 | |
List Price: $18.95 | | Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Salesrank: 195916
|
| Our Price: $11.81 |
| Used Price: $8.99 |
|
| Media: Paperback |
|
Editorial Review:
This memoir chronicles the Dead's seminal years: 1965-1985.
Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead Reviews:
Too many mistakes 
2008-08-14 - After having read this five or six years ago, and going through yet another phase of revisiting my fascination with all things Grateful Dead, I decided to read this again. I almost wrote down all the historical inaccuracies I could find, and there were about a dozen or so, if not more. It could be said that Rock Scully could be given some slack for this, but I'm left with the feeling that this was a rush job to cash in on Garcia's untimely death. That may seem harsh, but considering Scully had been out of the scene for almost 10 years at that point, and he gives no indication what he'd been doing to make a living, it seems probable that he was in need of an infusion of cash.
This is the most 'kiss and tell' book I've read on the Grateful Dead, and so much of these accounts I have to actually question the creibility of what's written. I have very little sympathy for Scully because he was along for what must have been a very enjoyable ride, but in the end he allowed himself to be reduced to Jerry's flunky, helping enable his decline.
All in all this is some entertaining reading, yet sad. You get the sense that Scully cared much less about the music then the drugs, and true Dead fans always cared more about the music first. You'd also get the feeling that Scully alludes to Jerry having been in such decline by the mid-80's that he was just going through the motions in order to pay for his drug habit. True fans know that while the 80's by and large weren't their best decade, they still managed to play many great shows. It wasn't until the 90's that things really fell apart, and I'm surprised Scully doesn't suggest it was because they didn't keep him around.
Unvarnished biography of The Dead -- Great! 
2008-02-02 - Here, Rock Scully wrote the most straightforward, hilarious, and un-egotistical biography I've ever read: The story of the Grateful Dead.
Rock Scully was the manager for The Grateful Dead and he was particularly close to Jerry Garcia. This 60s San Francisco Free Love Society band made a LOT of money, most of which was converted to drugs of abuse and immediately consumed.
I was especially impressed with Rock's ability to size up situations (like when a band of Arabs tried to chase him down and he escaped by using his wits) and his penchant for launching grassroots justice when dealing with people of abrasive cultures (specifically, the stogy old German officials who got covertly "dosed" with LSD for their interference in the band's more harmless activities).
I was around and involved in music back in those days and I'm here to tell you that The Grateful Dead was NOT all that big in terms of popular rock bands; however, everyone had at least heard of them so they had clearly achieved a notable national status amongst The Woodstuck. In subsequent years, The Dead ultimately hung on into the 70s and beyond, and they were more popular later on than they ever were in their Genesis. Their big thing was THE WALL OF SOUND and I think, here, Garcia in particular was a real innovator.
In any case, it was clearly Garcia who held it all together, always pushing band members to write songs so they could eek out another album for much-needed dope money. That's another facet of The Dead -- they never played a song twice the same way, improvising on stage each time they performed. Given my personal life experience in bands, this mostly represents an aversion to rehearsals which was probably what kept this group submerged well below other period bands in popularity.
Still, it was a great hoot to read of their antics, their trials, and their tribulations. The period leading up to the death of Jerry Garcia was especially sad to read about as was the death of "Pigpen", (the keyboards player and occasional percussionist).
Anyway, I didn't know all these interesting details until I read Rock Scully's fine book.
I thought this was just a super read -- well done!
NICE!
2007-12-08 - My friend send this book to me as part of an ongoing thing we have with the san francisco 60's and general interest in music. i really liked the book. it was an easy read, say it was well narrated and also full of interesting little side stories about all the involved parties. i really liked that there was no attempt of pink shades, meaning that people came accross as people with short-comings, vanities, addictions and stupidity, all the while it was still funny and really, it pulled me right in and made me feel as if i had been there myself. plus, any book that makes the hippies look like the crazy people they were is fine with me. many books make this generation look like they invented the wheel and everything was all love/ peace and happiness and everybody got along and the times were so much better then. in reality the summer of love was launched by a bunch of greedy haight street shop owners and most of the kids in the haight were runaways, drug addicts and pityful homeless basket cases that were under the impression that they were going to shangri-la. which it wasn't! anyway, the book tells all the stories in a very funny and witty way, it has a good eye for details AND you get to know the grateful dead in a good way, even if you don't like their music (which i don't)(except of some songs and some live stuff)(whatever).
all in all, great read, be careful, you might want to read it in one sitting :)
Fascinating book
2007-08-16 - This story is by turns wonderful (especially early on), depressing (especially toward the end), and hilarious (pretty much throughout), but always fascinating. Years of distance from the events allows Scully be as critical of himself as anyone else, and this gives the book an authentic quality. I only know the Dead's best-known songs, and I knew almost nothing about the band or Garcia before reading this book, yet it was a page-turner for me. Other musicians and cultural figures of the era make interesting appearances too.
Read this one first...
2006-02-12 - If you are wanting to read the "back story" behind the music and are just now starting your homework, let me suggest you start here. Why? Why here, when this is obviously a flawed, overly subjective work seen through a prism of chemical distortions, bringing us what are probably broken and incorrectly reassembled memories? Because this is a book you will finish. You will read this from cover to cover and most likely love it, and because this book is (more than any other out there) about the FUN of the Grateful Dead. That part gets left out - a lot.
Other reviewers are not wrong - the last half of this book is largely about Scully and Garcia's drug addiction. But it isn't, as is made clear, like everyone else was a health food nut. (Well, Bobby was, but that's beside the point.) And there is also a ton of history going on during this time, too. (For one thing, we learn some of the reasons that Bob Dylan was so devoted to Jerry and said such gracious things about him later.) But what made it all work, the glue that held it together, was the fact that this music was just so much more fun than anything else going on. This book is about that fun, and this book is fun to read. There aren't many books that have made me laugh harder.
Where you go after this is your own business: if you want to read a superb biography and perhaps the most important book of the whole genre, read the Garcia biography. "Dark Star" is heartbreaking but very insightful, and much of it makes "Living With The Dead" seem tame by comparison, as it is all first person interviews of persons involved. The McNally book is probably the completest, but is often as dry as toast and completely disengaged from the joy this band dispensed. So start here for fun, and to get a taste for what the life was like, and put a little color in the cheeks of all those black and white photographs.
And as to why this book doesn't get much into the music, it's because no book could get in to the music and talk about anthing else. Scully was not a Dead head - he would probably rather have seen a Stones concert any night. He worked for the band, he didn't follow them for love of the music. If you want to get inside the actual music, that's a whole separate library you need to read. We aren't talking about the songs, we're talking about the band, and this is as good a place as any to meet them, and better than most.
