The Grateful Dead FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Greatest Jam Band in History (Book Review)

gratefuldeadbook66Like the other books in the series, The Grateful Dead FAQ delves into its topic with earnest enthusiasm even though the history of this iconic band has already received significant attention from a variety of perspectives. And a subtitle as glib as it is pretentious, ‘All That’s Left to Know About the Greatest Jamband in History” misrepresents  Tony Sclafani’s individualized effort to enlighten.

The author is nothing if not a fan and one with a healthy enough detachment from his subject that, combined with his knowledge of the Dead, clearly implies he knows he’s not writing anything definitive. As such his book lends itself to jumping back and forth through its 39 chapters, picking it up and putting it down, thus elevating the fun of reading it and mitigating its relatively minor drawbacks. Given its subject, the sense of serendipity in this approach is more than a little appropriate.

Poor grammar and fact checking are less egregious here than in similar FAQ books devoted to Eric Clapton and Neil Young, while Sclafani’s concept is open-ended enough to strike a chord with anyone who’s giving more than passing attention to the Grateful Dead. His hypotheticals, for instance, are those extended musings the likes of which any devoted music fan might find arising from their own devotion: one the creation of a studio album of the Dead’s plethora of original material in the early seventies, (much of which but not all appeared on the live Europe ’72) and a similar construction of a later period work assembled from the final collaborations of Garcia and long-time lyricist, Robert Hunter, combined with a burst of creativity from bassist Phil Lesh.

This is the kind of ‘what if’ game that’s fun to play, light on nostalgia or sentimentality and it furthers an impression of the author as an original thinker. Some similar themes are equally well thought out, such as a list of collectible record issues and bootlegs of audio and video recordings, but others, like the chapter devoted to significant Dead concert appearances, are fraught with an arbitrary artificiality suggesting Tony Sclafani had a minimum content to fill per contractual obligation. Such intervals will have passing interest to dilettantes and virtually none for true Deadheads who either already know all about such relative ephemera or have their own self-motivation and initiative to find out for themselves closer to the source(s) of the information.

Kudos to the author of Grateful Dead FAQ for not indulging in the fan-boy mentality that afflicted similar titles;Tony Sclafani refuses to drone, preferring to maintain a light touch in keeping with the instrumental approach of the band at hand. Still, there are so many other weighty collections of research and insight devoted to the Grateful Dead (and most probably more to come from near the center of the zeitgeist), that this one ends up of little more than passing interest.

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