Grateful Dead Book Reviews

With Cornell ’77, Peter Conners takes on the most widely distributed, discussed, debated and dissected Grateful Dead show ever performed. The subject comes with baggage. Shortly after being disseminated through the wider tape-trading network, 5/8/77 began to be treated by some as sacred text. After the show was later repackaged by the entertainment industry into CDs, vinyl and lavish box sets, I fretted Conners might fall into the trap of typing into an echo chamber. He does

Within a few months, David Gans assembled Not Fade Away, a collection of tributes and reflections drawn from the online world, much of it orbiting The WELL, one of the earliest and most influential virtual communities. Published in November 1995, the book preserves the sound of people reacting in real time from the first das of mourning. Where so much of the early coverage flattened Garcia into cliché, Gans turned toward the voices of a community trying to make sense of the l

Buzz Poole, writing about the Grateful Dead's seminal Americana downshift Workingman's Dead, manages to include a good deal of information regarding the writing and recording of the album, as well as a dash of autobiography. It's a creative and ambitious approach.