This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead

(Paperback)

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The Grateful Dead band still exerts a powerful influence over hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. Today, an entire generation of Deadheads who have never experienced a live Dead show are still drawn to the music and the complex and colorful subculture that has grown up around it. In This Is All a Dream We Dreamed, two of the most well-respected chroniclers of the Dead, Blair Jackson and David Gans, reveal the band's story through the words of its members and their creative collaborators, and a number of diverse fans, stitching together a multitude of voices into a seamless oral tapestry. Woven into this musical saga is an examination of the subculture that developed into its own economy, touching fans from all walks of life, from penniless hippies to celebrities, and at least one U.S. vice president. The book traces the band's evolution from its folk/bluegrass beginnings through the Jug Band craze, an early incarnation as Rolling Stones wannabes, feral psychedelic warriors, the Americana jam band that blazed through the '70s, to the shockingly popular but still iconoclastic, stadium-filling band of later years. The Dead broke every rule of the music business along the way, taking risks and venturing into new territory as they fused inspired ideas and techniques with intuition and fearlessness to create a sound-and a business model-unlike anything heard and seen before.

Reviews

This Is All A Dream We Dreamed is an epic jam. --Vanity Fair

You could hardly ask for a more ideal configuration for a retelling of the Grateful Dead's story than an oral history, which is, after all, the jam band of biographical formats.... [T]he editors have pulled off the pretty neat hat trick of filling in plenty of cracks for the hard core while providing a basic education for novices. Best of all, they've provided a celebration that never feels remotely like hagiography. Even a nominal fan has to appreciate the wonder and unlikeliness of how the band sustained that first quarter-century or so of magic. --San Francisco Chronicle

"Despite its title, what makes this book different from all other books on the Grateful Dead is that it is anything but dreamlike. It is down-to-earth, plainspoken, without special pleading or arguments for differing levels of awareness. You didn't have to be there. On many pages, this could be the story of any band-the story as it emerges here carries no pretensions-and elsewhere it is the story of people doing their work. And it is so full of the intensity and repetitions of ordinary life that it throws the work that was done into a new light." --Greil Marcus, rock critic

"This epic oral history of the 50-year-old band... is a solid, engaging chronicle." --Publishers Weekly

"[Jackson and Gans] know as much as nearly anyone alive about the storied band.... There's plenty of peace and love here and lots of smoke and psychedelia, as well as the usual Altamont regrets, all voiced by people in and close to the band. Worthy of Studs Terkel and an essential addition to the books of the Dead." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"The Grateful Dead, when they were making music together, may have sometimes seemed 'more than human, ' but they were always the first to admit that they were less than perfect. Here they are, in all their cockeyed glory. Gans and Jackson have orchestrated a shrewd, essential account of the band members' lives and times, a tale as polyphonic as the 'electronic Dixieland' they unperfected through the years, to our (and their) enduring delight and awe." --Nick Paumgarten, staff writer, The New Yorker

"Jerry, Kesey, Bobby, Billy, Bear--this amazing book speaks to me out loud, inside my head, in all the voices of the Grateful Dead! It's an audio illumination of family, fans, and friends, and the long, strange trip. It leaps straight out of the tree-flesh to dance in our dreams." --Wavy Gravy

"[A] high-demand backstory...lively oral history." --Booklist

Readers will quickly become absorbed into the Dead's world and will feel that everyone is speaking directly to them.... There may currently be no better introduction to the Grateful Dead than this superior tome. --Derek Sanderson, Library Journal, starred review

Author Bio

Blair Jackson penned Grateful Dead: The Music Never Stopped and wrote and published 27 issues of the acclaimed fanzine The Golden Road. He is also the author of the definitive biography, Garcia: An American Life. David Gans has published three books on the Dead; he is the producer and host of the nationally syndicated Grateful Dead Hour, is cohost of SiriusXM's Tales from the Golden Road, and is a working musician who has incorporated Grateful Dead songs and improvisation into his own work.