Poet Conners (Emily Ate the Wind, 2008) revisits his eight-year
odyssey following the Grateful Dead around America.The Dead's
three-decade career, which ended with Jerry Garcia's 1995 death,
was partially divided into two notable periods, pre- and post-MTV.
In 1987, the video of their midlife anthem "Touch of Grey" spawned
a renaissance and a new generation of Deadheads. That same year,
16-year-old Conners jumped "on the bus," making the Dead a way of
life. Here he details his journey as a diehard fan, reading Beat
literature while consuming LSD, smoking pot and hopping from show
to show. Descriptions of concerts and the bazaar-like parking-lot
scenes are interspersed with memories of the author's small-town
upbringing in Pittsford, N.Y. Conners was a witness to the end of
the Dead's golden years. By 1990, the band had moved from playing
relatively intimate venues to selling out huge stadiums, attracting
an undesirable element looking for kicks rather than music that
soon outnumbered the tight-knit caravan of traditional Deadheads.
By 1995, it was all over, forcing the author to search for
alternatives. A decade later he finds himself with wife and kids,
working in an office, weighing his past. Much of that weighing is
self-indulgent self-glamorization. One scene shows Conners tripping
on acid and getting his thrills by laughing in people's faces; the
author's ex post facto explanation that he was an all-knowing
trickster teaching those unaware people something about themselves
rings hollow. Paragraph-long bios of each band member, plus
CliffsNotes-style treatise of the Beat Generation, the Merry
Pranksters and Woodstock, may be useful for neophytes but will
likely annoy his principal audience of nostalgia-seekers who have
been there and done that.Insightful and entertaining at times, but
frequently, aggravatingly hipper-than-thou. (Kirkus Reviews)
Told against the backdrop of the American landscape of the late
'80s to the mid-'90s, "Growing Up Dead" is the story of Peter
Conners's journey from straight-laced suburban kid to touring
Deadhead. Peter discovered the Grateful Dead in 1985, at the age of
15, through friends who exchanged bootleg tapes of live Grateful
Dead concerts. A teenager living in the suburbs of Rochester, New
York, he became exposed to an entirely new way of life, and friends
who were enjoying more freedom and less parental guidance. At the
age of 16, he attended his first Grateful Dead concert on June 30,
1987 - he was hooked. Between 1987 and 1995, Conners would attend
Dead 'shows' all over the United States. He traveled with a
makeshift 'family' of other Deadheads in a Volkswagen camper,
selling drugs and whatever else would provide gas money to the next
concert. His hair was a wild, unkempt bush and baths were
infrequent. In short, he had progressed from suburban kid, to
Grateful Dead fan, to full-blown Deadhead. Chronicling this
progression, which culminates with the 1995 death of Jerry Garcia,
Conners reveals the truth behind Deadhead culture and history. The
result is a riveting insight into the obsessive fandom that made
The Grateful Dead the most successful touring band of all time, as
well as a cultural phenomenon.
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