Rolling Stone on Fare Thee Well

Will Hermes of Rolling Stone just gave it up for Fare Thee Well--and the 2015 books that chronicled the Long, Strange Trip. Was delighted to see No Simple Highway in such good company. In the course of writing it, I came to know David Gans, Blair Jackson, David Browne, Benjy Eisen, David Dodd, and Jesse Jarnow--all of whom appear in this piece. Fanatical readers of this blog won't be surprised to learn that we've all supported each other, in one way or another, all along the way. That includes Dennis McNally, who was a big help to me when On Highway 61 was still a gleam in his eye.

Fare Thee Well, 2015

Eleven months ago, the "core four" members of the Grateful Dead announced their final concerts in Chicago. Four days later, No Simple Highway appeared. The timing was coincidental; we always wanted a 2015 publication date to tap interest in the Dead's 50th anniversary, but the publisher also wanted more space between my book and Bill Kreutzmann's. (We shared the same editor and publicity team.) So mine was moved up to January, and Bill & Benjy Eisen's came out in the spring. David Browne's So Many Roads also dropped in spring, and now we have strong additions by Dennis McNally (Jerry on Jerry) and Blair Jackson & David Gans (This Is All a Dream We Dreamed).

We're finishing the year with the paperback version of No Simple Highway, and I'm especially gratified that Jeremy Varon, New School history professor and editor of The Sixties, has published a brand new and very positive review of the book. Man, it feels good when someone reads carefully, not to mention approvingly.

If this was a good year for the growing Grateful Dead bookshelf, the national response to Fare Thee Well was the strongest indication yet that the Dead's project was uniquely successful. According to Billboard, the Chicago shows ranked first among the music industry's highest-grossing concerts, and the Santa Clara shows ranked third. No one familiar with the Dead's project was surprised by the fact that their community is still large, engaged, and incredibly supportive. But I'm glad the rest of the country (and the media) also witnessed that energy and support.

No Simple Highway argues that the Dead's project has to be evaluated on its own terms. That's standard practice for all thoughtful criticism; you judge artists by how well they achieve what they set out to do. From the beginning, the Dead sought to get people high through music and to build community. By that measure, their achievement can't be denied.

Robotic California

Lots of talk now about robots and artificial intelligence. My interest was piqued by Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots, which I reviewed for Truthdig. Ford and others are raising the prospect of a jobless future as a result of accelerating automation. Most economists are dubious; automation isn't new, and past predictions of joblessness due to mechanization haven't panned out.

Some of my early training was in labor economics, so I'm following this discussion with interest. Martin Ford's prediction also reflects a Silicon Valley mindset that falls into my California culture basket. And because I teach humanities, I also want to understand what these authors say or imply about what makes us human.

In my Truthdig review of Ford's book, I note a series of conflations that don't add up for me. The key one is between computation and consciousness. If the latter doesn't reduce to the former, then increases in computing power won't necessarily produce machine consciousness. Ford never addresses that distinction, but many AI experts take it seriously.

Another conflation has to do with higher education. For Ford, higher ed means disseminating information more efficiently. I think it's more about transformation than information, which has never been cheaper or more abundant. The challenge now is to determine what information we can safely ignore. That used to be called "expertise" or "wisdom," neither of which lends itself to automation.

Finally, Ford's discussion conflates news with journalism. He predicts that robots will take over large portions of everyday news writing, which is another way of saying that not all news is journalism. I'm pretty sure we'll always have news; the question is, will we support journalism in the digital age? This isn't rocket science; lots of countries are already doing this quite well. But we've been trying to invent the ever elusive new "business model" for what should be regarded as a public good.

For me, the robotics conversation furnishes another example of why the humanities are indispensable, and I'm looking forward to reviewing two new books on this topic. More soon.

No Simple Highway on "The Tony Basilio Show"

I had a substantial and relaxed chat about the Grateful Dead and No Simple Highway with radio host Tony Basilio a while back. That interview is now up at Tony's site. He posed some thoughtful, open-ended questions that allowed us to go a bit deeper than usual. Delighted with the way it turned out. Many thanks, Tony.

Making It Happen at the Bank

Forbes magazine has taken a keen interest in the Grateful Dead and their enterprise over the years, but Fare Thee Well takes the cake. Why? It probably has something to do with the $52 million in ticket sales, plus the largest pay-per-view audience (400,000 viewers) for a musical event ever. As the Forbes article notes, that turnout dwarfs the second biggest PPV musical event, a Backstreet Boys concert that drew 150,000 paying viewers.

That's serious coin, but consider this other fact: Last night, while attending a Willie Nelson & Alison Krauss concert at the Greek Theatre, I noticed Phil and Jill Lesh strolling to their seats in the section next to ours. No one made any sort of fuss, and they were buttonholed by friends only when they headed backstage during intermission. It's hard to imagine another musician who helps generate that much revenue moving as freely through a crowd as Phil.

Those two facts--record-breaking rock concerts and no fuss over the musicians--don't seem to go together, but I'm glad they do.

Fare Thee Well

Catching up: David Ulin turned his gaze to Fare Thee Well just before the Chicago shows. His LA Times piece ran in the Chicago Tribune as well. Lots to think about, but I'm especially glad he mentioned No Simple Highway--and quoted the blog! Interesting, too, that he mentioned the Dead in connection with what Greil Marcus calls the Old, Weird America. That was part of the argument in No Simple Highway.

The Big Show

I'm preparing for the Santa Clara show tonight with the so-called "core four" of the Grateful Dead. Should be a blast. I've been following the run-up, of course, including a New Yorker podcast that made many good points, but it also reminded me that many smart people don't really understand the Dead or their achievement. Like many rock critics of yore, some of these commentators can't see what's in plain sight, in part because of what my dissertation director used to call "a hardening of the categories." Let me explain.

