A Long Strange Trip
Title | A Long Strange Trip PDF eBook |
Author | Dennis McNally |
Publisher | Crown |
Pages | 738 |
Release | 2007-12-18 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0307418774 |
The complete history of one of the most long-lived and legendary bands in rock history, written by its official historian and publicist—a must-have chronicle for all Dead Heads, and for students of rock and the 1960s’ counterculture. From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplished musical entities to ever grace American culture. The creative synchronicity among Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan exploded out of the artistic ferment of the early sixties’ roots and folk scene, providing the soundtrack for the Dionysian revels of the counterculture. To those in the know, the Dead was an ongoing tour de force: a band whose constant commitment to exploring new realms lay at the center of a thirty-year journey through an ever-shifting array of musical, cultural, and mental landscapes. Dennis McNally, the band’s historian and publicist for more than twenty years, takes readers back through the Dead’s history in A Long Strange Trip. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, McNally not only chronicles their experiences in a fascinatingly detailed fashion, but veers off into side trips on the band’s intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience, or metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members. He brings to vivid life the Dead’s early days in late-sixties San Francisco—an era of astounding creativity and change that reverberates to this day. Here we see the group at its most raw and powerful, playing as the house band at Ken Kesey’s acid tests, mingling with such legendary psychonauts as Neal Cassady and Owsley “Bear” Stanley, and performing the alchemical experiments, both live and in the studio, that produced some of their most searing and evocative music. But McNally carries the Dead’s saga through the seventies and into the more recent years of constant touring and incessant musical exploration, which have cemented a unique bond between performers and audience, and created the business enterprise that is much more a family than a corporation. Written with the same zeal and spirit that the Grateful Dead brought to its music for more than thirty years, the book takes readers on a personal tour through the band’s inner circle, highlighting its frenetic and very human faces. A Long Strange Trip is not only a wide-ranging cultural history, it is a definitive musical biography.
A Long Strange Trip
Title | A Long Strange Trip PDF eBook |
Author | Dennis McNally |
Publisher | Corgi |
Pages | 912 |
Release | 2015-04-27 |
Genre | Rock musicians |
ISBN | 9780552171977 |
The Grateful Dead were one of the most fascinating rock bands and cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. Despite having few mainstream hits, from 1965 to 1995 the Dead blazed an extraordinary incendiary trail across the rock firmament. Exploding from the roots and folk scene of the early 1960s, the Dead went on to provide the soundtrack to the Dionysiac revels of the burgeoning counterculture. Their history is the history of the modern American Revolution in the years of rage and rebellion, which were to change the country forever. Here is the band's full story. Not just a brilliant rock biography, it forms a compelling portrait of America's West Coast from the halcyon days of Magic Buses and Merry Pranksters to the corporate dawn of the twenty-first century.
Thinking Small
Title | Thinking Small PDF eBook |
Author | Andrea Hiott |
Publisher | Ballantine Books |
Pages | 514 |
Release | 2012-01-17 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0345521447 |
Sometimes achieving big things requires the ability to think small. This simple concept was the driving force that propelled the Volkswagen Beetle to become an avatar of American-style freedom, a household brand, and a global icon. The VW Bug inspired the ad men of Madison Avenue, beguiled Woodstock Nation, and has recently been re-imagined for the hipster generation. And while today it is surely one of the most recognizable cars in the world, few of us know the compelling details of this car’s story. In Thinking Small, journalist and cultural historian Andrea Hiott retraces the improbable journey of this little car that changed the world. Andrea Hiott’s wide-ranging narrative stretches from the factory floors of Weimar Germany to the executive suites of today’s automotive innovators, showing how a succession of artists and engineers shepherded the Beetle to market through periods of privation and war, reconstruction and recovery. Henry Ford’s Model T may have revolutionized the American auto industry, but for years Europe remained a place where only the elite drove cars. That all changed with the advent of the Volkswagen, the product of a Nazi initiative to bring driving to the masses. But Hitler’s concept of “the people’s car” would soon take on new meaning. As Germany rebuilt from the rubble of World War II, a whole generation succumbed to the charms of the world’s most huggable automobile. Indeed, the story of the Volkswagen is a story about people, and Hiott introduces us to the men who believed in it, built it, and sold it: Ferdinand Porsche, the visionary Austrian automobile designer whose futuristic dream of an affordable family vehicle was fatally compromised by his patron Adolf Hitler’s monomaniacal drive toward war; Heinrich Nordhoff, the forward-thinking German industrialist whose management innovations made mass production of the Beetle a reality; and Bill Bernbach, the Jewish American advertising executive whose team of Madison Avenue mavericks dreamed up the legendary ad campaign that transformed the quintessential German compact into an outsize worldwide phenomenon. Thinking Small is the remarkable story of an automobile and an idea. Hatched in an age of darkness, the Beetle emerged into the light of a new era as a symbol of individuality and personal mobility—a triumph not of the will but of the imagination.
