Grateful Dead Book Reviews

Raw and real, When Push Comes to Shove presents the unfiltered Grateful Dead tour journals of Hollie A. Rose. Spanning 1988 to 1992, her entries capture the messy and sometimes contradictory reality of life as a “tour rat,” truckin’ from venue to venue in pursuit of magic through music and the long strange, sustaining alchemy of the Dead community.

In Loud and Clear, Brian Anderson explores the band’s search for sonic purity. The Wall of Sound wasn’t just a PA—it was a skyline three stories high containing some 600 speakers powered by McIntosh amps stacked like steel towers.

Visual gold, Jim Marshall’s Grateful Dead book works less as a traditional photo collection and more as a backstage pass. Marshall had a rare gift for being close without intruding and the result is a series of exceptional images that feel candid and natural.

For Deadheads — or anyone shaped by the late-’60s and ’70s counterculture — Far Away Radios is an emotional echo of a world that helped keep Dead’s wheels turning. Even for readers without that history, the book stands on its own as a modest, quietly haunting collection from a poet who lived hard, wrote honestly and left behind a slim volume that hums with human truth.

For Deadheads, music archivists or anyone curious about participatory fan culture, "After All is Said and Done" provides a detailed, enthusiastic and remarkably thorough guide to a practice that helped the music—and the myth—endure to the present day.

The ABCs of the Grateful Dead takes a whimsical, kid-friendly approach to the band’s sprawling mythology, distilling decades of cultural history into a brightly illustrated alphabetical tour of the Grateful Dead’s world.

Shot on film across twenty years—from parking lots in the late ’70s to the bittersweet final tours toward the mid-’90s—Deadheads is akin to a family album. The grain and haze of analog film feel right here; memory itself seems to seep from the negatives. Blakesberg isn’t chasing perfection. He’s chasing spirit—the stoney smile under a tie-dyed bandana, the spontaneous ritual of strangers dancing in time.

Steve Parish was not a star of the Grateful Dead; as a roadie, he was one of the custodians of their myth, the guy who hauled heavy crates and stayed awake long after the encore, the friend and fixer who knows the cracks in the mirror.