Most critics listen to the Dead's albums or live tapes, pass judgment on what they hear, and think their work is done. That's fine, especially if they're aware that the Dead improvised fearlessly for decades, and that the live performances (which were their calling card) could be uneven. But that approach also misses something important, for the Dead also had a larger project that distinguished them from their peers and helps account for their durable success.

How to describe that project? It's a long story, but the headline version is that their concerts expanded the social space for the experience of total rapture; their tours furnished fans with the opportunity for adventure; and those fans could experience that ecstasy and adventure in a large, vibrant, and cohesive community. As I've been trying to say since No Simple Highway came out, many people want some ecstasy, adventure, and community in their lives.

Yes, the Dead have a great songbook, but so do many other musicians. The question is, did the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, or any other contemporary artist you can think of foster so much community for so long? Now, two decades after the band dissolved, that community will have a few more chances to commune. And that experience is really what this excitement is all about.

The Dead in the Age of Reagan

When I pitched the proposal for No Simple Highway, it didn't include anything about what historian Sean Wilentz has called the Age of Reagan. I was well along with the manuscript, in fact, before I realized Ronald Reagan was the perfect foil for the Dead's project.

When discussing the Dead and American politics, it's easy to screw up, but a few facts are very clear. In California, Ronald Reagan ran against hippies, and as president, he intensified the War on Drugs. Neither move was meant to please the Dead Head community. The Dead rarely made political statements, but Jerry Garcia made an exception for Reagan. He didn't like Reagan's movies, he didn't like his politics, and he didn't like his vision of America. Some readers (and reviewers) obviously don't like those facts, which they attribute to my view of Reagan. But that doesn't alter the historical record, which I double-checked with other experts, including Dennis McNally.

Were Reagan and the Dead embroiled in a vicious and protracted blood-feud? No, of course not. But when trying to understand the band's only top-ten single and transition to the mega-Dead period, you have to consider the context. Consider, too, the personal attacks from George Will, William F. Buckley, and Mike Barnicle when Jerry Garcia died. I challenge anyone to read those attacks and argue that they weren't political. Whether or not the Dead (and their fans) were overtly political, you can't tell their story coherently without considering the social and political energies that were swirling around them. Anyway, much more of that in the book as well as a related article I wrote.

Today, the San Jose Mercury News ran an article on just this topic. It quotes Dennis and me along with others to understand the Dead's late-career success in the Age of Reagan. It's difficult to capture nuances in this kind of short article, but it might lead out to a fruitful discussion.

Note: I think the photograph above misquotes Reagan. The correct quote, I believe, is as follows: "For those of you who don't know what a hippie is, he's a fellow who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah."

Three Chords and the (Painful) Truth

I just finished reading Michael Stewart Foley's Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. I also attended and enjoyed a book event with the author at Moe's in Berkeley.

This short book (about 40,000 words) situates Dead Kennedy's outrageous debut album in an exceedingly troubled time in San Francisco's history--a period that David Talbot, drawing on Donovan, calls the season of the witch. Released in 1980, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables coincided with a sharp cutback in social services, a steep rise in homelessness, and what one contemporary punk called "the golden age of serial killers."

An accomplished historian with an appreciation for the punk ethic, Foley sketches the social and political conditions of the late 1970s and the band's take-no-prisoners response to them. He's also alert to San Francisco's distinctive punk scene and its openly political stance.

His essay is a welcome complement to the extensive literature on the city's utopian mood and music of the 1960s. In fact, he argues that Dead Kennedy's project was also utopian insofar as it prefigured the searingly truthful society it hoped to create.

I plan to base at least one lecture on this work when I teach a course on San Francisco this fall. Very worthwhile.

Review of H.W. Brands's New Reagan Bio

I reviewed H.W. Brands's new biography of Ronald Reagan for Truthdig this weekend. There's a lot to like in this bio, especially in the presentation. But as someone who teaches and writes about California topics, I was struck by some important omissions. To be fair, Rick Perlstein's Invisible Bridge, which I reviewed for The National Memo, also passed over some of this material.

Brands's portrait of Reagan resembles the one offered by Lou Cannon, who covered Reagan in both Sacramento and the White House. I interviewed Lou for my biography of Carey McWilliams and came away with huge respect--not only for the Reagan bios, but also for his work on the LAPD before, during, and after the Rodney King riots. Although Lou and I almost certainly differ in our assessment of Reagan and his legacy, much of what I know about Reagan I learned from Lou.

Lou also told me a story about his first book, which looked at Reagan and Jesse (Big Daddy) Unruh, the key Democrat in the state legislature and Reagan's opponent in the 1970 gubernatorial race. If memory serves, Lou wrote to several dozen public figures asking for interviews and general guidance. He heard back from precisely two: William F. Buckley and Carey McWilliams. Those two had a lot in common despite their different political orientations, and Lou felt, as I do, that it's important not to let ideological differences blot out such similarities.

Dead Heads in the Ritz-Carlton?

A New York Times article headline says it all: "Grateful Dead Fans Replace VW Vans With Jets and the Ritz-Carlton." The big idea is that once-broke Dead Heads are now doing quite well, thank you.

I don't have a problem with the story as written, but the only thing that makes it news is a hoary media stereotype: namely, that all Dead Heads were vagabond hippies indulging in their peculiar form of hedonistic poverty.

Yes, many Dead Heads fit this description, but as sociologist Rebecca Adams has shown, the Dead Head community was always more diverse than this stereotype suggested. Very early on, the Dead's record label found that about 70 percent of their audience went to college, and the band received rave reviews in elite campus newspapers. Is it any surprise that many Dead Heads had successful careers? Or that a fraction of them are willing to spring for the VIP treatment when the core four play together for the last time this summer?

Jerry Garcia's Middle Finger

Just discovered this blog today, courtesy of David Browne and Tales of the Golden Road on Facebook. Was DELIGHTED to read the following review of No Simple Highway.

