On June 28, 2015, I watched with some old friends in New Jersey a live stream of the warm-up “Fare Thee Well” shows in California before the so-called Grateful Dead (without Jerry, obviously, but with Trey from Phish and with Phil Lesh, who had opted out of most post-Jerry projects) played their final three concerts at Soldier Field in Chicago, shows my old friends in New Jersey would attend.
As a second-sentence aside, I always thought it was cool that Antonin Artaud thought that his surname was a contraction of Arthur Rimbaud, suggesting he was fated to serve as Rimbaud’s successor. Similarly, the name of the band that inherited much of the Dead’s fanbase is a contraction of Phil Lesh.
Anyway, I was surprisingly into that show we streamed in 2015, I even posted not particularly popular photos of Bobby and Phil (with Trey) on my nascent Instagram, but the real influential thing from that night was/is that someone watching with us (we were all standing and at times even kinda dancing), a friend of a friend, mentioned that he collected cheap electric guitars he got at yard sales and on Craigslist. I hadn’t had an electric guitar in twenty years at that point, only played an old acoustic, and so it had never really even occurred to me to check Craigslist for cheap electric guitars.
That weekend I started scrolling and bought a cheap Fender amp and $80 Squire Strat from an old Indonesian dude in South Philly who wound up inviting me to accompany him as he played keyboards toward the beginning of a block party. (That’s another story, an unfinished essay called “Memories Songs,” which is what the guy said he liked to play, meaning “oldies,” I think, although it turned out he really liked playing Christian devotionals over preprogrammed Casio beats.)
But that night watching the live stream reintroduced me and rekindled my love for The Dead, made me remember how much I knew about them from teenage indoctrination in that particularly trickster psychedelic cowboy bacchanalian cult centered on improvisational music, skeletons and skulls, and some adventuresome fun, and in a way it initiated everything you may or may not have read about in Neutral Evil ))) regarding the acquisition of guitars, amps, effect pedals, etc. In the aftermath of that fateful live stream I also read some books about The Dead and related topics of interest, all while Chaotic Good gestated, circa 2017 to 2019. I didn’t read these books as “research” — I read them for native interest and enjoyment (my equivalent of beach reads), all while something new was waiting to be born.
Thus and thereby, in recognition of the days between Jerry’s 81st birthday and the 28th anniversary of his death, here are some books from which Chaotic Good may have sort of sprung.
Note: this was originally posted on August 3, 2023, with reviews of three audiobooks first added in March 2025, and then three more audiobooks added in July 2025. Others will be added in the future, assuming a future in which to add books like this to this page.
Cornell ’77: The Music, the Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead’s Concert at Barton Hall by Peter Conners
Imagine if you will a “33 1/3” edition about a single concert and you’ll get the picture. This exceeded expectations. It pleased — tone, structure, bits of info, quotation, background, analysis. Would really like to know what someone thinks about this (and the show itself — here on Spotify or iTunes) who’s otherwise unfamiliar with the band other than maybe a few songs and their reputation. For me, its stupid hippie dance about architecture synced with my thoughts about the Dead’s music — I started listening to them in 1986 or so with “Skeletons From the Closet” and “Dead Set” before quickly hearing/acquiring everything they recorded in the studio, learning most of the songs on guitar (still don’t know how to play Slipknot, though) and then more importantly high-speed dubbing ~100 live bootleg cassettes (generally Maxell IIs), including of course the show at Barton Hall, which occurred only 11 years before my first show at the Spectrum in Philadelphia on 9/9/88 (it would’ve been 9/8/88 — see opening section of Chaotic Good).
Anyway, reading it and listening on archive.org to a bunch of May ’77 shows felt so comfortable, like a security blanket as Trump and Korea threatened nuclear war — and everything else. At B&N they have a table called Escapist Fiction, essentially beach reads by and for women with girlie covers and lord knows what sort of content — it seems to me like reading about the Dead recently and maybe even listening to them in a way has always been a sort of Escapist Fiction, an alt-reality, the ultimate goal of which is to reach a state of Terrapin.
