No Simple Highway

January 1, 2015
Far-ranging look at the ultimate jam band in the acid-drenched context of their formative years.Richardson (Humanities/San Francisco State Univ.) opens his account, fittingly, with a look deep within the pages of Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, a book that "recounted a single day in the life of an English intellectual tripping on mescaline in and around his Hollywood home." Intellectual, hallucinogen, California: Voila, the ingredients of the Grateful Dead, a band born in the heady Bay Area coffeehouse, bookstore and Beat poetry heyday. Richardson wisely locates the band within that tradition, allowing for lashings of British Invasion pop and old blues and for the particular eccentricities the region has always permitted. The author ascribes much of the culture change of the 1960s to the Dead's discovery that, if they were the weirdest of all the guys in Frisco, there were plenty of like-minded weirdos around the country. In the days before the Internet, connecting with those people and building communities required constant touring, and so the band also became as known for its dedicated work-shopping and endless roadwork as for its devotion to the lysergic arts. It's now more than half a century since the band began to form, so one supposes that it's necessary, as Richardson does, to explain who Ed Sullivan was and why Harry Smith's folk anthology was so important to the nascent counterculture. Along the way, the author raises such important matters as the ascent of Ronald Reagan, Jerry Garcia's opposite in nearly every respect, and the role of the Dead as both cultural interpreters and cultural pioneers, a role that is very real, no matter what one might think of hourlong jams on variations of "Johnny B. Goode." Not quite as smartly conceived and written as Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic (1997), but a kindred book that helps locate an influential musical group in time and place.

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March 15, 2015

This book is a missed opportunity. The author, a lecturer in humanities at San Francisco University, structures his narrative around what he considers the three central ideals of the Dead: ecstasy, mobility, and community. He tells the story chronologically, and the first part of the book, which takes us up until late 1969 and comprises nearly half of the text, is excellent, adding detail and nuance to a familiar story. Unfortunately, halfway through the second part of the work Richardson begins to lose his way. From this point on the author seems unsure about how to relate the band to the greater culture--seemingly his overarching goal--and the account consequently devolves into a series of pat summaries of the band's achievements from the mid-1970s to present. The final section reads more like a time line than a history. Overall, the work would have been a far stronger if the opening segment had been expanded by 50-100 pages and allowed to stand on its own. VERDICT Everyone from Deadheads to casual fans to historians of the 1960s will find great value in Richardson's initial narrative. For the rest of the story, Dennis McNally's A Long Strange Trip is the best place to start.--Derek Sanderson, Mount Saint Mary Coll. Lib., Newburgh, NY

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2014
Although the Grateful Dead disbanded in 1995, after 30 colorful years of touring and recording stylistically eclectic albums, their fan base remains a thriving one, with the group's current Facebook page attracting almost two million followers. Those who have never understood the Dead's inimitable mystique often caricature band members as aging hippies idolized by pot-ingesting dropouts. However, for San Francisco State humanities professor Richardson as well as legions of Dead enthusiasts (aka Dead Heads ), the stereotype easily dissolves within a broader picture of the band's enormous cultural impact, which the author presents here in a fascinating historical overview dating back to founding member Jerry Garcia's early adolescence. Richardson argues that the Dead's wide appeal was due to their embrace and support of three fundamental human urges for transcendence, mobility, and community, and he provides abundant examples from the band's days of drug experimentation, artistic exploration, and road tripping. While Dead devotees will revel in the wealth of biographical details here, every reader interested in music and its social repercussions will find Richardson's work both captivating and instructive.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)