Richardson, Peter. 2015. No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead. New York: St. Martin's Press.
--Essential, canonical source. Loved this book, a great, rich read, a beautiful set of three long narratives through the themes of ecstasy, mobility and community--exceptionally well conceived and executed. I learned a lot about the San Francisco avant-garde scene, and Wally Hedrick in particular, that I did not know--this is bedrock cultural material for Garcia. I learned a few new things about the Dead, in part via Richardson's work at the amazing GD Archives at UC Santa Cruz, but also just by novelly composing materials that I thought I already should have known ... It struck me in Richardson's hands as a fresh angle that cast some very interesting light, beautifully rendered, well-written stories. I hope this book gets read by more than Deadheads, but by anyone who is interested in digging a little more deeply into postwar American culture.

Man, I hope that "canonical" thing catches on.

The Dead and the Aesthetics of Effortlessness

David Browne has a nice piece on the Dead in The Daily Beast. David is certainly right that much of the Dead's coolness had to do with their authenticity and integrity. As I say in No Simple Highway, they gave mainstream culture a wide berth and showed that hippies could flourish on their own preferred terms.

In many ways, the Dead defined or embodied cool here in the Bay Area when I was growing up, especially until 1975 or so. Another source of their cool, I would say, was their studied nonchalance--or sprezzatura, as the Renaissance Italians called it. Then and now, Californians like to make difficult things look effortless. (If you need to put another face on that, try Joe DiMaggio.)

When I moved to NYC in my twenties, I learned that studied nonchalance didn't have the same cachet there. Quite the opposite: The whole point was to be serious, dramatize your effort, and win the Most Industrious award. Those who didn't were considered lightweight, flakey, etc.

If you're not attuned to the aesthetic of effortlessness, or if you aren't familiar with how hard it is to perform a difficult task at a certain level, you might be tempted to take things at face value and diminish the achievement. I think that's still happening with the Dead, in part because they consistently downplayed their effort. But you don't last three decades in the music business unless you're committed to your project. In short, my advice is to enjoy the sprezzatura, but don't let it fool you.

Dylan-Garcia Redux Again

Well, I suppose it had to be said ... repeatedly. Having read my objections here to Dan Chiasson's cavalier dismissal of Jerry Garcia in The New York Review of Books, an editor at Guernica asked me to write up a short article, which ran today. We'll see what, if anything comes of it. Yes, it's a trifle, but as I point out in the article, it's part of a longstanding pattern when it comes to Garcia and the Dead. The fact that Garcia and Hunter were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame this year, two decades after the Dead dissolved, is another part of that pattern.

The Dead-MMJ connection

I've been a My Morning Jacket fan for a while. Beth and I saw them at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley and at the Shoreline with Wilco, Ryan Bingham, and Bob Dylan. The latter show, the last stop on the Americanarama tour, also featured Bob Weir, who played with MMJ and Wilco. Then Bingham came out to join all of them.

If memory serves, they played five Dead songs, a couple of Dylan numbers, and one Springsteen tune. That was the highlight of the show, in my view, though Dylan was the headliner. He didn't invite anyone to play with him, though Jeff Tweedy, Jim James, and Bingham had collaborated with him on "The Weight" a few times on that tour.

Turns out Weir's presence was the highlight for Jim James, too. "He was so open to talking, the kind of things we were hoping Dylan would be," he told Rolling Stone. "Having him there was like this great gift."

Now I learn that MMJ recorded their seventh album, The Waterfall, at Sans Souci, the home Jerry Garcia shared with Mountain Girl in Stinson Beach. Fanatical readers of this blog may recall that Charles Reich and Jann Wenner interviewed Jerry there for Rolling Stone and what later became Garcia: A Signpost to New Space. The photographer for that occasion? Annie Leibowitz.

Dylan-Garcia Redux

Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that I wrote a short letter to The New York Review of Books a few months ago. It challenged Dan Chiasson's claim that Bob Dylan's foundering career in the 1980s was related to his decision to work with Jerry Garcia, one of several "minor talents" whom Dylan characteristically overestimated. I concluded that while there's no disputing taste, the Dylan-Garcia combination wasn't a case of a major talent mistakenly working with a minor one.

Before making a mountain out of a molehill, let's admire the genius of Chiasson's dismissal. It not only allows him to attribute Dylan's shortcomings to others, but it also makes Dylan's mistake resemble a virtue: namely, excessive generosity. If only Dylan had correctly assessed Garcia's talent deficit, the 1980s would have been another monument to Dylan's greatness.

Anyone paying attention, of course, will recall that Garcia and the Dead were thriving at this time, that Dylan needed them and not vice versa, and that Dylan praised Garcia's talent accurately and beautifully in his 1995 eulogy. But Chiasson would probably maintain that this assessment was just Dylan being Dylan again. Thoughtful critics would avoid his excessive generosity and consign Garcia to the minor leagues.

After sending off my email and posting it here, I turned my gaze to other matters. But while reading the current issue of NYROB yesterday, I saw an exchange in the Letters department that I have to mention.

"I find it ridiculous that [Chiasson] stigmatizes Jerry Garcia and Tom Petty as 'minor talents,'" writes Rick Holmes. "Dylan also collaborated with Roy Orbison and George Harrison in the 1980s. Perhaps Chiasson also considers them insignificant." And so on.

Here's Chiasson's reply.

I'm glad that Jerry Garcia and Tom Petty have such passionate and knowledgeable defenders, and there's no disputing taste. I think they are minor in relation to Dylan, though compared with other radio acts of that era--ZZ Top and Wang Chung, for example--they do seem like great geniuses.

OK, let's pause for a moment here. Jerry Garcia was a radio act of this era? Also, ZZ Top and Wang Chung? Is Chiasson completely ignorant of Garcia's work, or does he only assume that we are? Notice, too, the sarcasm in the crack about "great geniuses," a phrase that isn't synonymous with "major talents." The slippage reinforces the original insult, but I also sense some anxiety here, a kind of critical "tell," even if the reference is primarily or exclusively to Petty and not to Garcia.

