If you aren’t already aware of Dave Matthews Band fans and their fanatical devotion, So Much to Say: 20 Years on the Road will reveal the myriad ways in which they’ve made being crazy about DMB look easy. If you’re not already familiar with (or a fan of) DMB, the book certainly won’t make understanding that psychosis any easier.
[Originally Published March 26, 2009]
I’ll never forget the day late Grateful Dead keyboardist Brent Mydland passed away in 1990. I was playing hockey at Camp Westmont when a bunkmate’s brother came down the hill to tell us Brent had died. Now, I’ll be honest – I didn’t know a thing about the band at the time, but I wanted to find out. One of my Deadhead counselors turned me onto David Gans and Peter Simon’s well-written biography of the band, Playing in the Band,
Over the past twenty years, I’ve read a number of books on the Grateful Dead and some are spectacular and some aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. The latest tome on the band – Peter Conners’ Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead
10. Skeleton Key – David Shenk, Steve Silberman
I’ll never forget David & Steve’s book as the first time I ever saw the phrase 4:20. Skeleton Key offers bite-sized tidbits on phrases that are part of the Deadhead vocabulary – such as 4:20 – among its 400 pages of history, lore, and interviews about the band.
READ ON for nine more of Scotty’s favorite books on the Dead…
I Hate Myself and Want to Die is an amusing book written not just for collectors of kitsch and lovers of lists. Author Tom Reynolds has chosen the 52 most depressing songs you've ever heard and explains in detail why each deserves to be on the list.
Add Charles R. Cross to the short list of authors that can seemingly produce definitive biographies at will.
Presidents Day, I had the day off of work. I woke up was having coffee and surfing around on the computer, catching up on news, set lists and emails from the day before. There buried beneath the death of Sandra Dee, moe. playing
Lester Bangs truly lived every day as if it was his last. Unfortunately, but not coincidentally, his last day came at the young age of thirty-three. In Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America
This fascinating novel evokes New York City in it
Although the title may grab your attention, it actually refers to a magazine column that the protagonist
RUSH’s drummer Neil Peart copes with personal loss by hopping on his trusty BMW motorcycle for 15 months, covering ground from Alaska to Belize, in search of the wisdom of the road.
Mystic River, the polluted, industrial river bordering this small Massachusetts community holds more than one secret in it’s oily waters. Mystic River, the book, divulges its secrets through chillingly icy logic and reveals how sudden, life changing events in one community can ring so true as to astound.
