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.