Back to Chiasson's reply.

"Roy Orbison and George Harrison are indisputably major, but when was the last time you cranked a Traveling Wilburys tune? That was a lifeless, sleepwalking ensemble, and you know who I blame? Tom Petty."

Too bad Holmes gave Chiasson so much room to maneuver. First, he let the Garcia part slide and worked the Tom Petty angle. That made it easier for Chiasson to dismiss his objection, I think. Second, Holmes introduced Orbison and Harrison for no apparent reason. That permitted Chiasson to concede a symbolic point while sticking to his original judgment.

I lost a bit more respect for Chiasson, in part because I detect an attempt to disguise what my dissertation director called "contempt prior to investigation," which he regarded as an intellectual sin. Nothing Chiasson wrote in the article or reply suggests he knows anything about Garcia. And the diction in this reply seems designed to
compensate for this weakness. Indeed, it's very much of a piece with the original dismissal--clever but not wise.

Can't Wait Until That "Deal" Comes Round? The Kreutzmann Memoir

I was lucky enough to receive an advance copy of Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead by Bill Kreutzmann with Benjy Eisen. (The hoi polloi will have their chance next month.) I ingested 100 pages at the first sitting. Given Bill's vocation, is it any wonder that the book has great tempo?

Bill never did many interviews, and I've heard him complain about the accuracy of the ones that did appear. So I knew I was missing a lot of his basic information while I was writing No Simple Highway. I tried to contact him, of course, but he was saving the good stuff for his own book. And now we have it. I know quite a lot more about his youth, including a random (or was it?) introduction to Aldous Huxley while Bill was attending an Arizona boarding school. (Fanatical readers of the blog will recall that I start No Simple Highway with Huxley's first mescaline trip, which was the basis for his 1954 book, The Doors of Perception.) I also know where Bill lived, whom he married and had children with, and which memories survived three decades of continual touring and partying.

Many insiders have wondered what this book would reveal about the Dead and its members. Let's be clear: Bill pulls a couple of punches. In fact, he tells us so. "When I first started writing this book," he notes, "I imagined that I would go into a little more detail about the reasons why the Dead dissolved after the 2009 tour and why, for years, there were never even talks of reforming." I think I know at least one of those reasons, but the "little more detail" he mentions would have been welcome. On the other hand, that kind of dish probably would have thrown a monkey wrench into this year's anniversary concerts, so I'm willing to do without it, at least for now.

On balance, however, Bill's story is refreshingly forthright. He discusses his mother's suicide, for example, which I knew nothing about. He's also very clear that he didn't want Mickey Hart to rejoin the band in the 1970s: "I was not cool with that. At all." And though he never says so explicitly, he strongly suggests that Mickey's challenges during this time included heroin use. (Mickey has referred vaguely to the demons he was wrestling to the ground, and every band history mentions his dark period following Lenny Hart's criminal mischief as the band's manager.) Bill is equally honest about his own "opium habit" during a rough period of his life, not to mention the fact that the two drummers resumed their friendship and musical partnership. When I saw Mickey play with 7 Walkers a few years ago, their mutual delight was obviously genuine.

Another feature of the book is its emphasis on intense experience. That includes drug use but is by no means limited to it. Bill really liked to shoot at, blow up, and bang on things. He's also drawn to wilderness and the ocean; now living in Kauai, he's an avid surfer and diver. He's clearly focused on action, rhythm, sensation, and percussion, and I found myself enjoying his elemental nature--perhaps because my own is so verbal and cerebral. There doesn't seem to be a contemplative bone in his body, which, in the absence of flamboyant conflicts, regrets, or spectacular revelations, normally makes for a so-so memoir. Yet somehow this one came across for me ... and almost certainly will for many other readers.

For those who may have missed it earlier, here's my disclosure: Bill and Benjy's book was edited and marketed by the very same folks who handled my book.

Bay Area Book Festival

I went to a fundraiser last night in Berkeley for the Bay Area Book Festival, for which I'm organizing some panels. (My official title is "senior literary advisor," but no need to stand on ceremony; "Herr Doktor Senior Advisor" will be fine.)

I'm not gonna sugarcoat it; I was a little starstruck. Among the guests were Joyce Carol Oates, Mark Danner, Adam & Arlie Hochschild, David Talbot, Peter Coyote, Lalita Tademy, Belva Davis, Orville Schell (who hosted), Markos & Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis, Nion McEvoy, Gary Kamiya, Monika Bauerlein, Mark Schapiro, Leah Garcik, Steve Silberstein, and Alice Waters.

The book festival, which is cosponsored by UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Chronicle, is scheduled for June 6-7 in downtown Berkeley. Save the date; it's free, and it will be terrific.

Some Thoughts on David Browne's "So Many Roads"

I just finished reading Deal by Bill Kreutzmann with Benjy Eisen as well as So Many Roads by David Browne. It was a treat to hear the Dead's story told by their original drummer with few holds barred, but I'll say more about that effort in my next post. I have only a few minutes to compose this--I'm in Austin and returning to the Bay Area later this morning--and I want to comment on David's book while it's top of mind.

The first thing to note is how deeply reported So Many Roads is. After contacting David Lemieux about this project, David had access to the Dead's remaining members and inner circle. This was an extraordinary opportunity that David made full use of. He brought forward a great deal of new material based on those interviews, and he contextualized that material in new and interesting ways. (For example, his interviews with Barbara Meier show how the Cuban missile crisis provided the backdrop for Jerry Garcia's "live for the moment" lifestyle.) Even aficionados will find plenty of new insights into the band and its experience.

David also chose a unique way to structure his book. Instead of offering a continuous narrative, which has been done many times before, he selected seventeen days that were either turning points for the band or somehow illustrated its development. He then back-filled important information to ensure the coverage was adequate. So, for example, his seventeen days don't include the one Jerry Garcia died, but he makes sure readers know about that event and its key details. That structure allows David to bring certain moments into sharp focus without sacrificing a broader view of the band's history.