A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally
The greatest epic I’ve read since War and Peace. Sort of joking about that but only sort of. A fantastic picaresque adventure featuring a cast of charismatic characters, supremely talented and obsessive yet somehow not very ambitious, dedicated to music/magic and drugs, surrounded by all sorts of supporting acts, from other bands and musicians to their manly, ribald crew and crazy, coke-fueled managers, to all the women they leave in their wake thanks to their “emotional cowardice,” a phrase the author repeatedly uses toward the end to criticize Jerry, the non-leading leader of the band at the core of this. Not at all unwilling to call the boys out on their bullshit, including crap records and shows — but also written by someone who worked for the band as their publicist for years and definitely understood every aspect of their ethos and relays it perfectly, for the most part — I only felt things were very occasionally slightly discolored by the author’s (I wanted to write “narrator’s,” as though the book were written by a figment of the band’s collective consciousness) choice to refer to himself in the third-person as “Scrib” instead of simply opting for the less intrusive “I,” and sometimes his conservative deployment of full-throttle lyrical description of the music didn’t match my understanding of the songs or the playing, especially in terms of chords and notes etc (I won’t go back through to search for examples — just that sometimes I felt like the flights of ecstatic descriptive fancy were technically a little off).
But the overall structure seemed perfect: imagine all the other ways all this info and all these anecdotes could’ve been presented. There must have been a temptation to present a loose improvisational structure, form matching content, form matching the formlessness of the band’s best moments. Instead, for something so voluminous, containing such multitudes, it’s linear, with regularly shaped and consistently sized chapters that felt like they’re each about 25 pages, interspersed with interludes detailing an abstracted representative late-’80s/early-’90s stadium show (not a particular date), including most interestingly all the gear, cords, wires, lights, on and on, through the intermission and encore and post-show escape in a van to the airport to the next city’s hotel by the time most fans have finally recovered enough to hit the road home.
So many great bits like Bob Weir and some unknown black guitarist at the Guild tent at the Monterrey Pop Festival, having fun making semi-hollowbody guitars feedback, playing a little duet of howls — and of course the unknown black guitarist turns out to be Jimi Hendrix. Or how Jimi was once backstage with his guitar all set to sit in but Mickey Hart, too deep into things on a certain psychedelic, forgot to give him the signal to come on stage and so he took off.
The best bits were about how the songs came together, how Jerry’s old bluegrass/folk friend from Palo Alto came back around with lyric sheets that saved them from having sub-mediocre psych lyrics like in “Cream Puff War” and really made the band what it is, as much as the long jams built on what Lesh called “bleshing,” all five or six or seven players playing like the fingers on a hand, all unified. But of course there’s constant infighting, cliques, power struggles, a psychedelic game of Survivor played over the course of a few decades.
The progression is definitely not linear — they rise and fall (rise and fall) throughout, all of it leading to the MTV hit in ’87 that makes it impossible for them to play anywhere other than massive stadiums, lawless scenes that attract tens of thousands of ticketless revelers. I particularly got a little jolt when shows I attended were mentioned, like the show at the crumbling JFK Stadium in Philly (7/7/89) or the show in Cleveland in ’93 I had a ticket for that was canceled thanks to a blizzard (the band spent most of the day at a nearby movie theater).
And of course there’s everything about Jerry’s physical dissolution that started when he started smoking heroin during the ’77 spring tour — found it very odd that the significance of that tour wasn’t really covered and realized that its absence probably gave Peter Conners the idea to write the excellent Cornell ’77: The Music, the Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead’s Concert at Barton Hall (see above), which I read before this and loved, which ultimately is why I decided to read this, because I wanted to delve deeper into all this, a nostalgic trip for the soundtrack and experiences of my mid-to-late teenage years I’m more than happy to revisit and appreciate these days again from a completely different perspective, on the other side of so much other music listened to and loved and so many other bands seen live — to quote promoter Bill Graham: they’re not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones who do what they do.
Highest recommendation to anyone who watched the documentary of the same name available now for streaming on Amazon and thought that a four-hour documentary felt kind of thin.
Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead by Peter Conners
From the cover and title this seems like it would be terrible times ten. But not at all. It’s about as good as a memoir about being a kind veggie crunchy tour-head brother could be. It’s flowing, insightful, self-aware, nicely structured, not at all hippy dippy sunshine daydream idiotic. Last summer, I loved the author’s book about the famous 5/8/77 show at Cornell’s Barton Hall and so thought I’d give this a try. Loved just about every bit of it — it fully evokes the experience of going to shows in the late ’80s as a white suburban teen searching for the sound (I’m two years younger than the author).
Loved some of the details I’d forgotten, particularly the Rainbow Family and the calls of “Six Up!” when cops were near — immediately upon reading and remembering it I was teleported to parking lots outside Dead and JGB shows at JFK, RFK, Giants Stadium, Rich Stadium, Shoreline, Cal Expo, Buckeye Lake, The Spectrum, Richfield Coliseum, Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, and a hockey rink (Community War Memorial Auditorium) in the author’s hometown of Rochester (a fall ’93 JGB show, still a top concert of my life). Loved that he’s open about how he supported himself on tour. Loved the bit about transitioning away from the band as the scene went downhill and other bands emerged (I saw Phish a lot in small venues in the early ’90s too) — and loved the last chapter, seeing a Dead cover band as a middle-aged adult and recognizing how the music is now free among the people.
Highly recommended summer-reading if you’ve got a notion (loved the subtle integration of lyrics throughout too). If you’re not a fan of the band, I can’t imagine you would read this unless you were into cult memoirs or late-20th century American nondenominational religious experiences or psychedelics or deep into memoirs by fans of bands (do others even exist?). Reading about The Dead has become my light beach-reading? So easy and enjoyable and evocative of lost time.
Searching for the Sound: My Life in the Grateful Dead by Phil Lesh
Phil is so Phil-ly throughout. An oddball goober with a sarcastic sense of humor, backbone of a renegade, a committed techie audacity streaked with psychedelic mysticism (“consciousness” often comes up), all of which made him such a uniquely note-y contrapuntal bassist — a major reason why the Dead sound like the Dead. But the takeaway is that this group of misfits somehow had no idea what they were doing but were doing it for sure, more concerned with experience and music than anything else until the entity they created, the organization needed to sustain them that also lived off them, ultimately ate them alive.
Moving, definitely, toward the end about Jerry’s dissolution and death. Also everything with Brent. Realized after writing this that I’d listened to an abridged audiobook edition, but it felt like the ’70s and ’80s were glossed over, particularly ’77 or so. Could’ve been 100 pages longer with more detail about playing on stage, recording, relationships with other band members, etc, the way it opened up the Egyptian trip, more of those insightful asides for a few pages. But ultimately a wholly enjoyable listen recommended to anyone interested in the ever-expanding sub-genre of GD tales in print.
Tried reading this in ebook form a few years ago but just couldn’t manage more than a few pages. The prose seemed overdone and heavy, but also I didn’t need to read it at the time. This past week (Nov 22-26, 2024), listening to this read by Phil himself, streaming it on Spotify when alone in the car, at the gym, doing dishes etc, hearing it come through a metaphorically significant pair of new cheap excellent noise-canceling headphones, I feel like it helped me pass through the post-election stages of mourning, and also of course it was sweet to listen to after the recent passing of the author too.
The Silver Snarling Trumpet by Robert Hunter
Absolutely exceeded expectations, about as good as a young man’s autobiographical novel like this could be, a memoir of madcap Holy Fool bohemian young intellectual searchers, especially worthwhile now as the pendulum swings toward oppressive conservative conformity. This would be worth it as a historical document even if the narrator and the main character didn’t go on to write some songs together. Humorous shades of Melville and epic poetry in the DNA of the prose, humorous because it’s just a poet, a writer, and a guitar player, mostly, also a sax player and a few other weirdos, hanging out, philosophizing/jabbering at cafes. Late teens, early ’60s, post-Beat, pre-hippie, no drugs or anti-war movement or anything other than chasing their quixotic white whale they call The Scene, always on guard against the conventional temptations of “security.”
