Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead

If Hunter S. Thompson had written a book on the Grateful Dead, this would be it! "Fear & Loathing on the Deadhead Trail." Even if you're not a Deadhead, this is still one of the BEST no-holds-barred tell-all Rock & Roll memoirs out there! It's uproariously funny, shocking, erudite & well written. And it's funny. Did I mention it's funny?Rock Scully was a longtime manager for the Grateful Dead. (He passed away in 2014.) In the 60s, legendary "Acid King" Augustus Owsley Stanley III introduced him to the band as their new manager at one of Ken Kesey's infamous Acid Test parties. "Hey, good luck, dude," says Bob Weir. And away we go!... on acid! Scully's first drug-induced impression of the band is a cosmic comic hoot. No one in and around the Grateful Dead Tribe is safe from Scully's sardonic slashing scimitar of bawdy & decadent recollections. And after reading this & gaining some insight into the band members & their inner circle, I doubt any of them would care much about the salacious reveals in this memoir anyway. Here's a blurb from the back cover of the book from that notorious hippy chick who was actually there. You know the one..."Absolutely hilarious! Living with the Dead brings back intact the high, happy days of the Haight so gloriously it makes me want to go back there." - Mountain GirlScully was "high as a kite" through most of this psychedelic & drug-fueled madness. Like Thompson's Gonzo masterpiece "Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas," we're not quite sure what's hyperbole & what's actually true. Is this really how it all went down? Scully did keep a journal. And a few of those entries do appear in the book. But, unless Scully had a photographic memory, only a fool would think that he remembers some of these side-splitting dialogues verbatim. But, it's so hysterically entertaining you just won't care."We're like licorice. Not everybody likes licorice, but the people who like licorice really like licorice." - Jerry GarciaScully pulls no punches when it comes to the music: This memoir was an epiphany for me as to why I could never fully get into the Dead's music. It all makes perfect sense to me now. Except for their popular radio friendly tunes "Truckin'" & "Casey Jones" & some extended flashes of brilliance during their LIVE jams, their albums have always been puzzling & inaccessible to me. And I've watched a lot of their concert footage & listened to a lot of their albums. "Are they playing blues? Folk? Bluegrass? Country Rock? Experimental fusion jazz? What is this?" According to Scully, during LIVE performances, you never knew what band was gonna show up on any given night. They were all over the place. And they were tripping... a lot! The individual players were a grab bag of mixed musical personalities. A plethora of musical styles. At gigs a group of disparate dudes from the neighborhood just jamming together. Like they're working out some cover tunes in a garage somewhere in PsychedeliaVille... on 500 mics of LSD of course. Scully describes the faults & weaknesses of every band member when it came to their collective studio & performance chemistry. (No pun intended.) Most of the time in the studio, they couldn't quite gel. A studio setting was just not conducive to this band. And as every serious Deadhead will tell you, they were renowned for being a LIVE jam band. Seeing & hearing them LIVE was the draw. For the most part, they hated being produced in the studio & balked at the record companies trying to shape their sound. Song writing could be a lengthy process. Especially for Bob Weir. It didn't come easy. Jerry Garcia was brutally honest about their own popularity. Scully quotes Garcia twice in the book about that. A quote on page 156, " 'God, we make (awful) records' is Garcia's constant refrain." Only "awful" is not the word he used in the quote. That is some self-deprecating candor from Garcia.After finishing the book, I gained a new found respect for these madcap traveling troubadours. They started as a group of counterculture acidheads from the Haight, noodling through tunes at the "Human Be-In." A bunch of fun guys out to have a good time by dosing the local eardrums with some good time jams, which eventually steamrolled into a nationwide decades long conflagration "Wall of Sound" hippy dance band juggernaut. And the rest is Rock & Roll history. Faults, foibles, drugs & all. Sadly for Jerry Garcia, it ended tragically in 1995. Scully gives us the sordid details in the final chapter of Garcia's life. The "Persian" heroin addiction. The personal hygiene neglect & his rapidly deteriorating condition. It is dark & horrific. But while he lived & played, Scully portrays his friend Jerry as a funny & fun loving guy. Up for almost anything. And an absolute legend. He called him "The Great Barcia."Scully's book is very episodic. There are many fast-forwards to get to the good stuff. If you're looking for a fully detailed & somewhat sanitized history of the Dead, read "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead" by Dennis McNally. (Publicist for the Dead.) It's the definitive history. And McNally can write. (I'll be buying his bio on Kerouac.)But, if you're looking for the crazy misadventures & hidden history of the Grateful Dead, definitely READ THIS BOOK! It's a BLAST! I couldn't put it down. Deadheads will read them BOTH!ENJOY.