David's coverage is fairly evenly distributed over the band's three decades, and most of what I learned about the Dead from this book was set in the 1980s and 1990s. And here I want to mention a challenge most authors must address in writing about the band. Having read Dennis McNally, Blair Jackson, and Robert Greenfield, I knew I didn't want to detail Jerry Garcia's health problems during this period. It has been done, it's not very uplifting, and it tends to take over the narrative.

I decided to focus on a different theme during that period--namely, the growth and consolidation of the Dead community. This included discussion of the Dead's mail-order ticketing program, David Gans's syndicated radio program, Blair's fanzine, the Dead's decision to allow taping, the growth of the Dead Head community on the WELL, and so on. I also discussed the Reagan presidency and how it (unintentionally) fueled the Dead community. I spent no little time on "Touch of Grey"--not only its success, but also its lyrics--to show that the Dead and their community survived the Age of Reagan and collectively celebrated that survival.

In contrast, David doesn't shrink from the challenge of Garcia's health problems, including the details of his addiction. That's certainly the more straightforward approach, and David brings new and interesting material to bear on it. This decision was only one of many, of course, and it by no means dominated my reading experience. In any case, I look forward to following this book's reception--not only on this point, but in general.

Do I need to add that I relished this book and recommend it highly? I should probably also mention, in the interest of full disclosure, that I met David at the San Jose conference, enjoyed our time together, and am acknowledged in the book. If anything, I'm a little closer to the Kreutzmann project, if only because we shared a publisher, editor, and publicity team. But I'll get to that soon enough; mostly I wanted to recognize David's achievement while it's fresh in my mind.

Ramparts in the News

I recently attended an event at UC Berkeley with Karen Paget, author of Patriotic Betrayal. I plan to read that book next, and I've already seen the coverage (in The New Yorker and elsewhere). I'm following this discussion with interest, mostly because Ramparts magazine figures heavily in the story. Paget's story concerns the CIA's involvement with the National Students Association during the Cold War. Following a lead furnished by a whistle blower, Ramparts revealed that involvement and was subsequently targeted by the CIA. Such stories eventually led to Congressional hearings and more oversight of the U.S. intelligence community.

One review that caught my eye appeared in The Weekly Standard. It's by Gabriel Schoenfeld, who has argued elsewhere that New York Times editors and writers should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for their stories on massive U.S. surveillance programs. He also wrote a book called Necessary Secrets, which "offers a gripping account of how our national security ... has been compromised by disclosure of classified information."

Schoenfeld's review performs a kind of ideological minuet. Much of that performance hinges on its diction, misdirection, and suggestion. The organizing logic is melodrama. The violence of the Second World War, which Schoenfeld mentions in the first sentence, justifies the CIA's overreach during the Cold War that followed. He also refers to the CIA's "Cold War liberals," suggesting that they dominated the agency during the 1950s. This would come as a surprise to Allen Dulles, the lifelong Republican whom President Eisenhower appointed director of the CIA in 1952. After Dulles choreographed coups in Iran and Guatemala as well as the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, President Kennedy pressured him to resign in 1961.

Schoenfeld concedes that "the CIA link to the NSA—and a number of other domestic and foreign organizations—continued well past the point of usefulness." He also notes that "CIA astigmatism should be condemned." Note the passive voice--who, exactly, would do that work, especially if journalists are prosecuted for stories on classified programs? The review says nothing about the CIA's illicit investigations of those journalists or its plans to target them. The diction, too, is designed to minimize the agency's culpability. The agency suffered from astigmatism, or slightly faulty vision. If it had the correct prescription, perhaps it wouldn't have tried to assassinate Fidel Castro eight times between 1960 and 1965. Or maybe it would have succeeded.

That's as far as Dr. Schoenfeld can go toward criticizing the agency during this period. He saves his real criticisms for Paget's "preposterous judgments" about the agency and its efforts. He cites exactly one but assures us that they are scattered throughout the book. I will withhold judgment on that, but the review's selection and emphasis suggest that Dr. Schoenfeld might not be a reliable guide on these points.

Dead Spin

I'm teaching my Grateful Dead course at OLLI again, this time at Sonoma State University, and Jonah Raskin covered the story for the Press Democrat this week. I'm looking forward to the first class on Tuesday. Guests this time will include Rosie McGee, David Gans, and David Dodd, co-editor of The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics.

The Alibi, Albuquerque's alternative weekly, ran a positive review of No Simple Highway. Turns out I also attended one of the Santa Fe shows the reviewer mentions in the piece. In the early 1980s, I was a field representative for the college division of Harper & Row, Publishers. My territory was West Texas and the entire state of New Mexico. While calling on the University of New Mexico, I must have decided to catch a show over the weekend.

While researching my book at the Grateful Dead Archive, I learned that northern New Mexico was on the Dead's mind as early as the 1960s, when a newspaper item mentions their interest in moving to Santa Fe. And of course the region figured heavily in the back-to-the-land movement of the same period.

Nick Meriwether Does It Again

I came across this article in the Hartford Courant featuring Nicholas Meriwether, the founding director of the Grateful Dead Archive at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Nick's advice and support were a critical part of my Grateful Dead research and writing. My three weeks in Santa Cruz were incredibly productive, mostly because Nick made sure I had everything I needed at my disposal. That included books from his private library as well as steady access to his encyclopedic knowledge of the Dead and their times. We also enjoyed the occasional pale ale when the daily work was done.

So Nick is an extraordinary resource. But his overall contribution--as author, researcher, organizer, fundraiser, publicist, and impresario--far exceeds the indispensable role archivists normally play in the humanities and other fields.

Let me put it this way: Some day, and that day may not be far off, people are going to be studying Nick.

