A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead-Fast Shipping

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The complete history of one of the most long-lived and legendary bands in rock history,written by its official historian and publicist—a must-have chronicle for all DeadHeads, and for students of rock and the 1960s’ counterculture.

From 1965 to 1995,the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplishedmusical entities to ever grace American culture. The creative synchronicity amongJerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Ron “Pigpen”McKernan exploded out of the artistic ferment of the early sixties’ roots and folkscene, providing the soundtrack for the Dionysian revels of the counterculture. Tothose in the know, the Dead was an ongoing tour de force: a band whose constant commitmentto exploring new realms lay at the center of a thirty-year journey through an ever-shiftingarray of musical, cultural, and mental landscapes.

Dennis McNally, the band’s historianand publicist for more than twenty years, takes readers back through the Dead’s historyin A Long Strange Trip. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, McNally not only chroniclestheir experiences in a fascinatingly detailed fashion, but veers off into side tripson the band’s intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience,or metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members. He bringsto vivid life the Dead’s early days in late-sixties San Francisco—an era of astoundingcreativity and change that reverberates to this day. Here we see the group at itsmost raw and powerful, playing as the house band at Ken Kesey’s acid tests, minglingwith such legendary psychonauts as Neal Cassady and Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and performingthe alchemical experiments, both live and in the studio, that produced some of theirmost searing and evocative music. But McNally carries the Dead’s saga through theseventies and into the more recent years of constant touring and incessant musicalexploration, which have cemented a unique bond between performers and audience, andcreated the business enterprise that is much more a family than a corporation.

Writtenwith the same zeal and spirit that the Grateful Dead brought to its music for morethan thirty years, the book takes readers on a personal tour through the band’s innercircle, highlighting its frenetic and very human faces. A Long Strange Trip is notonly a wide-ranging cultural history, it is a definitive musical biography.