Night of the Living Dead

Has any band ever worn out its critical welcome so thoroughly and grindingly as the Grateful Dead? By the time lead guitarist and songwriter Jerry Garcia died at age 53 in August 1995, the Dead was long past its creative prime but more popular and more beloved than ever among the swirl-dancing true-believer fans who never seemed to mind the endless variations on the same revolving set list of the same old songs. Let other bands from the ‘60s fade to black; for 30 years, the Grateful Dead refused to die.

For those of us who witnessed the sparkling genius of the Dead in its first decade or so and then watched the scene flicker and dim into a ritual of reenactment, the band’s story is a tale of exhilarating discovery and lost promise. But however dark the ending, even a lapsed Deadhead can recall the heartbreaking incandescence of long ago and forgive the impulse to revisit and re-create something that’s gone forever.

The stark truth about the latter days of the Dead is this: For the last two decades of his life, Garcia was a drug addict first and a musician second; squandering his great gifts, he wrote only a handful of first-rate songs after the mid-’70s and made inspired, focused music only fitfully. Yet even as the Dead lost its edge and its countercultural subversiveness, becoming as safe and cuddly as the dancing teddy bear that was its latter-day marketing mascot, its popularity soared, and the Grateful Dead was transformed into a multimillion-dollar concert touring machine bankrolled by a huge fan base of weekend hippies and ‘60s reenactors--the rapt, loyal, obsessive, uncritical, pathetic Deadheads. Feeding the machine meant keeping Garcia propped up and plugged in, no matter how terrible he looked or played. When this cynical enterprise collapsed with Garcia’s demise, there was enormous sadness but also an odd glint of relief. (The recent reunion of surviving members, who performed as The Other Ones, was strictly an exercise in nostalgia staged for the incurable fanatics.)

Now, seven years into the band’s afterlife, perhaps we’re all ready to look past the long decline and revisit the original splendor of the Dead in the morning of its wild youth. And so this may be a timely moment for “A Long Strange Trip” to arrive. Although historian-turned-publicist Dennis McNally spent 20 years working on this official biography of the band, the appearance at long last of his 684-page tome may turn out to reflect a propitious delay rather than mere procrastination.

“A Long Strange Trip” is written from a seat inside the bus. McNally earned a doctorate in American studies and wrote an excellent biography of Jack Kerouac, “Desolate Angel” (1979). Garcia admired the book; in the early 1980s he invited McNally to document the Grateful Dead. The writer’s fly-on-the-wall role soon morphed into a paying gig as the band’s press spokesman, a job he continues to perform on behalf of the Dead’s thriving posthumous enterprises.

On its face, this might seem to be a fatal corruption of the author’s objectivity. On the other hand, no matter how dysfunctional it became, the business culture of the Grateful Dead organization always preserved a spirit of ornery iconoclasm and a keen aversion to hype and mindless good cheer; thus, McNally writes with candor about the unvarnished good, bad and ugly in the Grateful Dead saga.

Sometimes, especially when almost all the details of a life have already been told many times before, the best service a biographer can perform is to put the profuse facts of a life story in a clear chronological order. In “A Long Strange Trip,” the effect of McNally’s conscientious work is two-fold: He rescues the Grateful Dead from the spotlight-hogging effects of Garcia’s aura and reputation, thoughtfully rendering both the range of personalities in and around the band and the larger social canvas the Dead were part of; and he 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 lifestyles, with fateful consequences that we’re still fighting about and still trying to understand.

The Grateful Dead were five Bay Area kids and one New Yorker, drummer Mickey Hart. Jerry Garcia grew up in his mom’s bar and on the streets of San Francisco and became a fanatical bluegrass enthusiast before LSD and amplifiers took over in the spring of 1965. (It was bluegrass, even more than the blues, jazz and country styles he mastered, that gave Garcia’s guitar sound its singularity.) Rhythm guitarist Bob Weir was a rich kid (he was only 16 when he hooked up with Garcia in 1964) from the Peninsula; he was also adopted and severely dyslexic. Ron McKernan, “Pigpen,” the first Dead casualty (cirrhosis got him at age 27 in 1973), was a blues-saturated alcoholic white singer, harmonica player and keyboardist who grew up in a black neighborhood of East Palo Alto. Bassist Phil Lesh was a geeky Berkeley-trained composer of abstruse classical compositions who became the Dead’s mad subwoofer. Bill Kreutzmann, who played most of the time in tandem with Hart, was a virtuoso R&B; drummer. In the summer and fall of ’65 they sharpened their chops as a tough bar band, calling themselves the Warlocks.

At a party in San Jose on Dec. 4 of that year, the band--by then the Grateful Dead--performed at what became known as the first Acid Test, where a group of attendees including Neal Cassady, Ken Kesey, a UC Berkeley journalist named Jann Wenner and assorted members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club shot into the stratosphere. This historic evening begat the hippies, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band,” the epic tomfoolery of Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” and much else that came to be known as “the Sixties.”

