Essay on Bob Weir in "Hidden Voices"

I was asked to contribute to "Hidden Voices: Americans with Disabilities in United States History," which was published by the NYC Department of Education this week. It's a resource for K-12 teachers and students in the city's public schools. I focused on Bob Weir, who has spoken about his undiagnosed dyslexia and how it affected his schooling and work over the years. It was an honor to be asked, and I hope the volume will be widely used.

Glen Ellen, Hunter Thompson, and the Grateful Dead

My last post predates the first COVID lockdown, so let's forget about bringing everyone up to speed, shall we? But here are a few headlines.

We sold the house in Richmond and resettled in Glen Ellen. There's a lot to like about this little Sonoma County town, but one of them is its literary history. Jack London lived here, as did M.F.K. Fisher and Hunter Thompson. In fact, I tell the Thompson story in my forthcoming book. Which leads me to point number two.

Savage Journey is finalized, and advance copies are going out now. I'm also writing related essays for various outlets to raise the book's profile. More on all that soon, but I can tell you already that I love the cover. The publication date is in January.

In other news, the Grateful Dead audio book came out a few weeks ago. Believe me, it was no simple highway. The book came out six years ago, but St. Martin's Press reverted the audio rights only recently. My agent (Andy Ross) called Susie Bright at Audible, and we had a deal shortly after that. I VERY tentatively suggested David Gans for the narrative duties. Anything stronger would have felt presumptious, since I know very little about the audio book market, and Audible knows a lot. But as it turned out, Audible was receptive, and David was delighted to do it. He went into the studio, knocked it out, and the audio book is already out there. Selah.

John Fogerty's "Fortunate Son"

I finally got around to John Fogerty's memoir, Fortunate Son: My Life, My Music (2015). As an El Cerrito native, I found the first part especially interesting. Fogerty is adamant about his El Cerrito (not Berkeley or San Francisco!) roots, and his memories range over familiar terrain: Harding Elementary School, Indian Rock, Sunset View Cemetery, Portola Junior High School, the El Cerrito Boys Club, Ortman's Ice Cream Parlor, El Cerrito High School, Contra Costa College, etc. He even names a teacher I knew from Portola who was also a customer on my Oakland Tribune paper route. (Fogerty delivered the Berkeley Gazette, where his father was a Linotype operator.) Well after he became a star, Fogerty worked out of a studio on Key Route in Albany.

Even more unexpected was Fogerty's connection to Winters, one of my favorite small towns, about 13 miles west of Davis. His family spent many summers on Putah Creek before it was dammed to create Lake Berryesa. That creek later inspired "Green River."

As for his musical influences, Fogerty is equally specific. Most notable for me are the R&B radio stations, especially KWBR (later KDIA), which broadcast out of Oakland. The folk festivals at UC Berkeley, where Fogerty met Lightnin' Hopkins and Pete Seeger, also left their mark. At the Oakland Auditorium, he saw James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Duane Eddy, and Ray Charles from the front row.

Fogerty learned about Fantasy Records, then based in San Francisco, from a public television special hosted by Ralph Gleason, the jazz critic at the San Francisco Chronicle who also wrote for Ramparts and cofounded Rolling Stone magazine. Fogerty's longstanding beef with Fantasy (and his bandmates) takes up a good deal of the book. I found it interesting that Gleason, a vice president at Fantasy, evidently sided with Saul Zaentz, Fantasy's owner and Fogerty's nemesis. Lawyer Al Bendich, who famously defended Lenny Bruce in his San Francisco obscenity trial, also worked for Fantasy and plays one of the heavies.

Interestingly, Fogerty didn't identify with the San Francisco counterculture. He wasn't a creature of the drug culture, he avoided Dead-style jamming and improvisation, and he didn't appreciate the casual approach to live performance, especially extended tuning before the set actually started. He's a self-described control freak, and the studio has long been his domain. From the outset, he thought long and hard not only about the music, but also about the finished record.

The memoir loses shape and direction toward the end, when it becomes more of a family album. But the wealth of local detail, the deep dive into musical influences, and Fogerty's amazing run as a singer/songwriter made this a very worthwhile read for me.

Review of Barlow's "Mother American Night"

Truthdig just ran my review of John Perry Barlow's memoir, Mother American Night: My Life in Crazy Times. My interest in the Grateful Dead piqued my curiosity, but tech culture has also become a more important part of my teaching and writing, so I read Barlow's memoir in big gulps.

As I mention in the review, the book sometimes reads like a long turn in a conversation--or rather, an edited transcript. This might have to do with the role of Robert Greenfield, Barlow's accomplice, who has produced several oral biographies. That approach makes for a smooth, quick read.

But I also think that Barlow's anecdotes are meant in part to test the reader's credulity. In the review, I quote several passages that support my hunch, but there are many more. At one point, for example, he says that Deadheads "are hapless and credulous and will believe anything you tell them."

