A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History Of The Grateful Dead (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
As the band's longtime publicist, Dennis McMally had a pretty intimate perspective for telling the story of the Grateful Dead, and he makes use of it in this comprehensive biography of the band, which travels from the group's early days in San Francisco to their sad farewell to Jerry Garcia.All of the band members get their time in the spotlight, but as the group's defining presence, Jerry is a key focus. McNally stretches back to Garcia's childhood, taking us through the loss of his father, his estrangement from his mother, an aimless adolescence, a failed stint in the military, and finally a full-bore obsession with music. Jerry started out looking to be an expert banjo picker in a bluegrass band, but a trip through the segregation-era south scared him off that audience and moved him in the direction of rock and roll instead. While giving lessons at a local guitar school, he fell in with a group of musicians that eventually included Pigpen McKernan (a local greaser kid), Bill Kreutzmann (a teen-group drummer), Bob Weir (a thrill-seeking rich kid), Phil Lesh (who went from music school to delivering the mail), and eventually Mickey Hart (a drum freak from out east).The stories of the band jelling are richly captured by McNally, with a nice dose of commune living, free love and San Francisco psychedelia. The band is so loosely organized, and unconcerned with pleasing crowds, that it's a wonder they made a living at all. But they do, persevering to travel the world, play thousands of jams and become millionaires.McNally is a big fan of the band, and at times his writing can be too credulous about their larger, cosmic, impact. It's hard not to scoff when you come across passages like the following: “In the course of the fall’s shows, the six of them took their new material and became the Grateful Dead. Playing together night after night while high as could be, they quite often found themselves in a state of grace, and they discovered they were on a mission from God, serving the universe and evolution.”But "A Long Strange Trip" is a warts-and-all treatment. McNally dedicates pages to the band's self-absorption, sharing how the same all-encompassing commitment to music that fueled their careers often made a shambles of their personal lives. He also lays out decades worth of shallow pranks on the road, bad, drugged-out shows and back-stabbings delivered via the grapevine. Jerry Garcia in particular seemed to have a damning tendency to duck and run at signs of trouble, and you come away feeling the band was largely self-centered and unreliable. The good shows were great, but there were a lot of tossed-off ones too, it seems, and when their scene fell on hard drugs there were some tragic casualties.Still, it's fascinating to read about the Grateful Dead's unlikely ascent, and it's nice to get a firsthand look at the circumstances behind some of their biggest successes. McNally focuses largely on the concerts and the music, leaving out much exploration of the Dead's ties to cultural of industry trends beyond the initial Haight-Ashbury scene. But their long career gives him plenty of fodder, even if the book may be overly detailed for a casual fan.In the end, Robert Hunter's "Ten Commandments of Rock and Roll," recorded here, just about sum it up. The group is far from perfect, but they were fiercely independent and in a class of their own.1. Suck up to the Top Cats.2. Do not express independent opinions.3. Do not work for common interest, only factional interests.4. If there’s nothing to complain about, dig up some old gripe.5. Do not respect property or persons other than band property or personnel.6. Make devastating judgments on persons and situations without adequate information.7. Discourage and confound personal, technical and/or creative projects.8. Single out absent persons for intense criticism.9. Remember that anything you don’t understand is trying to fuck with you.10. Destroy yourself physically and morally and insist that all true brothers do likewise as an expression of unity.Additional Quotes“Born Wolfgang Grajonza in Berlin in 1931, [Bill Graham] was sent to a Parisian orphanage ahead of the Nazis in 1939, soon joining sixty-three other children in a terrifying escape from Paris to Lisbon by foot, bus, and train. From Lisbon they traveled to Casablanca, from there to Dakar, then to New York. Only eleven children survived the trip. At that, he was luckier than many of his relatives, some of whom died, or his sister Ester, who endured and somehow survived the concentration camp at Auschwitz. In New York he grew up to be a pugnacious Bronx hustler, interested in sports, Latin dancing, and gambling. He waited tables and ran a gambling sideline in the Catskills, then served in Korea, where he earned one Bronze Star for bravery and two courts-martial for insubordination.”“Stephen Gasking, a power in the freak community, replied, ‘Bill, we’ve heard that rap many times before. You took the choice between love and money. You got the money—don’t come looking for the love.’”
