Grateful Dead Book Reviews

Bill Kreutzmann’s Deal is not a historian’s chronicle of the Grateful Dead. It reads like a field recording from the drummer’s stool told by the man who held the beat. Co-written with journalist Benjy Eisen, the book is exceptionally candid, percussive and sometimes messy in a way that feels honest rather than careless.

You buy an old VW microbus. While cleaning it out, you discover a Deadhead’s scrapbook—part tour diary, part time capsule, part reliquary. That’s the setup for Deadhead Forever: Property of Haze, a fictional journal presented as “found” ephemera: musings, newspaper clippings, setlists, Ticketron stubs, photos, “Dupree’s Diamond News”–style odds & ends and a hundred little scraps that stitch together a surprisingly cohesive narrative. The story is invented, but the details are

Phil Lesh approaches memory like he approached music—with precision, curiosity and the occasional dissonant note. Searching for the Sound isn’t a tell-all or a nostalgia trip. It’s the bassist’s attempt to trace the arc from Palo Alto jam sessions to the strange, mythic machinery the Grateful Dead became.

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.