Perspectives on the Grateful Dead Critical Writings

Subjects:

• Popular Culture » Popular Culture (General)
• Popular Culture » Popular Music

Reviews:

• [T]he writing is...extremely rewarding.
  —JamBands.com

• Endorsement From Jeff Tamarkin
  Author, Got a Revolution!-The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane: Deadheads will find each of these diverse essays equally challenging, undeniably fascinating, another window on the multi-colored bus that is the Dead. Perspectives on the Grateful Dead is powerful reading, putting the psyche back in psychedelic.
• Endorsement From Michael Getz
  Co-author of the The Deadhead's Taping Compendium: Herein lies ample proof of the Grateful Dead's social prowess. Loved and hated in equal measures, this aspect of the band is explored through delightfully diverse, carefully crafted essays that are revealed to be -- through the depth of their reflections -- organic tentacles, sprouting from the same well the Dead drank from. Weiner has chosen wisely. Open-minded readers, fans or not, will come away enriched.
• Endorsement From F. Barry Barnes, Assistant Professor
  School of Business and Entrepreneurship
  Nova Southeastern University
  Fort Lauderdale, Florida: This book adds another significant piece toward solving the enigmatic puzzle of the Grateful Dead and Deadheads by bringing together a wide variety of writings about the music and the fans. No matter if you're a true believer yourself, these writings help explain the near-religious devotion of the fans, dissect the meaning of lyrics, and examine the culture of the Deadheads in intelligent, well-written articles.
• Endorsement From Paul Friedlander
  Director
  Music Industry Program
  California State University, Chico
  : `IPerspectives on the Grateful Dead: Critical Writings is a multi-perspective, innovative work, expanding the world of rigorous rock music study....Serious students and scholars of rock music will find many a 'miracle' in Perspectives on the Grateful Dead.
• Endorsement From Carol Brightman
  Author of Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure and Writing Dangerously: It's high time the Grateful Dead come in for serious study. There is no other phenomenon in American culture that has demonstrated the staying power of this remarkable band, its folk and folklore; and yet, until now, the Dead have been marginalized in popular culture, and all but ignored in academe. Rob Weiner is to be commended for breaking the silence with this provocative collection of first generation scholarship about the Grateful Dead.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword by Rebecca G. Adams
• Introduction by Robert G. Weiner
• Precisely How and Why I Didn't Kill Jerry: Ethnography, Surrealism, and The Millennium Shows by Philip E. Baruth
• A Pilot Study in Dream Telepathy with the Grateful Dead by Stanley Krippner
• Legally Dead: The Grateful Dead and American Legal Culture by David Fraser and Vaughan Black
• The Grateful Dead Onstage in "World Music" by Thomas Vennum, Jr.
• "No, but I've Been to Shows": Accepting the Dead and Rejecting the Deadheads by David L. Pelovitz
• Why Are There So Many Jewish Deadheads? by Douglas M. Gertner
• Bakhtinian Carnival, Corporate Capital, and the Last Decade of the Dead by Brad Lucas
• Understanding "Show" as a Deadhead Speech Situation by Natalie Dollar
• Is There a Day of the Month Effect in "Beat It On Down the Line?" by Robert K. Toutkoushian
• The Grateful Dead Experience: A Factor Analytic Study of the Personalities of People Who Identify with the Grateful Dead by William McCown and Wendy L. Dulaney
• "High Time" and Ambiguous Harmonic Function by Walter Everett
• Space, Motion, and Other Musical Metaphors by Shaugn O'Donnell
• The Grateful Dead Legendstock: Based on Alan Trist's Water of Life -- A Tale of the Grateful Dead by Marjorie C. Luesebrink
• The Grateful Dead vs. the American Dream? by Jason Palm
• The Annotated "Ramble on Rose": An installment in The Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics (a work in progress) by David Dodd
• "Laid my proposition down/Laid it on the line": Gambling and the Storyteller in Robert Hunter's Lyrics by Anissa Craghead
• Grateful Dead: Manifestations from the Collective Unconscious by Mary Goodenough
• Clinging to the Edge of Magic: Shamanic Aspects of the Grateful Dead by Nancy Reist
• The Grateful Dead as Community by Rachel Wilgoren
• Deadhead Tales of the Supernatural: A Folkloristic Analysis by Revell Carr
• The Piping of Heaven: Reckless Musings on Philosophical Taoism and the Grateful Dead Phenomenon by Joseph P. Noonan III
• The Ripple Effect by Joseph Holt
• Afterword
• The Curriculum of Joy by Steve Silberman