During the course of the first person narrative of Deal, founding member/drummer of the Grateful Dead Bill Kreutzmann shows he’s (almost) as skilled a storyteller as he is a drummer. Particularly in the early going of My Three Decades, his informal style lends itself well to the increasingly fast pace of his life as he discovers the pleasure of music, his passion for playing and his abiding devotion to the Dead as they coalesced in the mid-Sixties.
In recounting that latter process, including the stewardship of the band supplied on various fronts (acid, sound system and rehearsal space) by Owsley Stanley, the pace turns breathless, no doubt an accurate reflection of the sensation Kreutzmann and his band-members felt as their bond deepened as musicians and friends. Blithely detached from the business affairs of the Dead as he moved, literally and figuratively, to his own beat, Kreutzmann comes across charming rather than self-indulgent as he describes liaisons and consumption, contrary to the Grateful Dead’s stereotypical hippie image, not all that unlike those of any celebrity rock and roll band. To his credit, he makes no excuses, though as the book progresses, he does turn ever so slightly defensive even as he maintains a largely hands-off attitude toward the Grateful Dead organization as it comes to mirror the growing dysfunction of its personnel.
Kreutzmann does, however, speak frankly at more than one point during Deal and never more so than in depicting the sequence of events that ultimately leads him to assuming responsibility for asking Mickey Hart, his once and future partner in the Rhythm Devils, to leave the band (this upon the discovery Hart’s father Lenny, having managed the group for a short time, had absconded with most of their financial resources). No doubt Hart found his drumming comrade likable even as that moment of truth unfolded, though that might not be the case hearing Kreutzmann, speaking solely from a musician’s viewpoint, talk about his opposition to the percussionist rejoining the lineup at the end of the pre-hiatus Winterland shows in 1974.
Yet the author is no more or less candid in his assessment of the various strengths and weakness of the songwriting axis within the Dead or the fall-off in the ensemble’s performance level in the years just prior to the 1995 death of Jerry Garcia. Bill Kreutzmann’s deep respect and affection for the titular leader of the Grateful Dead seems to make his fraternal kinship with the remainder of the group less profound than it may be. In turn, though, it’s no surprise at all that, more and more often as the book concludes, he speaks of the Grateful Dead an entity apart from the members themselves.
In fact, this perspective may be Kreutzmann’s most discerning overall observation offered during the course of My Thirty Years of Drumming, Dreams and Drugs. Certainly as he wends his way into the post-Garcia years, his good-natured, lighthearted demeanor becomes strained, almost forced, in marked contrast to the naturally devil-may-care relish with which he recounted the uproarious activities of the Dead’s early to mid period touring days. To his great credit, Kreutzmann restrains himself from any cosmic pronouncements as they arise from such adventures, unless his tongue in firmly in his cheek (though his advocacy of weed legalization and other alternative politically-correct stances sound like afterthoughts).
Certainly that stiffness of tone, and its intrinsic superficiality, is the bane of contemporary autobiographies and there’s probably not a lot co-author Benjy Eisen could do to minimize that effect. The subtitle of Deal thus becomes almost a segue, like those in the best performances of the band he helped develop, when Bill Kreutzmann speaks of his rehab and rejuvenation, personally and creatively, in his later years. He makes us want to hear more clearly just how he’s changed for the better as a human being and a musician so that reading “To be continued…” as the final words here makes what’s often the bittersweet feeling of concluding a book a more joyfully anticipatory one.
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