Interstitial dream sequence bloviation mars the story, a texture that was easy enough to half listen to on audiobook but the sort of thing I’d’ve skimmed if reading in print, and you’re only allowed one “lapis lazuli” and “idly wandered” per book, but even so the humor (a delightful, truly LOL scene with “Tom” early on), free associative exuberant dialogue, general crazed high-minded anti-“security” spirit, and simple wonderful characterization throughout make this a winner.
The dual subtitle (“The Birth of the Grateful Dead―The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter”) was surely added by marketing, not Hunter. The contextual intro and outro by Dennis McNally and Barbara Meier are worth a listen.
Jerry, apparently, was always Jerry, the focal point of the scene even if being the center of things wasn’t his intention as much as living in the here and now and playing music. Also interesting in that the action picks up soon after the car crash Jerry and Alan Trist were in that killed their friend and made Jerry think he better start taking his music more seriously.
But overall, if you have a Spotify account, it’s worth ~six hours of your time. And if you’re still interested, also recommended are ~three hours of related interviews with Alan Trist and Barbara Meier and others spread across two episodes of the Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast.
Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews by Dennis McNally
He speaks how he plays: engaged, enthusiastic, joyful, philosophical, anti-establishmentarian, complicated but for the most part clear, essentially “rapping” as they used to say. No truly memorable stories or revelations other than that he was an asthmatic kid with few friends who stayed in bed most of the time and read comix and sci fi. At 1.5x speed he’s even more fluent.
Home Before Daylight: My Life on the Road with the Grateful Dead by Steve Parish (with Joe Layden)
Too bad it’s not read by Big Steve, who sounds exactly like Otto the Bus Driver on The Simpsons. But it’s an enjoyable listen, feels more like an extended podcast than a book. Interesting about his upbringing on Long Island and how it prepared him for life with the Dead. Some juicy stories, of course. Worth it alone for the chapter about Jerry being held at gunpoint by a young enraged Mafia-type in NYC. A few other bits like that. Drug-fueled orgies, tragedies, and tragedies narrowly averted. Interesting that he’s the nephew of Mitchell Parish, a famous songwriter of old standards (Stardust, Sentimental Lady, Volare, etc), something that won Jerry over. Sometimes I skipped ahead through stories about Hell’s Angel friends or when he strayed too far from the band. But definitely someone with insider information (roadie starting in ’69, JGB manager, best man at Jerry’s wedding) and worth a look or listen if you’re working your way through the GD genre as I am.
Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter of the Grateful Dead’s Long, Strange Trip by Joel Selvin
The author created a consumable story out of an information dump of tour dates and band formations from 1995 to 2015 but also clearly his request to Phil and Jill Lesh for background interviews and information etc was denied and he took it out on them. Seems exaggeratedly, almost laughably spiteful toward Phil. I understand that the author is trying to make something readable, driven by conflict between the surviving “core four,” all leading to the rainbow-capped resolution of the 2015 50th anniversary concerts in Chicago, but the narrative vibe seemed too negative, like you could sense that the author disliked these guys and the band in general.
The critical impressions of Phil’s Fare Thee Well performances were over the top. Would have been interesting to see how Dennis McNally would’ve handled the same material. Or any one with more empathy for the PTSD these guys had after their experience with the band and their leaderless band leader’s death.
Didn’t know most of this but also there’s really no reason to know too much about the various iterations of Bobby’s Ratdog or post-Jerry formulations (The Other Ones, The Dead, Further, Phil and Friends, et al), one of which (The Other Ones maybe) I saw at Giants Stadium in the late ’90s or early ’00s and thought pretty silly, with its idealized all-the-hits setlist, but mostly ignored those shows, only seeing Dead & Co twice, the second time vowing to never again submit myself to the slow pace of songs, John Mayer’s sexy growling vocals (I do respect Mayer’s playing however), and inflated ticket prices.
