Grateful Dead Scrapbook by Ben Fong-Torres
- Stuart Ake
- Feb 14
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 20
Published 2009 by Chronicle Books
I don't count myself among the die-hard Dead Heads. Aside from the twin treasures they produced in 1970, Workingman's Dead and American Beauty, their recordings are not in my iTunes library. But when I saw them in concert, they never failed to amaze, to educate, and to entertain me with their music, and with the astounding, encyclopedic range of it.
Children’s literature can be a feast of interactivity. Classic titles by Eric Carle, Hervé Tullet and others turned books into playfields, inviting readers to touch, push, pull and lift flaps to trigger surprises and shift the narrative. That same playful, tactile approach broke into adult literature with 1991’s Griffin and Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence in which Nick Bantock unfolds a love story between two characters through a series of illustrated postcards and letters tucked into envelopes mounted on each page. The simple act of removing and reading each piece of correspondence makes you conscious of storytelling as a physical process.
Ben Fong-Torres employs a similar multimodal approach with the Grateful Dead Scrapbook. He pairs a written history of the band with removeable ephemera: replicas of bumper stickers, backstage passes, concert flyers and typed correspondence from the band. An accompanying CD adds another layer, featuring interviews with Jerry Garcia, Mickey Hart, Steve Parish, along with excerpts from press conferences. By having readers handle the history, and not simply read it, mirrored a Grateful Dead concert, which was never intended to be passive listening experience.
Interestingly, I found Fong-Torres’s written narrative the least revealing element of the volume. That is a difficult sentence to write without feelings of imposter syndrome. Who am I to critique one of the most recognized writing voices in the history of rock journalism? His interviews with the likes of Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye revealed the artists as layered, complex and sometimes contradictory thinkers and makers. His work helped shape my love of music. Given his decades of proximity to the Dead, I expected the prose here to tilt the band into a slightly different light. Instead, the history as presented in Scrapbook, largely retraces familiar ground, echoing stories that have already appeared in countless other accounts.
To that end, the real treasure of the scrapbook is the “found objects”, with my favorite being the written concert program for the 1978 shows in Egypt. The multipage booklet, printed in both English and Arabic, spotlights each member of the band, offers chronological listing of Grateful Dead and solo album releases, and includes notes on Hamza El-Din, who opened each concert. Even as a replica, it’s an astonishing souvenir. It makes you picture the small ritual of receiving it at the gates, then walking into the Gizah Light and Sound Theater as dusk settles. What did it feel like to take a seat with program in your lap, knowing you traveled halfway around the world to watch the strange American caravan set up shop at the foot of one of the oldest architectural structures on earth?
In September came a once-in-a-lifetime adventure: a trip to Egypt and the chance to be the first rock band ever to perform at the foot of the Great Pyramid. Band members had been thinking about Egypt as the ultimate "power spot." "Ever since the Acid Tests, we've been into that power." Phil Lesh said. They won the permission from the U.S. government and promised Anwar Sadat and the Ministry of Culture that proceeds would go to local causes.
Even though I went in hoping for new revelations, Grateful Dead Scrapbook succeeds in a different way. It earns its place on the shelf because it is not merely something you read. It is something you handle. The removable pieces turn the book into an interactive playground worthy of repeat visits.
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I dubbed cassettes of the Egypt shows a few weeks after the Greek Theater shows in 1987. I had just moved to Berkeley and stumbled into friendships with Heads with seemingly bottomless collections. At the time, I thought I was pretty hot stuff with my live tapes measuring several hundred hours. Then I saw my first “real” archive, someone with thousands of hours, and realized I hadn’t even scratched the surface.
My copy of the Egypt shows sounded amazing, but listens were rare. To my 20-year-old ears, the performances felt uninspired. Perhaps I was too quick to judge.
Fast forward to 2008’s Rhino Records release Rocking the Cradle: Egypt ’78, which includes a DVD with video from 13 of the 21 tracks performed on 9/16/78 at the Sound and Light Theater. Frankly, much of the footage is wonky, leading me to believe the camera operators may have had a bit too much too fast. Cameras inexplicably drift, lurch or tilt away at exactly the wrong moment. Even so, it’s a worthy watch, if only for “Deal”.
Here, the band briefly coalesces and the whole thing lifts. The camera finds faces in the crowd that look like Egyptian locals, beatifically smiling, moving in the that loose-limbed, noodle-tendril dance you’d swear was only learned by tallying a few shows.
For a moment, think about the setting. Mrs. Jehan Sadat is seated in the first row at a frickin' Grateful Dead show, while her husband, Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin are secretly tucked away at Camp David, finalizing the Peace Accords, signed a few hours after the show ends.
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