Grateful Dead: The Illustrated Trip

Rating:
Summary: I agree with the other reviews
Review: Any Deadhead, serious or casual will find a ton of stuff to pique their interest here. There are treasure troves of interesting factoids in here. For me, it was very interesting to look over so many of the shows I saw and find out things I didn't know and things I did....bringing back many fond memories. So many little tidbits in here are bound to make you smile, laugh, and maybe even cry. Even the most hardcore fan will find a lot of new imformation in here. The only complaint I could possibly have is this is a big and heavy book...not exactly one to take on the subway with you. GET IT.

Rating:
Summary: The Dead Live On
Review: Being an old timer when it comes to these guys, I have to give this book 6 out of 5 stars. It starts way back and takes nearly every day since (and in some cases before) the birth of each of their members, and just keeps moving on in pictures (some never seen before) and words (some never printed before!) Although I am not a Deadhead in the classical sense, I still love to skim through this book from cover to cover every now and then, and enjoy the details it provides and the memories are still there! Look up a date of a show you went to - or never went to - and see it there! A must for anyone who had the fortune to see the Dead play live - anytime and anywhere, and a must for those who never have!

The Dead live on through this book - the latest addition to the tomes that are out there on these fellows - go and get it!

Keep on Truckin'!

Rating:
Summary: The Dead Live On
Review: Being an old timer when it comes to these guys, I have to give this book 6 out of 5 stars. It starts way back and takes nearly every day since (and in some cases before) the birth of each of their members, and just keeps moving on in pictures (some never seen before) and words (some never printed before!) Although I am not a Deadhead in the classical sense, I still love to skim through this book from cover to cover every now and then, and enjoy the details it provides and the memories are still there! Look up a date of a show you went to - or never went to - and see it there! A must for anyone who had the fortune to see the Dead play live - anytime and anywhere, and a must for those who never have!

The Dead live on through this book - the latest addition to the tomes that are out there on these fellows - go and get it!

Keep on Truckin'!

Rating:
Summary: Heavy Duty Dead
Review: If you're groaning and thinking "oh man not another GD book," think again. This is easily the biggest and most thorough book ever on the band. There is a TON of information going back to the Dead at birth and all the way to the new group this year, and a TON of great photos. It's like the Grateful Dead's coffee table book. Could we have lived without yet another tribute book? Definitely, but now that I have it I will say that this is the nicest book in my collection. I think long-time Deadheads will really enjoy it, as well as the new kids on tour who want to check out a great visual history of the magic. Ask Uncle Jer for Christmas. Muy excellante.

Rating:
Summary: I needed to know all this: how about you?
Review: It helps to have a few concert DVDs to promote an understanding of who does what in The Grateful Dead, but it would be impossible to know everything about the people who have been in the band without a very large book, as this one is, and the things that they have done, including an album in 1975 called "Keith & Donna" and the album cover for which Jerry Garcia "provided a whimsical drawing on the forehead of the Godchauxs' son Zion that would comprise the album's front cover, and the sessions enjoyed a similarly comfortable intimacy, since they were mostly recorded at Keith and Donna's home." (p. 179). I was not particularly aware of the Grateful Dead in 1975, Keith had joined the group as a pianist for the 1971 fall tour when "Pigpen was missing gigs because of a debilitating liver condition." (p. 136). Donna "joined the band as a backup singer in the spring of 1972, and stayed until the winter of 1979." (p. 142). "Pigpen's Last Show" was June 17, 1972 (p. 145).

People who go to concerts to hear someone sing some songs they know with enthusiasm would have liked Pigpen best. When Warner Bros. Records Inc. was trying to promote "Live/Dead" on "The Big Ball" back in 1970, it included six and a half minutes of "Turn on Your Love Light" with notes that described it as "the extravagantly soulful rendition of `Love Light,' here performed for your listening pleasure by Mr. Pigpen." GRATEFUL DEAD THE ILLUSTRATED TRIP describes Pigpen as a performer that audiences loved who "always had more nerve than I could believe," (p. 19), as Jerry Garcia said. He was born as Ron McKernan, and it was only 16 years later that he dropped out of high school and hooked up with Jerry Garcia in 1961 when Garcia got out of the army and "he took up the harmonica and everyone called him Blue Ron." (p. 18).

The timeline in the book starts with the birth of Philip Chapman Lesh on March 15, 1940. A lot of information can be located in the index, but there is nothing listed there for arrests, which tended to happen to people associated with the acid trips that were public events in California before LSD became an illegal substance. A lot of titles can be found in the index under "Albums/CDs (GD and solo band members)" (p. 470), "books on Grateful Dead" (p. 471), "films/videos" (p. 472), and "songs (GD and solo band members)" (pp. 476-478). Counting lines in the index, it appears that "Dark Star" and "Drums" are mentioned on more pages than "Turn On Your Love Light," which appears at least 29 times in this book. For those who are interested in tours, the index lists 21 by name, though six of those are "Europe '70" through "Europe '02" (p. 478).

