Home Before Daylight: My Life on the Road with the Grateful Dead by Steve Parish
Updated: Aug 19
Cover of the Grateful Dead book "Home Before Daylight" by Steve Parish Photos of roadie Steve Parish in Grateful Dead book "Home Before Daylight" by Steve Parish Photos from Egypt 1978 in Grateful Dead book "Home Before Daylight" by Steve Parish Back Cover of Grateful Dead book "Home Before Daylight" by Steve Parish Photos of roadie Steve Parish in Grateful Dead book "Home Before Daylight" by Steve Parish Dust jacket of Grateful Dead book "Home Before Daylight" by Steve P Photo of cover of Grateful Dead book "Home Before Daylight" by Steve Parish Jerry Garcia with Steve Parish in Grateful Dead book "Home Before Daylight" by Steve Parish Photos of Jerry Garcia in Grateful Dead book "Home Before Daylight" by 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.” - Steve Parish
Outside of the Grateful Dead’s orbit, even the most devoted music fans would be hard-pressed to name a single roadie. The Deadisphere is different. Numerous Heads can name-check “Big Steve”, Ramrod, Kid Candelario, Sparky and Rex Jackson. They know Candace Brightman handled the lights and who handled the soundboard. It’s an example of what makes the Grateful Dead extended family feel less like a rock-and-roll organization and more like its own little planet.
Steve Parish was not a star of the Grateful Dead. He was a roadie. With an intimacy few rock memoirs can match, Home Before Daylight explores the band's journey from one of the less glamorous corners. He hauled heavy crates, drove trucks and tuned guitars. Starting as a unpaid part of the crew in 1969, Parish became a constant presence in the long strange trip of the Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Band. Perhaps more importantly, he became one of the people Jerry Garcia trusted to look after him.
Much of the Grateful Dead literary canon focuses on the bright and beautiful; a quasi-mystical narrative that paints a soft halo around the band and scene. Less so here. Home Before Daylight spends more time behind the curtain. Penned in partnership with Joe Layden, the book captures the exhaustion, loyalty, absurdity and occasional ugliness of life on the road. Parish’s perspective is valuable because he was close to the machinery behind the magic. The approach offers a rare, unfiltered look at a rock-and-roll family navigating a teeter-totter of immense genius and profound tragedy.
There’s plenty of humor. But the most memorable passages explore more difficult terrain. Parish writes candidly about Garcia’s decline, sitting beside him when he was comatose and the grief that followed his death. Those moments give the memoir its emotional weight.
The candor extends to Garcia’s opiate dependence. Though I’d long known about Jerry’s struggles, it was sobering to confirm how early the addiction took hold. Even as the band inched from the mid-to-late 1970s, a period many Heads trumpet as the Grateful Dead’s musical zenith, heroin dependency was a serious problem.
That contradiction can be difficult to reconcile with the music. Listening to ‘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 fro 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. It’s one of those storybook moments that remind you why Deadheads spend decades debating individual versions of individual songs.
Yet, the music was flourishing alongside very personal deterioration. Parish describes Garcia and Keith Godchaux as men bound partly by what they enabled and concealed in one another.
They shared secrets and lies. Jerry remained one of the most gifted and charismatic artists I rock’n’roll. He was the Grateful Dead, and it was possible, even necessary, to forgive him almost anything, and indulge all manner of bad behavior. Keith didn’t have that luxury, which is why he was nudged off stage.
This passage hit me especially hard because he doesn’t separate the triumph from the turmoil. Within little more than a year of that show at Golden Hall, Keith and Donna Godchaux would be gone from the band.
For the dedicated Deadhead, Home Before Daylight is engaging, if sometimes uncomfortable, reading. For the casual reader, it offers a reminder that even the wildest circus depends on the regular folk who keep the tent standing.
At its core, this is a story about loyalty and transformation. Parish writes about early run-ins with the law, selling acid and his unlikely decision to hitch himself to one of the strangest road shows in American music. The band may have built its reputation on improvisation, but the crew improvised as well. Night after night, they solved problems, moved equipment and kept the machinery rolling. Perhaps this may be Parish’s most valuable contribution to the Dead story. Extraordinary happenings depended on ordinary people solving ordinary problems.
The book has its silences. If to level a criticism, it is that Parish 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 props rather than partners. Then again, Home Before Daylight is not a scholarly treatise. It is an on-the-ground report by a man who moved the music and looked after the man at its center.
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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.
During 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 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 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.
It’s hard to give this book a poor review because Big Steve was right there, in the eye of the Hurricane, and his take on the whole scene is obviously indispensable. That said, I did have much higher hopes for this one, and there’s quite a bit of room for improvement. However, given that Jerry was family, I can fully understand why punches were pulled.
Now to the actual reason I elected to comment on this review, which, frankly, was due to the fact that I somehow wound up in the endnotes. What ever debt Stu claims to owe me has been repaid, in kind, hundreds of times over. Monsieur Ake, as you may or may not know, has forgotten…