Richardson is a university professor who spent time in the recently opened Dead archives to write a cultural history of the Dead and their times. Richardson seeks to understand why the Dead remained so popular for 50 years despite numerous predictions of irrelevance. Even the death of Jerry in 1995 resulted in the highest revenues in merchandise in band history, and spin-off and mimic bands are still going strong. The Dead were more than a band but a cultural and artistic movement. They tapped into an American ideal of radical freedom that has been picked up the left and right. Richardson attributes three themes that made them so popular: ecstasy (not the drug) ie. seeking a peak moment be it drugs or just rapture. Nomadism, the open road and freedom to move about. And community. I think he makes a pretty good argument, although these themes could be applied to other fan-centrist things, such as table-top gaming or Star Trek conventions. This is the most recent in a growing library of Dead histories, I think it's pretty good and well worth the time. The remove of years adds perspective and context to understand what the Dead were about and how it has influenced culture for us all. ( )

Excellent short history of the Dead and their connections to culture, both its influence on them and theirs on it. Covers all the high points, but adds some interesting background and quotes. ( )

This book was published in 2014, and Richardson attempted to differentiate his book from the (at a wild guess) dozens of previously published band biographies and musical histories of the Grateful Dead by, as the title suggests, writing a book about the ways in which the band shaped, and was shaped by, the important cultural events of their era(s). All in all, I'd say that Richardson succeeded in this goal quite nicely.

Richardson does a nice job of providing an overview of the background to and creation of the original Counter Culture/Hippie movement as it developed in San Francisco. It is fair to say that that movement and the Dead were organically joined, and that probably neither would have developed as they did without the other. As Richardson portrays it, the Dead's style of performance, in which they aimed to tear down the walls between musician and audience and to create music that would lend itself to ecstatic dancing in particular, placed them squarely at the center of the growing scene. Acid was definitely a vital component of the philosophy.

As the movement faded and/or evolved, the Dead tried their best to stay true to their core values, while changing themselves as their organization grew along with the sizes of the crowds that came to see them and the necessity for larger venues became clear. Richardson also shows how the Dead became lightening rods for the anti-counter culture politics of the Reagan Revolution, all the while remaining a touchstone of value for their fans, old and new, who still wished to find an alternative to the growing clampdown that the 80s represented in American society.

Richardson makes clear the damage done to the band, and especially to Jerry Garcia, by the pressures of their fame, as well as to the myriad ways, sometimes wise but also foolish, that the musicians insisted on supporting their extended "family" and also of trying to wrest control of their own fortunes from corporate entities. At the same time, the group strove to remain a collective as much as possible, with no one person having control over the band's decisions or destiny.

But as his topic was the Dead's cultural role, Richardson does stay away from a lot of biographical material regarding the band members. Other than Garcia, whose role as musical leader and philosophical guru make his life central to the greater story being told, details about various band members' marriages, breakups, etc., are mostly left out, and even the musicians' intra-band relationships are touched on only lightly, and only when specific to the book's central theme. This aspect of the book I found refreshing and appropriate.

I have been a fan of the band and their music since my college days (mid-1970s), though I would not go so far as to say that I've ever been a Deadhead. Back in my younger days, when I was eagerly gobbling up anything I could find about the counter culture and its icons, I did read a couple of those earlier books about the Dead, but it had been at least 20 years since I had done any of that reading when I decided to pick up this book and see what Richardson would have to say about the Dead phenomenon from this relatively far chronological remove. While a lot of the information was already familiar to me, going through the history again was fun, and reflecting on Richardson's perspectives was worthwhile. ( )