Sex, drugs, drugs, drugs and drugs again ... and rock and roll.

One of the funniest book ever written. I didn't go to bed smarter for reading it but I enjoyed it a whole lot even if I didn't know much about the Dead.

What did I think of Living with the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus with Garcia and the Grateful Dead? Let me start by saying that if I was the author Rock Scully, the co-writer David Dalton or the publisher Cooper Square Press I would be embarrassed to have my name associated with this ebook. The number of misspellings within the four hundred plus pages of this book is ridiculous. Words are spelled correctly in one sentence than in the very next sentence the same word is spelled wrong. Names of people and places are spelled wrong. Sometimes the letters are so jumbled that is hard to determine what the word is that the author wanted to use.

The spelling nightmare aside this was an entertaining book. Scully gives a great look into the world that was Jerry Garcia the Grateful Dead. Some of the ideas that I had of the Dead, such as they were a democracy, were shot down with this book. Garcia was in-charge and everyone else followed his lead. This book really takes the reader from the early days of the Kool-Aid Acid Test shows through the Woodstock into the seventies when the group was trying to become more main stream onto the eighties where the band was just going through the motions to earn money to keep the members on top of their bills.

There were some chapters of this book where the text is written more in a journal entry style. I found these sections a lot more enjoyable to read. They were quick hits with information about the band and touring. I would assume that these journal entries were taken from touring journals kept by Scully and that he, for the most part,didn't keep a journal when off the road. It is amazing that with all the drug use that he claims in the book that he could remember much that happened in his world.

At the end of Living with the Dead Scully notes that if nothing else this book was written as a love note to Garcia. Unfortunately, for Scully, Garcia passed away before he could read it. The reader can tell that there was more than a boss/employee relationship or even friendship between these two. Scully realizes the talent that Garcia has and is in awe of what he can do with a guitar, when writing song lyrics, when producing the band's music, while he is painting and just how he can control a room when he is speaking.

I would recommend this book, even with the misspellings, to anyone that is a fan of the Grateful Dead. It gives a good look at the inner workings of the band that I have not found in many other books. There is some flowery writing for the first few chapter to get through but the stories are very interesting. Also anyone that is interested in reading about sixties music in general. The Dead were involved with some of the biggest acts of the time and stories fill this book of not only sixties artists, but also groups of the seventies that looked up to the group. There is a even a chapter dedicated to time spent with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi in New York City at their bar.

I didn't actually finish this, but not because I wasn't enjoying it. I was reading it, in part, while on a stationary cycle at the gym and I am pretty sure I left it there. It didn't get turned into the gym lost and found. So either a deadhead picked it up, or perhaps someone who decided to make maybe a buck at Half Price Books.

I've decided to review it anyway because I had just come to the end of the chapter that dealt with the making of Blues for Allah, and Scully had pronounced that the Persian heroin had just made a big reintroduction into the circle. That marks the beginning of the end, and knowing something about the decline of Garcia and Scully into addiction, I decided I didn't want to buy the book again just to read the depressing stuff.

The beginning of the book, and even up to where I lost it, was a lot of fun. I've read that much of what Scully says is unreliable. Of course it is. It's a gonzo memoir. I wouldn't read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for its factual content either. Gonzo uses exaggeration and distortion to (hopefully) reveal a larger truth. That said, Scully is no Hunter Thompson, and sometimes the attempts at overload tended instead to be overbearing or simply overdone.

Scully's attitude toward the band members is troubling. Bobby is always an incompetent, spaced-out kid. There's not a good word to be said about Phil. Bill comes across as a mostly deranged wild man. There is some sympathy for Pigpen, who is drawn more fully than the others. Garcia, on the other hand, can basically do no wrong. And Keith and Mickey are pretty much cyphers. (Keith always comes across as a cypher, and it makes me wonder if that's just how he was.)

The stories, however, are fun. And Scully is more forthcoming than any of the other books I've read. Of course, forthcoming and reliable are two separate issues. One of the things that surprised me, however, is how little of the book had to do with the business of the dead, considering that Scully managed the band for close to 20 years. With all of that, there is very little on the nuts and bolts on running the business. I would have liked it better if he had gone into some of the business dealings in the same sort of detail that he gave to many of the acid trips.

If I see the book (and maybe this copy) in Half Price Books, I will pick it up and finish it. But for now I am counting it as a sign that I lost it where I did, and that I don't have to get angry and bummed out, yet again, over Jerry's self destruction.