Grateful Dead Book Reviews

Brackett traces “Touch of Grey” from Robert Hunter’s early sketches through the Dead’s evolving live arrangements beginning in 1982, showing how both the words and music continued to shift over several years. After Garcia nearly died, lyrics about getting by and surviving suddenly carried a resonance neither Hunter nor Garcia could have anticipated when the song first began taking shape.

Elizabeth Zipern’s Cooking with the Dead: Recipes and Stories from Fans on the Road is an ethnography disguised as a cookbook. It preserves a vanished ecosystem of cooks, vendors, travelers and improvisers whose contributions rarely appear in histories of the Grateful Dead. Between the fall of 1993 and the fall of 1994, Zipern traveled from show to show collecting recipes and interviewing the people who fed the touring community.

Centered around fresh ingredients and plant-based meals, the book is divided into sections loosely tied into the flow of a Grateful Dead show. The first centers on dishes one might expect from the parking lot scene, exploring one of the great under-documented features of Deadhead culture. Before camping was pushed to the margins of the scene in the early 1990s, the parking lot was an adventurous, globally flavored culinary village operating out of the trunks of hundreds of ca