Deal

Reviews

“A memoir of his years with the anarchic band that became an unlikely American institution…Kreutzmann and co-author Benjy Eisen recount the Dead’s formation, its zigzagging rise, and many low points. Unlike other books about the Grateful Dead’s history, Mr. Kreutzmann homes in on his own experiences with the group. Deal chronicles partying with John Belushi, riding camels through the desert to a Bedouin musical jam, and encountering George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972.”

“Bill Kreutzmann, founding drummer of the Grateful Dead, has produced more than just a tourist’s guide. What emanates, maybe more than he intended, is a testimony to friendship and profound sadness when it abruptly ends.”

“In Deal, this thoughtful musician writes about his long, long career with the greatest improvisational band of all time and the wild times and radical changes that went with it.”

“Taking its title from a Jerry Garcia solo song the band was fond of playing, the book’s understandable and blatant subjectivity of the Dead’s story is a given…[and] offers plenty of insight, opinion, observations, and analysis that are unique and of great interest to fans.”

“The uninhibited (of course) tale of the co-founder of the legendary rock band, who played drums at every single one of the Dead’s 2,300 concerts and lived to tell about it all.”

“Like one of the Dead’s meandering, free-form jams…[Kreutzmann] provides his own history of the Dead through chronicles of the band’s albums and the personnel involved in making them…Kreutzmann offers his take on each band member, recalling many of his long, strange trips on various hallucinogens, as well as the ups and downs of his personal life.”

“The book’s last forty or so pages, which recount Jerry Garcia’s death and its aftermath, are tremendously moving, and here the work finally hits its stride.”

“Readers dropping into Grateful Dead drummer Kreutzmann’s stream of memory may be surprised by only one overriding theme: namely, the frequency of bitter episodes of discord, always roiling under the surface of a good-time psychedelic jug band that slowly emerged as a stadium filler.”

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