KRCB Chat with Suzanne M. Lang

I had a great Friday two weeks ago. I taped an interview at KRCB with Suzanne M. Lang, did a bookstore event at Copperfield's in Sebastopol, and then managed to hear Jackie Greene perform a couple blocks away at the HopMonk Tavern. A scrumptious pale ale was icing on the cake.

The radio program aired on Sunday, and I really like the way it turned out. Suzanne was well prepared and asked great questions. We also had a chance to explore some themes and characters I haven't talked about much. For example, she asked about Ralph J. Gleason--perhaps in part because his son Toby hosted a jazz program at KRCB until recently.

Here's the link; you can judge for yourself how it turned out. It was supposed to be a 25-minute segment, but Suzanne decided to devote the entire hour to the Dead and the book. Very gratifying. Long live public radio!

Largehearted Boy Playlist for NO SIMPLE HIGHWAY

Largehearted Boy asked me to assemble a playlist to accompany No Simple Highway. Turns out that wasn't so easy, but here's what I came up with.

How to assemble a soundtrack for a cultural history of the Grateful Dead? Fill it with my favorite Dead songs, collect their most revered jams, or try to represent the various music streams that fed their huge repertoire? I could even feature the music that Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh spun at KMPX while that San Francisco radio station was pioneering free-format rock programming in the mid-1960s.

I finally decided to produce a soundtrack that highlights the Dead's origins. Well before the band existed, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter were listening avidly to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, which Folkways Records released in 1952. That idiosyncratic collection was a portal to what Greil Marcus called the Old, Weird America—a shadow world of obscure heroes, rogues, doomed love affairs, suicides, murderous exploits, and half-forgotten legends.

In that spirit, then, I begin with Noah Lewis's "New Minglewood Blues," which Smith included in his anthology, and which the Dead recorded and performed many times in concert. Lewis's song was only twelve years older than Garcia, but by the time he heard it, it already sounded ancient, not to mention very weird and very American.

As a youth, Garcia heard fiddler Scotty Stoneman stretch out a bluegrass number for twenty minutes during a live performance. That was the first time Garcia recalled getting high from music; he later said his hands hurt from applauding so much. I've included Stoneman's "Talkin' Fiddlin' Blues" to mark that turning point in Garcia's musical journey. From then on, the experience of total rapture he sought would require improvisation rather than recital.

Meanwhile, Garcia's fellow folkie, Robert Hunter, was reading James Joyce and trying to write fiction. That is, until he heard Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde (1966) and realized rock music could be a fit vehicle for his literary aspirations. Thus, I include "Visions of Johanna." Dylan was another Harry Smith fan; later, he and Hunter would collaborate on Together Through Life (2009).

By the mid-1960s, the Dead were part of a vibrant San Francisco scene that included Jefferson Airplane. When they recruited Grace Slick from The Great Society, she brought along two songs, "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit," a touchstone for the San Francisco counterculture. Like the older San Francisco artists who introduced the teenaged Garcia to bohemianism, the local bands were highly collaborative. Garcia contributed to the Airplane's debut album, Surrealistic Pillow, and coined the title. The Dead also benefited indirectly from their commercial success. Aided by San Francisco music impresario Tom Donahue, Warner Bros. signed the Dead to their first record deal.

One of Hunter's early lyrics was "Dark Star," which became the Dead's most famous (and protean) jam. Many bands, including the Beatles and Rolling Stones, were going psychedelic; with this song, the Dead went galactic. And where Jefferson Airplane alluded to Lewis Carroll, Hunter raised the literary stakes by echoing T.S. Eliot. Hunter would soon cast himself as a western writer, but there was nothing especially western about this lyric, except that it featured a frontier—the final one, space.

The Dead's early, more experimental music didn't sell many albums. But they also had other challenges. In October 1967, most of them were arrested for drug possession in their home at 710 Ashbury. The following year, they moved to bucolic Marin County, where they hung out with David Crosby and his folkie friends. Meanwhile, Garcia taught himself to play pedal steel and provided the opening riff for "Teach Your Children." That song appeared on Crosby, Stills & Nash (1969), a huge critical and commercial success. Both bands appeared at Woodstock that summer. Insofar as the event drew on the contemporary urge to "get back to the garden," Woodstock was a powerful expression of the back-to-the-land movement at its peak.

The Dead's next album, Workingman's Dead, tapped that same back-to-the-land urge. It was packed with soulful acoustic music and vocal harmonies, and when the executives at Warner Bros. heard "Uncle John's Band," they also heard the cash registers ringing. The Dead toured Canada that summer on the so-called Festival Express and returned to the Bay Area to record American Beauty. Those two albums gave the Dead their first taste of commercial success and something to tour behind.

American Beauty included "Truckin'," another popular single. This one tapped the American fascination with the open road, which the band inherited from Jack Kerouac and On the Road. As their touring machine grew in the 1970s, more and more fans began to follow their annual migrations. Those tours modeled a new form of American wanderlust and expanded the social space for the expression and transmission of countercultural values.

On one of their live albums in the 1970s, the Dead included "Brown-Eyed Women." Set somewhere in Appalachia, the song details the challenges of moonshiners during the Great Depression. Hunter's lyric would have been right at home in Smith's anthology. Garcia once said that he related more to Dylan's lyrics, but that Hunter had the ability to evoke a whole world in a song. This one is a good example.

The Dead's touring machine rumbled through the 1970s, when critics wrote them off as a nostalgic act. After a creatively slack period in the early 1980s, the most serious challenge to their enterprise was Garcia's diabetic coma in 1986. When he pulled through and resumed touring, the Dead scored their first top-ten single with "Touch of Grey," which was accompanied by a creative music video. Hunter's lyric can be read as a complex response to the Age of Reagan, but mostly the song is an anthem to survival—Garcia's, the Dead's, and the Dead Head community's. When the band changed the chorus from "I will survive" to "We will survive," they gave their fans something to celebrate. They would survive Reagan, scourge of the hippies, as well as his militarized war on drugs.

