Living with the Dead
Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
As a manager for the Grateful Dead, Rock Scully was with the band from its early days in San Francisco to the years it spent touring the globe as one of the most enduring legends in music history. In Living with the Dead , Scully gives a complete account of his outrageous experiences with the band, during years that saw the Grateful Dead transform from a folksy revivalist band to psychedelic explorers of outer space. In addition to close-up portraits of band members Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Pigpen, Phil Lesh, Micky Hart and Bill Kreutzmann, Scully brings into the story many of the people the Dead encountered in their journeys across America's musical landscape, including Ken Kesey, Janis Joplin, Etta James, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and the Jefferson Airplane. Scully tells the story of the band with genuine feeling; the tour disasters, acid trips, and burnouts, but most importantly the exaltation of delivering fantastic music.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Scully first saw the Grateful Dead perform, in San Francisco in 1965, he thought they were the ``world's ugliest band.'' He promptly signed on as their manager and lived with them for the next 20 years; in 1985, fresh from a heroin detox clinic, he quit or was fired amid charges (all false, says he) of misusing the band's money. His account of those years, written with the coauthor of Marianne Faithfull's autobiography, is not addressed exclusively to an audience of Deadheads. In fact, they may be disappointed by the low profile Jerry Garcia keeps in Scully's memories. He does remember the LSD and the drugs and the hazy high jinks: the souring Haight-Ashbury scene, Woodstock and Altamont, the ``endless party rolling down the road.'' He describes Garcia as ``magnetic, affable, inquisitive, approachable and infinitely benign,'' and that's about as deep as it gets. A few of the albums, especially early ones, get some attention, but Scully is more interested in the Dead as a social phenomenon. And after 20 years, with Garcia getting ever deeper into drugs and isolation, the group, he says, became both a self-parody and a ``cash cow.'' Photos not seen by PW.
