The Grateful Dead Reader

Here is an exciting collection of writings about The Grateful Dead,offering both classic and hard-to-find essays, reporting, and reviews.Arranged in chronological order, these pieces add up to nothing less thana full-scale history of the group--from Tom Wolfe's account of the Dead's firstperformance (at an Acid Test in 1965), to Ralph Gleason's 1967 interview withthe 24-year-old Jerry Garcia, to Mary Eisenhart's obituary of the greatguitarist. Powerful, incisive, and always imaginative, these selections includenot only outstanding writing on the Grateful Dead, but also superb pieces onmusic and pop culture generally. And alongside the words of Tom Wolfe, GeorgeW.S. Trow, and Robert Christgau, readers will find poetry, fiction, drawings,and an offering of rare and revealing photographs. Fans will be fascinated bythis anthology's many interviews and profiles, interpretations of lyrics, andconcert and record reviews. Yet The Grateful Dead was more than a band--it was acultural phenomenon. For three decades it remained on one unending tour,followed everywhere by a small army of nomadic fans who constituted a virtualcult. The writers in The Grateful Dead Reader both celebrate and analyze thisphenomenon, in such pieces as Ed McClanahan's groundbreaking article in Playboyin 1972, fan-magazine editor Blair Jackson's 1990 essay on the seriousness ofthe drug situation at Dead concerts, and Steve Silberman's insightful essays onthe music and its fans.The Grateful Dead Reader brims with some of the best writing on music, onpopular culture, and on a band that helped define a generation.

David G. Dodd and Diana Spaulding are a husband-and-wife editorial team. David is a branch manager with the Marin County Free Library in San Rafael, California. He co-edited (with Robert Weiner) the definitive Grateful Dead bibliography, The Grateful Dead and Deadheads. He also maintains the Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site on the Internet. Diana is a reference librarian for Fireman's Fund Insurance. They live in Petaluma, California.