100 Books Like A Long Strange Trip

I love this book because it sweeps me into the wild, wonderful, free spirit of the 1960s.

Although it is ostensibly nonfiction, Wolfe uses a singular hip, frantic voice to propel readers into the weird world of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters as they cavort with the Grateful Dead at the infamous, hedonic LSD-laced Acid Tests, journey around the country in the psychedelically-painted bus nicknamed Further, and eventually head for Mexico to avoid arrest.

I've read this book multiple times, and on each occasion, it's like time-traveling to one of my favorite eras.

Although this book is ostensibly set in the future, countercultural enthusiasts of the sixties were quick to claim it for their own, with its references to transcendental enlightenment, out-of-body experiences, communal living, and free sex.

It became a best-selling phenomenon as contemporary young people reacted positively to its iconoclastic attitudes. That's what happened to me, too, when I came across the book shortly before the move to the Bay Area that opened my eyes to the reality of the psychedelic sixties.

I love the conversational style of Bill Kreutzmann’s memoir, completed just before the Fare Thee Well concerts were announced in 2015.

The mood is both of a time completed (the interim) and the tense unexpectedness just before a new age was to begin (the era of Dead and Company). His frank assessments provide a valuable viewpoint on the band’s many ups and downs, as well as an entirely unique perspective on the two-drummer dynamics. His own personal challenges, and those of his bandmates, get serious consideration.

He repeats his statement that he was the “first Deadhead”, recalling the occasion when he was mesmerized by a solo banjo performance by Jerry Garcia. That transformation took place long before Kreutzmann was asked to be the drummer in Garcia’s first electric band.

I find this novel intensely absorbing as it focuses on Timothy Leary's experiments with psychedelics and communal living in the early sixties.

After a prelude depicting the discovery of LSD's properties and power by a Swiss scientist in 1942, the viewpoint switches to a graduate psychology student and his wife as they are drawn into Leary's inner circle through the initial Harvard-approved weekend psilocybin and LSD parties, the summer-long bacchanalian revelries of drugs and sex in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, and the communal social experiment in Millbrook, New York.

I can appreciate how Leary is presented as a charismatic, somewhat deluded guru of a drug cult and how his followers are enthralled, enraptured, and yet ultimately dissatisfied with a lifestyle based on the mind-expanding power of psychedelics.

This memoir paints a vivid picture of the sixties due to its author's excellent writing style and his immersion into the important events of the era.

One of the key factors for me and many other young people at the time was the war in Vietnam, where Stone served as a reporter. Later, he was closely associated with the sixties counterculture, including the exploits of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, which he describes in this absorbing and fascinating book.

I find it a remarkable testament to the robustness of the Deadhead phenomenon that a 400-page book could be produced on the special vocabulary of this unique fanbase.

In the following book list, this one has the distinction of being the only one which was published while the Grateful Dead were still active. It is organized as a dictionary of phrases and terminology that have specific meanings in the Deadheads’ world and thus provides a great starting point for understanding Deadheads and their common perspective on the world.

I have gotten many a good laugh at finding entries for things I have experienced that I did not know there was a term for (like “Dead in your Head”, when the music keeps playing after the concert).

I love the thematic organization of this collection of interview excerpts.

This is a great concept for pulling together the varying recollections of each of the different participants in the same events and time periods. The editors did a masterful job of collecting material from a variety of sources and putting them side-by-side, allowing a fuller understanding to be gained than would be had by reading one interview at a time.

Among the gems is Garcia owning the identity of a Deadhead for himself when he said that yes, there was, in fact, a Deadhead who had been to every Grateful Dead concert: him.

I find this book particularly intriguing because Phil Lesh was the first of the Grateful Dead band members to produce a full memoir.

In it he recalls his unlikely path from young symphonic composition student to rock star, with all the attendant joys and sorrows. He writes of his heartfelt appreciation for his bandmates, as well as for those devoted fans that supported them.

The timing of the publication also presents an interesting perspective: his reflections were committed to a writing at a time when it was not at all clear how robust the Deadhead movement would be after Jerry Garcia had left this Earth.

I think that this book unveils Jerry Garcia’s essential, elusive personality better than anything I’ve read, even given the excellent work of David Browne, Blair Jackson, Dennis McNally, and other terrific Grateful Dead biographers.

I learned a lot about how seemingly secondary characters are often particularly honest and illuminating. Robert Greenfield also collaborated with promoter Bill Graham on Bill Graham Presents, the excellent autobiography in oral history format. 

Researching a book on the lives and work of road crew was a fascinating, eye-opening, and thoroughly enjoyable, and enlightening experience. It also made me realise how few of those people have told their own stories. In fact, not nearly enough of them start writing road crew folk! But this book was a delightful revelation – a road crew guy, with a great way with words and insights – and telling us about his experiences with one of my favourite rock’n’roll bands of all time. What’s not to like. This may not be the easiest book to find – but like a Grateful Dead show, the reward is often the journey and what you find at the end.