But overall and generally and for the most part a perfectly enjoyable listen at 1.25x speed via Spotify (note that there’s an unannounced, totally annoying time limit on the number of hours you can listen to audiobooks a month and then the m’effers offer you a “top off” of another 20 hours for a ridiculous $13.77 — luckily this occurred a few minutes to the end of the last chapter).
Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America by Jesse Jarnow
Totally enjoyable, remarkably well done, illuminating, generous, linear yet effortlessly revolving/evolving mandalic quilt-type unique mind-expanding relatively contemporary work of mostly American ethnopharmamusicology. Of all the Dead- and psychedelic-related books I’ve read and listened to over the past several years, this is easily up there with the best. Love how it centers psychedelics and refocuses the Dead and later Phish in the larger lysergic context of their eras.
I listened to the audiobook via Spotify but actually acquired this in print a few years ago and skipped around but then sort of figured my time could be better spent than learning about those Johnny Appleseeds who helped psychedelics become a mind-manifesting invasive weed thrown to the wind, the true blue honest-to-Dark Star entheogenic sacred/profane culture that it’s become since it escaped the lab back in Palo Alto in the early ’60s. At first I skimmed the book for bits on the Dead and Phish, honestly, but then put it down in favor of fancy Euro lit in translation, as is my wont, all along and ever since loving the author’s Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, my #1 priority download whenever it streams down the tubes into my phone in the morning.
Jesse Jarnow graduated from the same college I did, a college known for its progressive politics, music conservatory, indie-rockers, and hippies (the line about how there were “still a lot of Deadheads and granola munchers” attracted me, along with its five-star academics, in the Peterson’s Guide to Colleges I browsed when considering colleges in high school). And unknown to most for its winter term project (a month-long self-directed January immersion in whatever you want to do as long as it’s conceived as a sort of project) as well as its Ex-Co, or Experimental College, actually accredited classes taught by students usually about things like, for example, the history of psychedelic America, and this book felt to me like it easily could’ve started as Jarnow’s winter term project before morphing into an Ex-Co class.
Anyway, I’m very familiar with the author, in part because Obies recognize Obies out in the wild, but more so because I’ve listened to him speak for however many hours it takes to listen to every episode of his official GD podcast, the greatest ongoing ethnomusicological project I know of. Jesse reads the audiobook version and it’s like a special season of the Deadcast, with some welcome overlap of stories he’d resurfaced there, but for the most part it’s just a damn fine impressive work of popular accessible scholarship, especially how it presents for example how hip economics slowly becomes hippie capitalism, how the shambling experimental trial-and-error organic processes of the Dead enterprise are elaborated by Phish and later codified and preconceived/perfected as business models — so well done, so well handled. Not to mention how he introduces and returns to the primary players, some really well-known like Kesey, Bear, Garcia, Terrence McKenna, John Perry Barlow, Keith Haring (surprisingly), and other familiar entities like Dick Latvala, or Nancy (the writer of two favorite early Phish songs, from whence the wacky lyrical wordplay derives, a sort of crazy playful rhythmic sensory code they replicated in their own early originals), Bread & Puppet, or even more so the random manufacturers of note of the sacramental stuff, and especially (and unexpectedly) early NYC graffiti artists like Chad (LSD OM), early disco, various communes in northern California and remote Vermont, the formation of Burning Man, early raves, post-Garcia music festivals . . . oh! and not to mention the early internet, all those early San Fran-area computer dudes were heads too of course, Steve Jobs you’ve heard of but also the first guy who ever posted a status update to the internet for example.
The author also does a great job every once in a while noting, often humorously, that most of these “heads” are white and comparatively well-off dudes, essentially the demo turned on en masse in the late ’80s as the Dead had a top 10 hit for the first time, also around the time I was a prep-school stoner, in my mid-to-late teens reading The Doors of Perception, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Storming Heaven (which Jarnow mentions at one point), just scratching the surface of this stuff before heading in other directions in college and after it.