LSD and the Acid Tests put the Grateful Dead on the world culture map and gave the band’s rise its revolutionary force. The band’s equipment guru, a prodigy from Alexandria, Va., named Augustus Owsley Stanley III, doubled as a one-man LSD conglomerate: In home laboratories, this whiz-kid chemist produced 1.62 million doses of the drug between 1965 and 1967 (LSD was legal in California until Oct. 6, 1966), selling some to help keep the band afloat financially and giving the rest away.

With a great sense of humor, no sense of limits and plenty of brain candy to sell, the Dead turned into the living fulfillment of the most paranoid fantasies of the law-and-order types: They really did come for your children, and they didn’t just glamorize drugs, they fronted a wholesale operation to distribute them. (My favorite picture of the Dead, shot by Bob Seidemann in 1967, shows the band dressed in black and looking gloriously Satanic on a barren street of tract homes in Daly City.) Real revolution, the kind with non-groovy politics and real violence, never tempted the Dead--after all, these were mostly well-bred suburban boys--but the band did have an indirect hand in enabling the ugly side of stoned anarchy, as when a concertgoer was stabbed and beaten to death by the Dead’s buddies, the Hells Angels, during a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont in 1969.

Yes, girls and boys, there was a time when the Dead were punks. Still, however heedless and sardonic and delinquent, the band remained, for most of its run, an endearingly benign project. (Much of what is appealing and humane about the Grateful Dead worldview can be credited to Robert Hunter’s well-crafted and poetic lyrics.) Their psychedelic utopianism is a more problematic matter. As avid proponents of hallucinogens and purveyors of ecstatic marathon concerts, the Dead helped blow open a sizable door of perception and give thousands of fans a glimpse, through that door, of a pearlescent, heroically gorgeous universe of color, cosmic humor and unlimited freedom.

But psychedelics, like all drugs, carry risks more subtle than predictable downsides like psychosis and addiction. Sadly (or not), you can’t live on the far side of that door into eternity, no matter how intelligent you or your drugs may be. Garcia, in particular, chose to believe that you could jam that visionary door open and stay high forever, and by the time he tried to get off the jet to the Promised Land, it was too late.

Amazingly, at least for a while, out of the chaos the Grateful Dead created brilliant music, in songs and improvisational jams, in concert and on records. Starting in 1969, a string of five great albums--”Live Dead,” “Workingman’s Dead,” “American Beauty,” “Grateful Dead (Skull and Roses),” and “Europe ‘72”--formed an aesthetic mother lode that ensured they would outlive the counterculture. This winning streak gave them the artistic capital they lived on for decades to come.

By the late ‘70s, hard drugs--cocaine, a smokable opium called Persian--settled in for the long haul, and the flow of new masterpieces dwindled and dried up. The new fans didn’t mind, and some nights, the band still performed miracles of effortless synchronicity. Yet the story was no longer about heroism but about longevity; not about a new heaven and Earth but about every form of petty tempest and bickering you can find on every episode of VH-1’s “Behind the Music.” And then--with 20 years gone in a flash--Garcia’s dead.

Even so, it’s hard to read “A Long Strange Trip” as a tragedy. Every sin you care to lay at the feet of the Grateful Dead has already been anticipated, admitted, confessed to and guiltily acknowledged in the dark threads that were always woven into the woof of their lyrical tapestry. In songs populated by thieves, killers, losers, victims, confidence men, fugitives, escape artists, pranksters, tricksters, bootleggers, affectless dopers and phony messiahs, the Dead declared its independence from responsibility, clear purpose, sobriety and propriety. “I don’t think of myself as an adult,” Garcia told a hostile punk-rock interviewer in London in 1981. “An adult is someone who’s made up their mind .... I feel like someone who is constantly on the verge of losing it, or blowing it.”

McNally’s chronicle is a more coolheaded, sweeping and evenhanded affair than the one previous insider’s account of note, former band manager Rock Scully’s harrowing and frequently hilarious 1996 memoir, “Living with the Dead.” From the mid-’60s to the mid-’80s, Scully shared the Dead’s altered-consciousness fun-ride, eventually hitting the wall and crashing out of the game. Looking back with justified incredulousness, he throws a harsh, painful light on the greedhead drugginess and infantile decadence of the Grateful Dead’s story: It’s a junkie parable. McNally’s discreet historicism tends to round off the jagged, crazy highs and smooth out the horrific lows, and he is more insistent about the band’s lasting achievement.

“The Grateful Dead isn’t really a rock band,” he declares. “The band’s body of work could lay serious claim to comparison with that of Ives, Gershwin, Ellington, and (Miles) Davis, or any of the other great American composer/performers. So long as there are people who listen to music, there will be Dead Heads.” The two books together approximate a rough justice, both the gutter and the stars.