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San Francisco's Grateful Dead brought its psychedelic blend of folk, bluegrass, and blues to the 1960s counterculture, along with a romance for the Beats and a love of anarchy that made it something more than a bond. Without radio play and virtually unnoticed by the press, the Dead forged a vast underground following whose loyalty survives to the present day.
National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Carol Brightman returns to the bond's roots -- to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, the acid tests and the heady days of Haight-Ashhury, the free concerts in Golden Gate Park and the formative shows of New York's Fillmore East -- to uncover the secrets of the band's longevity. Drawing on exclusive interviews With band members, staff and crew, Deadheads, other musicians, journalists -- and her own experience as a '60s activist -- Brightman shows us how, amid the turbulent Free Speech Movement and antiwar rallies, the Grateful Dead's abandonment to music, drugs, and dance offered the faithful a shelter in the storm. Her riveting, in-depth portrait of Jerry Garcia, the "nonleader leader" who held to a vision of the Grateful Dead's destiny even as he recoiled from the juggernaut it became, shows us how it was that a Dead concert become something halfway between a revival meeting and a family reunion.
An absorbing and exhilarating exploration, Sweet Chaos offers, at last, a complete understanding of the Dead phenomenon and its place in American culture.
List of contents
ContentsForeword to the Paperback Edition
Introduction
Part I Roots
Prologue
Chapter 1 The Magic Art of the Great Humbug
Chapter 2 Enter Cosmic Forces
Chapter 3 Flashes of Recognition
Chapter 4 How the Balloon Was Launched
Part II Takeoff
Chapter 5 Courting the Strange
Chapter 6 Summertime Done Come and Gone
Chapter 7 Son et Lumière
Part III Bums, Radicals, and Other Criminal Elements
Chapter 8 Their Subculture and Mine: I
Chapter 9 Their Subculture and Mine: II
Chapter 10 Their Subculture and Mine: III
Chapter 11 Their Subculture and Mine: IV
Part IV Reaping the Whirlwind
Chapter 12 The House That Jerry Built
Chapter 13 Heads and Tales
Chapter 14 Junkie Dreams, Acid Rain, and the Resurrection of the Dead
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
About the author
Carol Brightman is the author of three books, including
Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Walpole, Maine.
Summary
National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Carol Brightman brings the Grateful Dead and their history to life in this fascinating and “cogent, intelligent look at the Dead and the structure of American culture into which they so successfully tapped” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
San Francisco's Grateful Dead brought its psychedelic blend of folk, bluegrass, and blues to the 1960s counterculture, along with a romance for the Beats and a love of anarchy that made it something more than a bond. Without radio play and virtually unnoticed by the press, the Dead forged a vast underground following whose loyalty survives to the present day.
National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author Carol Brightman returns to the band's roots—to Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, the acid tests and the heady days of Haight-Ashbury, the free concerts in Golden Gate Park and the formative shows of New York's Fillmore East—to uncover the secrets of the band's longevity. Drawing on exclusive interviews With band members, staff and crew, Deadheads, other musicians, journalists—and her own experience as a '60s activist—Brightman shows us how, amid the turbulent Free Speech Movement and antiwar rallies, the Grateful Dead's abandonment to music, drugs, and dance offered the faithful a shelter in the storm. Her riveting, in-depth portrait of Jerry Garcia, the "nonleader leader" who held to a vision of the Grateful Dead's destiny even as he recoiled from the juggernaut it became, shows us how it was that a Dead concert become something halfway between a revival meeting and a family reunion.
An absorbing and exhilarating exploration, Sweet Chaos offers, at last, a complete understanding of the Dead phenomenon and its place in American culture.
Additional text
Raleigh News & Observer (North Carolina) [A] valuable, smart and ethically engaged account of political and cultural resistance in the '60s as a necessary preamble to what came next.