Cool to see how it was a phenomenon that had been growing and changing and surging and being tamped down by the feds and then resurging to an extreme around the time a high school band called the Blues Band (soon to change its name to Blues Traveler) was playing in my friend’s basement and we were all trading Dead tapes and hitting as many Dead, JGB, and a little later Phish shows as possible, doing what one does there. Interesting how Jesse keeps returning to stats on high school seniors and LSD use to chart the rise and fall and rise and fall of it all — essentially it seems like there’s always a 20% of high school seniors who are at least interested in psychedelics, and a fraction of these interested kids are the seekers, the ones who often find the Dead, create their own thing, and/or “find the others” like them, per Timothy Leary’s instructions.
Also excellent on the formation of Wetlands in NYC where so many of those HORDE-type bands played (I somehow never went there, feeling like I had missed its prime, being in high school and then in college in Ohio in the late ’80s through 1994) and the Psychedelic Solution, on W. 8th, where I went once or twice on my first unaccompanied-by-mother trips into the city, probably circa ’90.
So grateful/thankful etc that Jesse’s energies now seem mostly funneled into the Deadcast but I also look forward to his next extended work of scholarship, and I will definitely look into his earlier book on Yo La Tengo and indie rock.
This Darkness Got to Give by Dave Housley
Ingenious mash-up of gumshoe procedural + vampire thriller + some obscure governmental MK Ultra psych-experiment conspiracy stuff, mostly set in end-stage Grateful Dead show parking lots. The Undead meets the Dead . . . Would’ve been really easy for Housley (founder/editor of Barrelhouse, which published my rejections book, among other things) to have had way more fun with this. Vampires on acid . . . Blood-suckers hawking kind veggie burritos . . . Crazy silly psychedelic sentences . . . But instead it’s straightforward transparent prose concerned with moving the story ahead and reflecting on where it’s been and what it means, propelled by short chapters and clearly defined characters, structured by Dead show date and location toward the end of summer tour ’95, which all Deadhead readers know from the beginning means that the band’s last show and Jerry’s death are imminent.
I definitely anticipated way more lyrics alluded to, more of a sense of or reflections on the music but came away satisfied with the inclusion of the Dead content once the story took over. Delivers requisite genre pleasures and fulfills expectations raised by the plot but distinguishes itself by the way it wields its unique, evocative, Spinner-replete, psychedelic open-air market-like setting. Liked the light thematic juggling about authenticity (being true to who you are) and compulsion.
Also liked how Housley included toward the end the titles of his last two books (Massive Cleansing Fire; If I Knew the Way, I Would Take You Home — I didn’t note references to Ryan Seacrest Is Famous or Commercial Fiction, however). Good, grungy fun, in general, starring a fresh face on a dying scene tracking a former Hell’s Angel biker/Acid Test participant/vampire sought by special-op federales including a 90+-year-old, essentially tamed Euro vampire.
If you’ve read that Michael Pollan LSD book and Tao Lin’s Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change AND you’re a big vampire novel fan, this is a must read. For everyone else, I’d definitely recommend it if you’re into genre mashups with the music of one of the more mashed-up bands holding it all together. A good quick summer read!
Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin
Loved reading this, loved holding it on the subway with its subtitle and author-drawn mandala, wanted nothing other than to read it when I wasn’t reading it, loved the symbiosis of life and literature in the third-person epilogue, loved how this champions complexity and at least once uses the word “complexify,” but ultimately it’s the overall structure I most appreciated the morning after finishing it, the clearly delineated rational movement through its subjects, with every conclusion more like a propulsion into the next chapter, the divisions as clear as the segues, layering like that as the author self-transforms in life and lit like Terence McKenna’s self-dribbling mirrored basketball elves composed of visual language. Loved the transition from Terence McKenna’s psychedelic extremism (“heroic doses”) to Kathleen Harrison’s sustainable plant-centricism (most troubling mental states can be alleviated by looking at a leaf for two minutes), along the way detailing the histories and chemical consistencies of DMT, LSD, psilocybin, salvia, cannabis, and Tao’s own experience with each, as well as his own history and existential consistency thanks to video games, punk music, literature, depressions, anxiety, alienation, pharmaceutical drugs.