The Dead disbanded when Garcia died of a heart attack in 1995. But the music lives on, largely through the continuous reinterpretation of the Dead songbook. Countless bands have covered the Dead, but I chose Los Lobos' version of "Bertha" as a token of that type. (I especially like the unlikely combination of an East Los Angeles bar band and San Francisco hippies.) The Dead's legacy will continue as long as new artists are drawn to their music. And as the overwhelming response to the Soldier Field shows in July demonstrates, the community is still going strong.

Nick Meriwether, Blogger

So glad to see this: Nicholas Meriwether is now blogging on the Dead's critical reception over at Dead.net. Very grateful for the shout-out in the first installment. Can't wait to see where he goes with this story, which tells us a lot about a distinctive strain of American culture in the second half of the twentieth century.

For the uninitiated, Nick is the founding director of the Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, not to mention a walking encyclopedia of the Dead, their music, and postwar American bohemianism in general.

"Ask the Agent" Interview

My agent, Andy Ross, quizzed me for his blog recently. You can find the interview here. Andy is also well known for owning and operating Cody's Books, a Berkeley landmark, for many years. In my view, that was one of three or four key Bay Area bookstores in the second half of the twentieth century.

Hunter & Garcia Inducted Into Songwriters Hall of Fame

Great news that Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia have been recognized by the Songwriters Hall of Fame. But it feels a little weird that they will be inducted along with Toby Keith, who gets top billing in the New York Times headline. "Beer for My Horses" and "Should've Been a Cowboy"? Or to put it another way, why weren't Hunter and Garcia inducted two decades ago?

This news, especially when combined with the NYRB snub mentioned in the previous post, suggests that the Dead and their achievement are still grossly underestimated.

And finally, I can't help but recall what Kris Kristofferson, borrowing a line from Waylon Jennings, said about Toby Keith and his ilk: "They're doin' to country music what panty hose did to finger f***in'."

NYRB Letter

It seems unlikely that the New York Review of Books will run my recent letter to them, but here's the complete text:

To the Editors:

I'm probably not the only reader struck by Dan Chiasson's dismissal of Jerry Garcia as one of "the minor talents" Bob Dylan collaborated with and characteristically overestimated during the 1980s ("Prodigal Bob Dylan," NYR, Feb. 19, 2015). It's true that Dylan thought very highly of Garcia; this much is clear from his 1995 eulogy. It's also true that when they toured together, the Grateful Dead were thriving and Dylan was foundering. Although the resulting album was largely a Dylan production, he later admitted that the Dead understood his songs better than he did at the time. There's no disputing taste, but most critics see the Dylan-Garcia relationship as a case of mutual respect between major talents.

Peter Richardson
Department of Humanities
San Francisco State University

Consequence of Sound

Just found this exchange, a smart discussion of No Simple Highway, on Consequence of Sound. The criticisms are earned and therefore well taken. Unlike some reviewers--okay, one in particular--they read the book carefully. Also, they're younger readers, the kind I had in mind while writing the book. Thus the brief background on The Ed Sullivan Show, etc.

Great to see this exchange, but I'm happy to make this website's acquaintance in any case.

Houston, We Have No Problems Whatsover

This sweet review from Bob Ruggiero's Houston Press Get Lit blog. You also receive the embedded "Touch of Grey" video at no extra charge. The upshot: "No Simple Highway more than serves its goal at looking at the Grateful Dead as not just a rock and roll, but a cultural institution with some insight. And while the band's story has indeed been a long, strange trip, it wasn't one taken in isolation."

Yapping It Up With Arroe Collins

Just found this online. It's one of the longer chats (19 minutes) I had in my most recent radio blitz, and I really like the way it turned out. So grateful to Arroe Collins of WRFX 99.7 in Charlotte! I dug his knowledge of, and enthusiasm for, the Grateful Dead and their history.

In related news, No Simple Highway logged its second week on the Northern California bestseller list. Somewhere (and I think we all know where), book industry executives are consulting an enormous map of North America with dozens of pushpins stuck in it. Two of the executives have cigarette holders tilted rakishly from their clenched smiles. Satisfied with their achievement, they will soon repair to Four Seasons for a long, martini-soaked lunch. Because that's how modern book publishing works, right?

NO SIMPLE HIGHWAY Tops List of Bay Area Books This Month

Got a little love from Georgia Rowe at the San Jose Mercury-News, who selected No Simple Highway as the top book of the month by a Bay Area author. How far we've come since the paper covered the San Jose Acid Test, the first one the Dead (then the Warlocks) attended. No simple highway, indeed.

Another Grateful Week

Couldn't be happier about the book's reception this week. This is definitely the fun part. Brisk business on Amazon, and my agent told me that No Simple Highway made the San Francisco Chronicle's regional bestseller list for nonfiction. (I have an embarrassing story about my attempts to place the Ramparts book on that list. Maybe another time.)

I just listened to this segment hosted by Liz Saint John for Alice 97.3's Weekend Magazine. I really like the way it came out. Thanks, Liz!

I'm looking forward to a KPFA spot today (Jan. 31) with David Gans and the Grateful Dead Marathon). KPFA and other Bay Area radio stations (KMPX, KSAN, KFOG, even KYA) figure significantly in the book, of course. My chat with David today will start at noon. I also plan to work the telephones during pledge drive and will return in March to chat with Brian Edwards-Tiekert.

On February 1, I'm traveling to one of the Dead's sacred sites (Cornell University) for some unrelated business. Maybe I'll light a candle at Barton Hall. Then back to it on Tuesday.

I Can Be Shamed Productively

I chatted it up this morning with Michael Krasny on KQED Forum. (I'm a longtime listener, first-time guest.) It went well, but a caller asked about Joan Osborne, and I totally blanked. A producer told me not to worry; they had already gone to their pledge drive, and only listeners who paid for pledge-free programming heard my reply.