Cross the free-associative rambling narrative style of "Clockwork Orange" with some juicy details about what managing a rock band is like and you have a good idea of what this book is about. One man's journey through the belly of the whale known as the Grateful Dead, told briskly with an abundant sense of humor despite the carnage, makes for a very entertaining read.Other reviewers here are essentially correct about where this book stands in relation to other tomes regarding the Dead: Jackson's biography of Garcia is well-written but heartbreaking, Lesh's autobiography is gritty but inherently dry and technical, and McNally's history of the band is detail-oriented but distant. None of them have the "everyman" quality that this book has, that certain human relatability that draws you in by the lapels and keeps you there with engrossing stories-within-the-story on every page. The result is a 400-some-odd-page book that can be finished within a day, instead of the others which need to be approached systematically like a textbook if you're going to finish them at all.A good example is the blow-by-blow account of the Dead's meeting with Warner Brothers executives to tell them that they want their next live album to be named "Skullf***." Other books give a shorter version of this story, a paragraph or two, but Rock gives us a page and a half going into minute detail. And the length of the episode does not slow the narrative down at all: it just makes the incident funnier.McNally and other authors have referenced this book disparagingly, calling its accuracy into question (without citing specific reasons as to why they hold this opinion), but the reader should keep in mind that each viewpoint of a rolling juggernaut like this would be inherently subjective anyway. Rock's job, being the band's manager, puts him as close to the fire as a person can get without being a musician himself. To relate this perspective in an objective way he would have to step back, take on another viewpoint besides his own, and with that added baggage of self-doubt this book would be too heavy to even consider.One of the reasons this book works so well is that Rock holds his own observations to be self-evident and does not doubt the veracity of his own opinion. He saw what he saw, experienced what he experienced, and holds nothing back.Whether Rock is true to the facts is for others, as close to the fire as Rock, to say. Scully is true to himself here and makes no apologies, which is probably the best lesson anyone can take from this book: anything Life throws at you, taken with a dose of humor, can distill down to an entertaining narrative given enough time. There is a certain human glory there that no objective history can approach.

As a rule of thumb, you can usually trust any book written by a tour manager for the juiciest stories. It's one of the most intimate positions in any band or artist's orbit, and this is more or less the role that Scully served for most of his 20 years with the band. Crucially, he was there in 1965 when the whole thing came together, until the mid-80s when the wheels were beginning to come off. The book spends a lot of time on the foundational early years in San Francisco but, frustratingly, rather zips through the late 70s and early 80s. Yet it maintains a great momentum. While it lacks in any great academic analysis, it certainly makes up for it via its succession of amusing anecdotes and overall candor. Aside from the kangaroo leaps through the 70s period, the one other frustration is that it feels sequentially challenged in a few places: One minute Janis Joplin has died while the band is on stage, only to resurface alive and well in an anecdote in the next chapter. The book also assumes some degree of familiarity with the extended Grateful Dead family, as some characters appear in the story with little introduction (indeed, one minute Sam Cutler is in London working with the Stones, then a few chapters later he's suddenly on the road with the Dead in America with no explanation of how or when that job change came about). But these are minor issues in an otherwise entertaining, insightful and no-holds-barred read.

For anyone interested in the beginnings of the 1960’s psychedelic underground, counter culture that originated in San Francisco spearheaded by Greatful Dead this is the book for you.A warts and all account of living and working with this band with eye watering detail of their prodigious appetite for legal and illegal drugs. Wish I had been there ,

All “insider “ tales have to be regarded with a degree of cautious scepticism and they will exhibit some degree of bias. That said, I found this a sharp insightful, witty,knowledgable, candid book that gives a glimpse of the “Long strange trip” that most of us could only imagine. I enjoyed it a lot. Also, can Amazon please listen to actresses who say they have been sexually abused. It’s better for everyone.

Well written by rock Scully former grateful dead manager

This is old and other memoirs of the Dead have come out in the more than two decades since this was published. If reconciled with those, there seem to be a few small inaccuracies. What is real is the full to the floor lifestyle described. Absolutely wild. There is no bitterness in spite of his being finally let go. A Dead Head must read.