Home Before Daylight: My Life on the Road with the Grateful Dead Steve Parish

“They shared secrets and lies. Jerry remained one of the most gifted and charismatic artists in rock ‘n’ roll. He was the Grateful Dead, and it was possible, even necessary, to forgive him almost anything, and to indulge all manner of bad behavior. Keith didn’t have that luxury, which is why he was nudged off stage.”

With an intimacy few rock memoirs dare to touch, Home Before Daylight isn’t about celebrity or even music — it’s a tale of loyalty and loss. 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.

Growing up in Queens and starting as an unpaid part of the crew in 1969, Parish became a constant presence in the long strange trip of Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band. Penned in partnership with Joe Layden, Parish’s voice, blunt and slightly ragged, carries with it a truth that feels like being backstage after the encore — the crowd gone, the cables coiled, the air still humming with what just took place on stage and the ache of another four AM departure.

Much of the Grateful Dead literary canon tends to focus on the bright and beautiful; a quasi-mystical narrative that paints a soft halo around the band and its scene. Less so here. There’s humor in these pages, but also heartbreak. Several chapters are haunting in their honesty and raw intimacy. His accounts of Garcia’s decline, being at his bedside when Jerry was comatose and the heavy silence that followed his passing, hit with the blunt ache of someone who’s carried both the music and the man on his shoulders.

Parish is open and honest about Garcia’s opiate dependence. Though I’d long known about Jerry’s struggles, it was sobering to realize how early the addiction took hold. Even as the band inched from the mid-to-late 1970s, a period many Heads trumpet as the most focused and powerful, heroin dependency was a serious problem. When listening to the Jack Straw from Golden Hall on 1/7/78, it’s baffling to fathom Jerry and Keith could be struggling with drifting demons as the instrumental jam builds to levels of intensity that rival or eclipse anything from the entire Grateful Dead catalogue. Keith, Bobby, Phil, Mickey and Billy are a five-finger death punch in lock step rhythm over which Jerry solos. Yet, in just over a year, Keith and Donna would be removed from the band.

“They shared secrets and lies. Jerry remained one of the most gifted and charismatic artists in rock ‘n’ roll. He was the Grateful Dead, and it was possible, even necessary, to forgive him almost anything, and to indulge all manner of bad behavior. Keith didn’t have that luxury, which is why he was nudged off stage.”

For serious Deadheads, Home Before Daylight is engaging, if sometimes uncomfortable, reading. For everyone else, it’s a reminder that even the wildest circus depends on people who believe in keeping the tent standing. On a deeper level, the book is about identity and redemption. Parish’s early run-ins with the law –selling acid, a youth out of balance—and his decision to hitch himself to the greatest road show in rock history form a meditation on chance and choice. The band may have been improvisers—but so, too, were the crew, the roadies, the behind-the-scenes operators.

If I were to level a criticism—it is that the book skirts deeper analysis of failed relationships, collective silence in the presence of a spiraling friend or the backstage culture’s treatment of women as disposable… more props than partners. Then again, Home Before Daylight is not a scholarly treatise, but an oral history, an unvarnished memoir, a document from inside the circus rather than above it.

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JACK STRAW 1/7/78 Golden Hall, San Diego, CA

Credit goes to Brian Smith for turning me on to the set-two opener. With Jerry’s voice silenced by laryngitis, not a single Garcia tune is performed during this two-night stand.

Back in our Berkeley days, Brian basically ran an unauthorized community sound system out of our third-floor apartment. Those booming cars which bump and thump with funky deep bass rhythms? Brian’s rig put them to shame. He would angle a pair of Polk tower speakers out of our third-floor apartment window toward seldom used tennis courts across the street. Local Heads drifted in to toss frisbees while early-generation Dead cassettes roared across the neighborhood at a volume that absolutely should have gotten us evicted.

To this day, I’m still not sure whether our neighbors were closet Deadheads or just too intimidated to complain. All I know is that in four years, no one ever told us to turn it down.