Widely considered to be the ultimate compendium for Grateful Dead history, Dennis McNally’s A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead is an extremely dense book. It has taken me a long time to finish it, but it was extremely well-written and contained a lot of information that I did not know prior to picking it up.The book follows the Grateful Dead from their 1965 gig at Magoo’s Pizza in Menlo Park, CA to Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995. McNally was the official band historian beginning in 1980. There’s a lot to be found in this book, from musical trivia and lyrics, feuds between the band members and crew, a sense of what being a Dead Head is all about, etc. It is essentially an encyclopedia for the Dead.The book is presented mostly in chapter format, with an occasional “Interlude” thrown in. These Interludes do a good job of breaking up the flow of time for the reader, making it easy to read such a long book. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to read, but at times it felt like information overload - I mean, I love the Dead but I don’t need to know absolutely everything! But the good side of this is that if you want to know anything about the Dead, you can probably find it inside.Published in 2003, the book doesn’t have any information on The Dead’s reunification in 2009 (which I was fortunate to witness firsthand) or the musical developments of Phil Lesh and Friends, RatDog and The Other Ones in the mid-200s. But that’s to be expected, and considering this book is about the Grateful Dead, and not the side projects that happened after Garcia passed, there really isn’t anything missing.4/5 Stars. 684 pages. Published 2003.
What do You think about A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History Of The Grateful Dead (2003)?
Whew. This was a long, rambling, occasionally enlightening but ultimately shambolic and overlong tome on one of the '60s counterculture's most enduring institutions. In this way, it's not unlike the band at its most aimless and self-indulgent. Granted, there's a lot of ground here to cover, from the band's freewheeling early days to the many financial missteps to the band's obsession with sound and fidelity to a full-on cultural phenomenon which garnered the regard of much straighter business entrepreneurs. But it unfortunately doesn't focus on any of these very well. In particular, it really misses an opportunity to craft a truly moving narrative around the book's most intriguing character, Jerry Garcia. Far from being the wise, bearded father figure of the freak nation, Garcia emerges from the brief biographical sketches as a deeply troubled victim of the Dead's success, silently slaughtered over the decades by the demands of countless hangers-on and audience members, resented by bandmates and categorically denied of any solace or chance to heal through love or music, each of which betrays him over time. It is utterly heartbreaking to acknowledge that the scion of a huge underground family should die alone in his sleep in a detox center after a lifetime of horrendous choices caught up with him. A more skilled biographer, or perhaps one not so intimately linked to the Dead (McNally served as their publicist.), could have crafted this into a very powerful, if difficult, object lesson for an entire community. As it stands, there's plenty of unique tidbits in here that make it important for anyone trying to understand why the Dead meant so much for so long to their audience, but hard to wade through if you're not a Deadhead.
—Justin Hampton
McNally has all the scholarly chops of a true historian -- as he should since he earned a PhD in History at UMass Amherst before started following the band in 1978. At that point, DESOLATE ANGEL, his dissertation-turned standard bio of Kerouac had just been published. Although he spent the next 30 years with band -- half of that with Garcia -- and has more stories than he will ever have time to time tell, this book maintains its academic rigor throughout . . . so much so that you may find it tedious unless you like that kind of thing and never tire of Dead. I fall into both caregories. McNally is also a truly good guy, with enormous integrity and good sense. The kind of guy, and the kind of writer, you want on your side.
—Wesley Blixt
Some people see the bus and get on. Others see the bus, but don't get on, and then there are those that don't even see the bus.It was nice to get more of the background on the Dead, the members, their operations, and more. The book included plenty of the bad that was part of their story.The book mentioned a couple of the shows I had been to, and several "old stomping grounds" when I used to live in the Bay Area. A fun flashback to memory lane.I also have several musicians that I had never listened to before that I have been able to listen to and really dig.One of my favorite parts of the book was when Micky Hart explains the rhythms in "The Other One".
—Zinger
