Living With the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus With Garcia and the Grateful Dead

by Rock Scully and David Dalton

Book Overview

This memoir chronicles the Grateful Dead's seminal years: 1965-1985. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316777056
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.13 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

Read this one first...

If you are wanting to read the "back story" behind the music and are just now starting your homework, let me suggest you start here. Why? Why here, when this is obviously a flawed, overly subjective work seen through a prism of chemical distortions, bringing us what are probably broken and incorrectly reassembled memories? Because this is a book you will finish. You will read this from cover to cover and most likely love it, and because this book is (more than any other out there) about the FUN of the Grateful Dead. That part gets left out - a lot. Other reviewers are not wrong - the last half of this book is largely about Scully and Garcia's drug addiction. But it isn't, as is made clear, like everyone else was a health food nut. (Well, Bobby was, but that's beside the point.) And there is also a ton of history going on during this time, too. (For one thing, we learn some of the reasons that Bob Dylan was so devoted to Jerry and said such gracious things about him later.) But what made it all work, the glue that held it together, was the fact that this music was just so much more fun than anything else going on. This book is about that fun, and this book is fun to read. There aren't many books that have made me laugh harder. Where you go after this is your own business: if you want to read a superb biography and perhaps the most important book of the whole genre, read the Garcia biography. "Dark Star" is heartbreaking but very insightful, and much of it makes "Living With The Dead" seem tame by comparison, as it is all first person interviews of persons involved. The McNally book is probably the completest, but is often as dry as toast and completely disengaged from the joy this band dispensed. So start here for fun, and to get a taste for what the life was like, and put a little color in the cheeks of all those black and white photographs. And as to why this book doesn't get much into the music, it's because no book could get in to the music and talk about anthing else. Scully was not a Dead head - he would probably rather have seen a Stones concert any night. He worked for the band, he didn't follow them for love of the music. If you want to get inside the actual music, that's a whole separate library you need to read. We aren't talking about the songs, we're talking about the band, and this is as good a place as any to meet them, and better than most.

I liked it.

Written in a Hunter Tompson gonzo journalism style,I found the book to be very witty and funny.This is fear and loathing meets rock n roll.Even though everything in it has to be taken with a grain of salt,I did get a feeling of live on the road with the Dead.Being a recovering addict myself I did get a sense of the problems drugs cause, and towards the end of the book, I think Scully did a good job of potraying this.I feel even though some people seem upset at the potrayal of some of the other band members I was equally upset at the way in which he was cast out of the band after 20 years of service.Scully admits in the book about resentment issues,but I feel he has dealt with them quite nicely.His comments about the band are really quite funny and not really malicous.In general,Scully is a great story teller and a twisted,funny, witty man.I would like to thank him for the book,and if the other Grateful Dead members will not thank you for your services ,I will.Iam sure Jerry would of.

Great Book, Great Document

It's well-written. Scully presents his "trip" through 20 years with the Dead as a narrative, with momentum. His thoughts on band members' contributions and personalities do emerge over time, during the flow of events.It's all here, the good the bad and the ugly. You get a real sense as to why the Dead were important to people. You get a real sense of Owsley's role (the LSD manufacturer who served as their "patron" for years). You get a sense of Garcia's personality and why people were/are attracted to him. You get a sense of the whole thing losing direction, the train coming off the tracks. You get a sense of abuse of power, and of the 70's dissolving.For me, the most disturbing and disheartening description is Scully's remembrance of Altamount, when the Dead were too scared to play and took off in their helecopter, leaving the Rolling Stones by themselves to cope with the violent crowd and volatile situation.The book draws a detailed picture of a complicated band, and it's an easy read.

DEADHEADS -- YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!!

Find out what happened behind the scenes! The spark that existed in the early Grateful Dead was drugged and dragged down! It was not all light and airy as - it seems to me - many seem to think. Jerry was in serious trouble and on heavy drugs. Know the truth in what was going on. This book explains the difference in the early, (1960's), Grateful Dead and the clearly more sluggish Grateful Dead of the last years. Apparently, Jerry just continued to play to provide money - support for his life-lifestyle -- which was about serious drug use. Jerry, an experience with you and your group changed my life 30 years ago -- Rest in Peace.

Essential Reading

Days after finishing Scully's book, I continued to be moved by his insights and observations about the Dead in general and Jerry Garcia, in particular. I also felt a tremendous sense of loss, nearly mourning. It is as important a historical document as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, and clearly lays out how the Dead influenced and shaped the budding alternative 60s culture and changed the music scene forever. Living With the Dead is funny, exciting and quite touching in its "You Are There" style, especially as Garcia's (and Scully's) progressive heroin addiction kills the hope and optimism the Dead symbolized when they began. If you loved the Dead and Garcia, and need a solid sense of their history, how they did what they did, and why it fell apart, Scully's eloquent and loving memoir is essential reading.