In other words, the Goddam Grateful Dead!
This is turning up today because of this piece in The New Yorker - THE NEW YORKER! My east coast intellectual elitist wannabe self feels so validated. And Nick Paumgarten is the Real Deal. A fellow Deadhead. I can tell.
Somewhere in the house I have a shelf of books about the Grateful Dead. I have a stack of old magazines with articles about them - half of them collected during the month or so after Jerry died. I have old copies of Dupree's and Relix and I'm missing only one issue from The Golden Road, Blair Jackson's fanmag from back in the day (now a blog). The best of them all, for my money.
On the books, though. We have an Encyclopedia, , a Dictionary, , biographies (, e.g.), and tell-somes, like Rock Scully's . That's about a fifth of my personal collection. Which is to the prose genre pretty much like the ice in Martin Rothschild's martini in the bar of the Titanic is to the ice berg that killed him. Don't suppose you even want to know about Deadbase. I've got nine of 'em.
My favorite, however, is . I've got two of these. My first copy fell apart. Haven't thrown it out yet, though. It convinced a new-born Deadhead that she wasn't alone. It gave her a language in which to couch feelings and interpretations for which she didn't have words as yet. Descriptions like “the little spirally, zippery, escaping-worm synth sound in the Playin’ Jam that signals the end of the meltdown madness and the beginning of the dreamier, noodley bit.” Which I actually stole from The New Yorker piece but which, had they had it, would have been included in The Official Book.
I wish more than almost anything else in the world that I could still repeat the words of one of my fellow Deadheads, some guy from Connecticut, "The Dead are back in town. Where did I put my bells?"