A Long Strange Trip
The Inside History of the Grateful Dead
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- USD 7.99
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- USD 7.99
Descripción editorial
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Grateful Dead’s official historian presents the definitive chronicle of one of the most long-lived and legendary bands in rock history.
“A Long Strange Trip manages to capture the entirety of the complex organism that was the Grateful Dead. . . . The most comprehensive and reliable account out there.”—Entertainment Weekly
“[Dennis McNally] conjures afresh the pure, unaccountable, jolting weirdness of the unrepeatable moment when manufactured psychedelics burst into American popular culture and ran riot through literature, music, fashion, and lifestyle.”—Los Angeles Times
From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplished musical entities ever to grace American culture. To those in the know, the Dead was an ongoing tour de force: a band whose constant commitment to exploring new realms lay at the center of a thirty-year journey through an ever-shifting array of musical, cultural, and mental landscapes.
Dennis McNally, the band’s historian and publicist for more than twenty years, takes readers back through the Dead’s history in A Long Strange Trip. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, McNally not only chronicles their experiences in a fascinating detailed fashion, but veers off into side trips on the band’s intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience, and metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members. He brings to vivid life the Dead’s early days in the late-sixties San Francisco—an era of astounding creativity and change that reverberates to this day—and carries the Dead’s saga through the seventies and into the years of constant touring and incessant musical exploration, which cemented a unique bond between performers and audience and created the business enterprise that is much more a family than a corporation.
Written with the same zeal and spirit that the Grateful Dead brought to its music for more than thirty years, A Long Strange Trip is not only a wide-ranging cultural history; it is a definitive musical biography.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Grateful Dead forever changed popular music by ushering in the psychedelic sound of the 1960s as they valiantly toured almost nonstop for three decades and consumed loads of illegal substances. Yet the most fascinating, and revealing, thing about the Dead is their fans the Deadheads: tie-dyed, drugged up and devoted in a way that makes Beatlemania look rational. What did the Dead have that fellow San Francisco bands Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Moby Grape lacked? As author McNally (Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America) explains in this entertaining and well-written book, the Dead built up their loyal following by treating fans as equals, as "companions in an odyssey." After improvisation, writes McNally, "the single largest element in the Dead's weltanschauung was their pursuit of group mind under the influence of LSD...." As the Dead's publicist for more than 20 years, McNally packs this 600-pager full of intimate details otherwise unavailable, such as the time the group's janitor vetoed a suggestion from multimillion-dollar promoter Bill Graham as too "commercial." On the other hand, McNally clearly dodges the more unflattering and controversial aspects of the musicians' lives offstage; indeed, every living member of the original lineup provides glowing endorsements on the book's back cover. But perhaps McNally thinks the Dead's underside has been done to death; in any case, with a little prettifying he still manages to pen the most exhaustively researched book on the band to date.