20 Years of Rolling Stone
Title | 20 Years of Rolling Stone PDF eBook |
Author | Jann Wenner |
Publisher | |
Pages | 558 |
Release | 1987 |
Genre | Language Arts & Disciplines |
ISBN |
Articles, interviews and photographs published in Rolling Stone. Authors, artists, and subjects included are Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Avedon, Annie Leibovitz, Ralph Steadman, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Pete Townshend, Sting, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Woodstock, Kent State, Vietnam, Patty Hearst, Charles Manson, Karen Silkwood, and John Lennon.
Fare Thee Well
Title | Fare Thee Well PDF eBook |
Author | Joel Selvin |
Publisher | Da Capo Press |
Pages | 288 |
Release | 2018-06-19 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 0306903040 |
A tell-all biography of the epic in-fighting of the Grateful Dead in the years following band leader Jerry Garcia's death in 1995 The Grateful Dead rose to greatness under the inspired leadership of guitarist Jerry Garcia, but the band very nearly died along with him after his sudden death in 1995. So long defined by Garcia's artistic vision, the surviving "Core Four" were reduced to conflicting agendas, strained relationships, and catastrophic business decisions that would lead the iconic band into utter disarray for the next twenty years. Acclaimed music journalist and New York Times bestselling author Joel Selvin was there for much of the turmoil following Garcia's death, and in this book, he offers a never-before-explored insider account of the ebbs and flows that occurred in the decades that followed. Culminating in the landmark tour bearing the same name, Fare Thee Well charts the arduous journey from Garcia's passing all the way up to the uneasy agreement between the Core Four that led to the series of shows celebrating the band's fiftieth anniversary-finally allowing for a proper, and joyous, sendoff of the group revered by so many.
Unwasted:
Title | Unwasted: PDF eBook |
Author | Sacha Z. Scoblic |
Publisher | Kensington Publishing Corp. |
Pages | 182 |
Release | 2011-01-28 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0806535164 |
“Triumphant, moving, and wildly entertaining. This is an unabashed and completely relatable account of getting clean and getting a life.”—Steve Geng, author of Thick as Thieves The single glass of wine with dinner . . . the cold beer on a hot day . . . the champagne flute raised in a toast . . . what I’d drink if Hunter S. Thompson wanted to get wasted with me . . . these are my fantasies lately. Too bad I've gone sober. When Sacha Z. Scoblic was drinking, she was a rock star; the days were rough and the nights filled with laughter and blackouts. Then she gave it up. She had to. Here are her adventures in an utterly and maddeningly sober world—and how she discovered that nothing is as odd and fantastic as life without a drink in hand. . . “A gripping, inspiring tale that picks up where most sobriety memoirs leave off . . . This is a story for anyone trying to enact meaningful change in their lives.”—Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, #1 New York Times-bestselling coauthors of The Nanny Diaries “Hilarious and heartbreaking, Unwasted is a traveler’s guide to the perilous, wondrous land of sobriety. Scoblic’s scorched, sweet prose is the work of a writer at the top of her form.”—Jennifer Finney Boylan, New York Times-bestselling author of She’s Not There “Scoblic’s testament to life on the wagon is pertinent and raffish, marked by considerable candor and humor. A dryly witty, spirited memoir.”—Kirkus Reviews
Grateful Dead Scrapbook
Title | Grateful Dead Scrapbook PDF eBook |
Author | Ben Fong-Torres |
Publisher | Chronicle Books |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2009-09-23 |
Genre | Music |
ISBN | 9780811870894 |
Grateful Dead fans are legendary for their Dead-ication to the band and its enduring legacy of freewheeling musical exploration. The Grateful Dead Scrapbook collects rare removable memorabilia and evocative images culled from the Grateful Dead Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz, including never-before-published photos, flyers, fan letters, and other ephemera. To accompany the eye-popping visuals, renowned journalist Ben Fong-Torres draws on his personal knowledge of the San Francisco music scene in a rich text that conveys the Grateful Dead's story in a fresh way, centering each chapter on a pivotal song that encapsulates a certain era of the group's songwriting,performance, and community. An attractive slipcase and an audio CD* round out the book's beautiful design, delivering a richly illustrated volume as colorful as the band itself. *The audio CD contains interviews & press conference recordings.