonauts as Neal Cassady and Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and performing the alchemical experiments, both live and in the studio, that produced some of their most searing and evocative music. But McNally carries the Dead’s saga through the seventies and into the more recent years of constant touring and incessant musical exploration, which have cemented a unique bond between performers and audience, and created the business enterprise that is much more a family than a corporation.

Written with the same zeal and spirit that the Grateful Dead brought to its music for more than thirty years, the book takes readers on a personal tour through the band’s inner circle, highlighting its frenetic and very human faces. A Long Strange Trip is not only a wide-ranging cultural history, it is a definitive musical biography.