I decided to make this a teachable moment, especially for me. Here's more on Joan Osborne, for all the fanatical readers of this blog who don't already know about her and her work.

She joined forces with the surviving members of the Grateful Dead when they regrouped to tour in 2003 as The Dead, sang with Motown's legendary Funk Brothers in the acclaimed 2002 documentary Standing in the Shadows of Motown, and produced two albums for the great blues trio the Holmes Brothers. She's shared stages with a wide range of performers, including Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Emmylou Harris, Patti Smith, Melissa Etheridge, Taj Mahal, Luciano Pavarotti and the Chieftains. More recently, Osborne has toured and recorded as a member of Trigger Hippy, which also includes rising Americana star Jackie Greene and Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman.

Shelf Awareness Review of No Simple Highway

Shelf Awareness is a go-to review site for the book industry, so it's especially cool that they've endorsed No Simple Highway. This from Rob LeFebvre:

The Grateful Dead's long, strange trip has influenced several generations of music lovers around the world. Peter Richardson (A Bomb in Every Issue) takes a cultural viewpoint to the 30-year musical career of this lasting group of misfits and druggies, revealing them as intelligent, thoughtful, passionate individuals.

The Grateful Dead is more than a band, it's a community of likeminded musicians, stage crew, sound experts and incredibly loyal fans that remains vibrant today, nearly 20 years after the group's official disbanding when reluctant leader and lead guitarist/vocalist Jerry Garcia died in 1995 (and as the surviving members of the group plan a reunion concert this summer). Richardson delves deep, showing the band and its various musical and business enterprises as truly revolutionary endeavors. No Simple Highway concerns itself with the relevance of the band's jam-based, best-heard-live musical style, looking at the group's 1960s inception in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, its country-music-influenced middle period, and its final massive success in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Richardson avoids romanticizing Garcia & Co., preferring instead to offer a story in vivid detail and let the reader make up his or her own mind about the drugs, the parties, the communal living and the anti-authoritarian, audience-focused stance the Grateful Dead held throughout its career. No Simple Highway offers a complete look at why this influential group was able to become one of the biggest rock bands of all time. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor

Discover: An exhaustively researched and entertaining cultural history of one of the most successful yet resolutely iconoclast musical groups ever.

Day of the Living Dead

Lots of radio this morning and yesterday. Here are two representative samples: a long chat with the lovely and inspiring Rose Aguilar at KALW, and a snappier exchange with Ryan Gatenby on WBIG in Aurora, Illinois. I also appeared on nine other shows between 6 and 8 this morning.

Then there's the Dean Russo image, which I love, based on Baron Wolman's photograph. I was lucky enough to visit with Baron, who was Rolling Stone's first chief photographer, near his home in Santa Fe. The Dead attracted many superb photographers--and poster artists--to their project over the years.

NO SIMPLE HIGHWAY Is Amazon's #1 Best Seller in Rock Music

We had a great first week on the book front with events at Diesel, The Booksmith, and the California Historical Society plus interviews on KGO ("The Pat Thurston Show"), NPR ("On Point") and WDET in Detroit ("The Ann Delisi Show").

Next week is also shaping up well. CBS Radio is tomorrow, KALW is Tuesday, the Premiere Radio Tour will tape Wednesday, KQED Forum will air on Thursday, and I'll appear on KPFA's Grateful Dead Marathon on Saturday. I'm also looking forward to the Book Passage event in Corte Madera on Wednesday at 7 pm. I'll be joined there by Paul Liberatore of the Marin Independent-Journal.

The announcement of the Chicago shows certainly raised the book's profile. Honestly, I don't know how St. Martin's Press pulled that off just four days before the official publication date! But as we all know, it's better to be lucky than good. In any case, I'm delighted that No Simple Highway is Amazon's #1 Best Seller in Rock Music right now, and I want to thank everyone who has supported the book so far. Please don't stop!

The Eagle Has Landed

Today I celebrated the official publication date of No Simple Highway with a lengthy interview with Tom Ashbrook of NPR's "On Point." Gotta say I like these long formats; you can cover a lot of ground without sacrificing key detail. Also, Tom was knowledgeable about and sympathetic to the Dead's project.

Tonight I'll give a talk at Diesel bookstore on College Avenue in Oakland. I want to leave time for a lively Q&A, so I have to make some tough decisions. But mostly I want to celebrate.

Finally, San Francisco State University ran a related article on the book. Thank you, Jonathan Morales!

No Simple Highway Drops This Week

Lots of book news to report since the last update. Paul Liberatore wrote this piece about No Simple Highway and the Grateful Dead in Marin. Some of our Marin friends were surprised (alarmed?) to see my mug over their morning coffee.

Jonah Raskin's review runs in the Chronicle today. Fanatical readers of this blog will recall that Jonah also reviewed the Ramparts book for the Chronicle. Also, Truthdig ran an excerpt--on the media reaction to Jerry Garcia's death--just in case you want to wet your beak.

We have some events this week: Diesel Books (Tuesday), The Booksmith (Wednesday), and the California Historical Society (Thursday). Paul and I will talk it over at Book Passage next Thursday, too. See event details at the Amazon author page. Please help us celebrate!

Lots of radio interviews, too, starting tonight at 5 pm on KGO's "The Pat Thurston Program." NPR's "On Point" is Tuesday morning. Details to come.

And of course the real news--that the core four will perform in Chicago this summer--broke the Internet.

Amazon and KALW Are on the Bus

Just learned that Amazon named No Simple Highway a Best Book of the Month in the history category. Very gratifying for me and the whole St. Martin's team.

Now I'm listening to KALW's "Crosscurrents," which has put together a wonderful show on the Dead that includes a recording of Joe Smith interviewing Jerry Garcia; a segment on our OLLI course at the Freight & Salvage; and an interview with Richard Loren, who managed the Dead and recently published his memoir. Very worthwhile.