Robert Hunter gets credit for the lyrics of a lot of Grateful Dead songs. There are ten songs on the album "American Beauty," which has a cover that can also be read as "American Reality" because a squiggly B looks like an R, and U could be LI (p. 124), nine of which have words by Hunter. The exception is "Operator" by McKernan, who only got credit for performing harmonica and vocals on that album. It is tough to play keyboards on songs that have not been written yet, something that only a real musician would even attempt, and Pig Pen was not good at intuiting what the other players were going to do. His song is a conventional ditty, but the rest of the group was so good, they could make him sound like he fit in. They needed him while he was healthy to attract crowds who will flock to a blazing spectacle, but his life span was typical for what can happen to kids who start heavy drinking at the age of 12. "Operator" was "one of only four Pigpen originals recorded by the band." (p. 121). "American Beauty" starts with a song that deserves some explanation:

" `Box of Rain' served as a tribute to Lesh's sick father and is packed with symbolic imagery, from the `walk into splintered sunlight' that echoes common reports of near-death experiences to the cleansing rain that promises to `ease the pain.' `Phil Lesh wanted a song to sing to his dying father and had composed a piece complete with every vocal nuance but the words,' Hunter wrote in the compendium of lyrics he named after the song. . . . After serving as the very last song the Dead would ever play live with Jerry Garcia, `Box of Rain' routinely appeared in sets by Phil's side project, Phil and Friends, as well as in sets by The Other Ones." (p. 121).

All of the DVDs I have in the LIVE IN CONCERT set have Brent Mydland on keyboards. Born in 1952, he might have been trying too hard to catch up with the other guys when he died from a mix of morphine and cocaine shortly after the end of the summer tour in 1990. When I have been criticized for singing, it is often for traits he displayed. "Some liked his soulful vocals and B-3 organ playing. But detractors felt his aggressive and even hostile vibe, as shown in some of his songs, was out of place at Dead shows." (p. 380). The use of the word "Dead" in that sentence seems particularly apt, but this whole book is like that.

Shortly thereafter, in April 1991, Various Artists performing songs originally by the Grateful Dead called their album "Deadicated." (p. 388). If you have not heard this and do not know what this is about, just let me say: what a concept.

Rating:
Summary: Just the Best!
Review: It is really a wonderful book. Clever, well written, and full of trivia and history organized chronologically. The forward by Robert Hunter is a special treat. The photos are varied and delightful, evoking images of a very special time and place. True, it is a little light on some of the less attractive parts of the history, but that seems OK in a book like this. And the photos are generally too small to do them justice, but they make up for the size in quantity. What is there is choice and makes for hours of fascinating reading. Just the thing to be enjoyed on a cold winter's evening with Europe 72 on the stereo and a hot drink in your hand. On balance, it is one of the few "must have" books for a Deadhead.

Rating:
Summary: Really good stuff
Review: It's probably not fair of me to review this book yet, since it's going to take me at least another month to get through it! Seriously, this is really something. Photos from all eras, including a bunch I'd enver seen from the old Warlocks days, great overviews of all the albums, key songs and players and just about anything else you can think of is in this monster. I plan on playing the tapes of all the shows I went to as background music while I read it from cover to cover, but I think the tapes will run out before the book does. Great work.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent in content, context, design, and depth - WOW!
Review: This huge (480 pgs.) and interesting compendium of photos, stories, mini-bio's, art, comments, and multi-decade chronology is much more than another Deadhead encyclopedia of set lists and arcane trivia. By setting the Grateful Dead's story in the context of a much larger historical timeline, it pulls it all together - both for those of us who were/are there, and also for those who always wondered what the fuss was all about. It gives credence to what we've known all along .... that all of us who've consciously participated in this wonderful story are not just a band-loving fringe of weirdo's living on the edge of society. It's a beautifully-conceived book, lovingly executed with taste; and as a photographer who contributed to this book, I particularly appreciate the quality of the design and printing.

Rating:
Summary: Great for Gift!!
Review: this is easily one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen. I gave two as Christmas gifts and just came back to get one for myself.
I gave one to a serious Dead fan and one to a lifelong music lover and both were totally blown away.

Rating:
Summary: Eye candy for a long, strange trip
Review: What can you say about an illustrated book about the Dead? It's fun, disjointed, fragmentary, but it fits perfectly with the Dead and their style of living and music-making. In the usual Dorling Kindersly style, this book contains lots of sidebars with illustrations all over the place. There's no narrative, other than time itself. The timeline, that is the thread through this book, moves from the earliest days to Jerry's death and beyond, covering the albums, important concerts, drug busts and all the other highlights of the Dead's career. If you are, or ever have been, a Deadhead, you'll want this book to leaf through while listening to live Dead shows.