Long Strange Trip

[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, and I was immediately fascinated by the history of 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 – is available now at Amazon.com and in honor of what looks to be a terrific addition to a Deadhead’s bookshelf, I’ve put together a list of my ten favorite books on the band…

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…