Home Before Daylight: My Life on the Road with the Grateful Dead by Steve Parish
- Stuart Ake
- Nov 23, 2025
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 29
“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
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. He was one of the custodians of their myth: the roadie who hauled heavy crates, stayed awake long after the encore and knew 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 is blunt and slightly ragged. Pages read like being backstage after the crowd has cleared, the cables are coiled, the air still hums with what just took place on stage and the ache of another four AM departure.
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. There’s humor, but the tone is honest enough to be unsettling. Several chapters are haunting in their raw intimacy. Parish's 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 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 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. Parish doesn't let you forget that brilliance and collapse often ran side by side.
“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. Yet, 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 on-the-ground document from inside the circus rather than above it.
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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.
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.
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…