In short, this is a quick, interesting read, but I wouldn't bet the ranch on its veracity.

SF State Now Flying Its Freak Flag

The communications folks at SF State have launched a series on the Summer of Love, with special emphasis on the role of the campus, alumni, etc. Was happy to help the reporters, including Jamie Oppenheimer. My advice to Jamie was to focus on the SF State alumni, such as Wes Wilson (poster artist), George Hunter and Dan Hicks (The Charlatans), Peter Coyote (actor), Rock Scully (Grateful Dead manager), and so on. I'm delighted it's coming out now.

David Talbot & the Bay Area Book Festival

I got a little love from David Talbot yesterday. In his Sunday column for the San Francisco Chronicle, I credited Cherilyn Parsons for creating the Bay Area Book Festival, and David was kind enough to mention my books on the Grateful Dead and Ramparts magazine.

Amir Bar-Lev's "Long Strange Trip"

I saw Amir Bar-Lev's Long Strange Trip last night at the Castro Theatre. I want to write a longer post after I've had a chance to review and absorb it, but I also want to get a couple of things down quickly.

The film, especially the first half, is visually rich, with tons of footage and photographs I've never seen before. The music is polished up very nicely. The narration is sophisticated. (I won't rehearse the details here, but the Frankenstein motif is both funny and effective.)

The band's basic story comes through, but without many of the standard story elements and characters. There's nothing on Olompali, Woodstock, Festival Express, Rock Scully, Danny Rifkin, the poster artists, Carolyn Garcia, Bill Walton, or even band members Tom Constanten and Vince Welnick. This is a very partial list, but even these missing items are striking.

Also, there are relatively few talking heads outside of the band members themselves. Offhand, I can recall Dennis McNally, Alan Trist, Joe Smith, Sam Cutler, Steve Parish, Trixie Garcia, John Perry Barlow, Steve Silberman, Brigid Meier, Nick Paumgarten, and Al Franken. I'm sure I'm forgetting people, but for a four-hour movie, the cast is remarkably lean, and the story is by no means replete. This isn't a criticism, by the way. To the contrary, I'm impressed that Amir could put across the story and its emotional impacts without genuflecting in the usual places.

I was less impressed by the second half of the film. Although the narration and commentary are admirable, the material itself poses a formidable challenge. How do you tell the Dead's story without allowing Jerry Garcia's addiction to hijack it? The film's decisions on this point reflect the general consensus, which is to say that it doesn't break any new ground in our understanding of Garcia's decline. And perhaps for that reason, the narrative is bound to bog down. The second half is tragic and full of rich paradoxes--the young artist committed to fun and freedom who's finally constrained and burdened by the community he helped to create. But the material simply isn't as interesting as the events that precede it. For this reason, I think, the better books spend more time on the story to 1975 than on the final two decades of touring and recording.

Let me quickly add that my own book was faulted for a weak second half. Like this film, No Simple Highway wasn't an attempt to tell the whole story, soup to nuts. In my view, Dennis McNally had already done that, but I thought there was still some interpretive work to do. I emphasized the band's deep and remarkably stable commitments to ecstasy, mobility, and community--which I argue account for the band's durable success. Although I was clear about my purpose, some reviewers failed to note (or remember) it.

By organizing the last section of my book around community, I consciously shifted the focus from Garcia's personal challenges to what was happening around him. That included the formation of the Dead Head community, which the film also treats at length. But in the 1980s, the band also revamped its ticketing operation and taping policy and hired Dennis as its publicist; David Gans began his syndicated radio program; and Blair Jackson and Regan McMahon started the fanzine. I didn't ignore Garcia's decline, but those changes (and others) grew and consolidated the Dead community, broadly defined. Others will decide whether or not my strategy worked, but my point here is to highlight the basic narrative challenge.

Many viewers might give Amir points for telling the basic story straight and well. I predict others will feel a certain loss of narrative ingenuity and power in the second half of the film.

That's it for now. Something tells me I will be returning to this one.

Kepler's Books

I had the honor of appearing at Kepler's Books last week. That's the Menlo Park store that Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter, and David Nelson haunted during their misspent youths. If memory serves, it's also where Jerry met his first wife, Sara Ruppenthal.

The staff and I were pleased that nearly 100 people attended the talk. I invited my students at San Francisco State University, so the audience ranged from newbies to savvy veterans.

Before the event, Paul Freeman interviewed me for the San Jose Mercury News. His article no doubt boosted the turnout at Kepler's. Paul also posted the transcript on his website, PopCultureClassics.com. I liked the article very much, but the full transcript gave me extra room to rave.

For more on Kepler's and its history, make sure you watch Paperback Dreams, which also features Cody's Books of Berkeley. That was an important bookstore for me. Its erstwhile owner, Andy Ross, is now my agent.

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.

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."

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.