A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Grateful Dead’s official historian presents the definitive chronicle of one of the most long-lived and legendary bands in rock history.

“ A Long Strange Trip manages to capture the entirety of the complex organism that was the Grateful Dead. . . . The most comprehensive and reliable account out there.”— Entertainment Weekly

“[Dennis McNally] conjures afresh the pure, unaccountable, jolting weirdness of the unrepeatable moment when manufactured psychedelics burst into American popular culture and ran riot through literature, music, fashion, and lifestyle.”— Los Angeles Times

From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplished musical entities ever to grace American culture. 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 fascinating detailed fashion, but veers off into side trips on the band’s intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience, and metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members. He brings to vivid life the Dead’s early days in the late-sixties San Francisco­—an era of astounding creativity and change that reverberates to this day—and carries the Dead’s saga through the seventies and into the years of constant touring and incessant musical exploration, which 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, A Long Strange Trip is not only a wide-ranging cultural history; it is a definitive musical biography.