Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening

Biographer Newton (Man of Tomorrow) serves up a sympathetic meditation on the Grateful Dead; its quixotic frontman, Jerry Garcia; and the band’s role in 1960s and ’70s American counterculture. After swiftly moving through Garcia’s tragic childhood marked by the death of his father at age five and a meandering young adulthood that involved a brief stint in the military, Newton dwells on the 1965 formation of the Grateful Dead in Palo Alto, Calif. He describes how the group shaped their sound at Ken Kesey’s LSD-filled “Acid Test” parties, feeding off the audience’s energy and developing a performance style that prized “immediacy over a more static idea of perfection.” Elsewhere, Newton delves into the Dead’s conflicts with California governor Ronald Reagan, an emblem of the era’s “dominant conservative culture” long before he was elected president, and their fostering of a progressivism that, Newton contends, is reflected in today’s embrace of environmentalism and other ideas that run counter to Reagan-era individualism. Key moments are dramatized through dialogue and recreated scenes that draw from a vast trove of Dead-related documents and archival material. While Newton clearly lionizes Garcia and the rest of the band, he’s also candid about his subject’s flaws—among them the wreckage of Garcia’s personal relationships brought about by his infidelities and the cumulative toll of a drug addiction that led to his death in 1995 at age 53. The result is a colorful and comprehensive portrait of a band and the dynamic sociopolitical moment in which it evolved. (Aug.)