Grateful Dead Book Reviews

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, 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.

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.