No Simple Highway corrects that impression, revealing them to be one of the most popular, versatile, and resilient music ensembles in the second half of the twentieth century. Routinely caricatured by the mainstream media, the Grateful Dead are often portrayed as grizzled hippy throwbacks with a cult following of burned-out stoners. A Long Strange Trip is not only a wide-ranging cultural history, it is a definitive musical biography. Written with the same zeal and spirit that the Grateful Dead brought to its music for more than thirty years, the book takes readers on a personal tour through the band’s inner circle, highlighting its frenetic and very human faces.
But McNally carries the Dead’s saga through the seventies and into the more recent years of constant touring and incessant musical exploration, which have cemented a unique bond between performers and audience, and created the business enterprise that is much more a family than a corporation. Here we see the group at its most raw and powerful, playing as the house band at Ken Kesey’s acid tests, mingling with such legendary psychonauts as Neal Cassady and Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and performing the alchemical experiments, both live and in the studio, that produced some of their most searing and evocative music. He brings to vivid life the Dead’s early days in late-sixties San Francisco–an era of astounding creativity and change that reverberates to this day. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, McNally not only chronicles their experiences in a fascinatingly detailed fashion, but veers off into side trips on the band’s intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience, or metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members.
(Peter Simon / March 19, 2015) via A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNallyĭennis 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. The Grateful Dead at the Hartford Civic Center in 1977: left to right: Phil Lesh, Donna Jean Godchaux, Bob Weir, and Jerry Garcia. because we’re definitely going to be turning it up to eleven. Little Hippie just visited the Grateful Dead Archive at University of California in Santa Cruz and will soon report back on our findings. In the meantime, here are eleven titles on Owlsley’s reading list via Amazon. “They were making no money, so to actually take the plunge and invest in a clipping service was a real statement that they understood the importance of PR and of public image.
“The Dead were very much on the forefront of that.” Among the holdings is an extensive collection of press clippings dating back to 1966. “There’s enough material there for people to be able to document things such as the growth of rock music as an industry, in particular the growth of modern rock touring,” Meriwether said. The Grateful Dead Archive in Santa Cruz is open to the public. On the scholarship front, several new books about the Dead, some of which draw upon records located in the Dead Archive, will hit the market in 2015, including Peter Richardson’s cultural history “No Simple Highway” “Deal,” a memoir by Bill Kreutzmann and “So Many Roads,” an engaging read about important milestones in the band’s career by journalist David Browne… And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.We’re catching up on Michael Hamad’s piece Deadhead Scholars, Fans Marking 50 Years Of Grateful Dead: You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. Watch the video above to learn more about this game-changing painting. In fact, they were heavily influenced by an art movement that started in the late 1800s called Art Nouveau. Their job? Make posters for bands like The Byrds, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Steve Miller Band, Jimi Hendrix - all of whom were just getting their start, competing for nightly stage time at venues like the Fillmore and the Avalon.īut these designers didn’t invent that now-iconic style. This style was first conceived in San Francisco by a handful of designers in the late 1960s. You might also think of a very specific graphic design and illustration style, seen on concert posters and album covers: curly, cloudy, barely legible lettering trippy color combinations and decorative meandering borders. When you picture hippies, you probably think of bell bottoms, long hair, and LSD.