In 2004, I posted one of his first stories on the weird little lit site I edited from 1999 to 2014, Tao actually first invited me to Goodreads in 2007, and I talked to him for a while at a Karl One Knausgaard event at McNally-Jackson Books a few years ago, but I don’t use the “potential conflict of interest” tag I use on Goodreads when I know someone whose book I’m writing about, even if I’ve been an online literary acquaintance of this author for a couple decades. There’s something about his writing/perspective that seems to prefer a sincere response, without restraining or softening critique (see my review of Shoplifting from American Apparel) or erring on the side of praise. With this, when I saw Tao announce it on Facebook, I immediately preordered it since it’s up my alley, or aligns with an interest dormant since my teen and early college years stirring again, most likely among mid-life crisis rumblings related to a resurgence in playing music and listening to The Dead again after nearly two decades away from it. I recently read (and didn’t love) DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible after watching DMT: The Spirit Molecule multiple times on Netflix, loving the descriptions of the DMT experience, the molecular interconnectedness of plants and animals, the promise or at least possibility of a burst of endogenous DMT upon death in particular, and of course I get all giddy when Dennis McKenna talks about elves in the form of self-dribbling basketballs. In high school, I’d read Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” and “Island,” Tom Woolfe’s “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, and maybe a few others as I experimented with my own related real-time experiences with friends or tens of thousands of similarly addled others first at late-’80s Dead/JGB and then early ’90s Phish shows. I once experienced the visual language McKenna talks about — words emerging in color from a friend’s mouth — but generally the extent of my related reading and experience is mostly confined to when I was fifteen to about nineteen years old, a long time ago now. And the more I peek into this world now the more I see that I’ve just barely scratched its surface.
So, with that significant yet sufficiently superficial previous exposure/experience in hand, Tao’s book interested me in part in that it ignored the traditional division between Timothy Leary’s controlled set/setting and Ken Kesey’s all-out freakout schools of psychedelic experiences. I liked that he instead focused on McKenna and himself and Kathleen Harrison. Something that occurred to me at times was that Tao wasn’t necessarily allowing himself to be self-critical regarding his current path and transition from opiates, downers, synthetic drugs to natural psychedelics in that he never seemed to question that he’s essentially transforming into a hippie, someone interested in macrocosmic consciousness (you ever think that there are like as many atoms inside us as there are like galaxies and stars in like the universe, man), organic healthiness, plant appreciation, etc. But it works since Tao is otherwise super-self-reflective and his parents live in Taipei instead of Vermont or Oregon — meaning the sort of newfound hippiedom he’s expressing doesn’t seem like his birthright or a stereotypical progression/well-trodden path and as such it seems sincere and makes for interesting reading. He also listens to Chopin instead of The Dead or Phish, not that there’s anything wrong with those bands (I’ve always been a “Dark Star” enthusiast). This is autobiographical non-fiction but the autobiographical element emerges from someone without the constraints of conventional employment, marriage (I suppose his official marital status is separated but he’s essentially divorced), mortgage, fatherhood — that is, it’s the memoir of a man without responsibilities (no pets even), who can afford to throw away his computer once and snap another computer’s screen another time and possibly intentionally discard his iPhone. Not a serious critique, just something this reader was aware of as someone filled to capacity with responsibilities at the time.
But again, generally, I loved reading it, found it surprising, thoughtful, a champion of complexity over unnatural reductions of reality (maybe other than the masculine/feminine duality toward the end), at times I found it funny (LOL’d when he said he was now in better mental and physical health and therefore had no excuse not to try DMT), it added a few books to my reading list (I started True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna immediately after finishing this), and even if Tao is transforming into a West Coast hippie, I liked the focus on change (I loved at the end when the guy I’ve always assumed subsisted solely on kale smoothies orders half a chicken since he’s trying to eat more like an aborigine). Also, I like that it’s essentially evangelical about psychedelics — I hope it inspires Tao Lin fans to elevate their dead-pan depressed single-quote ‘consciousness’ and contributes to the overall easing of laws throughout the country. It’s hard to believe that in Pennsylvania, where I live, salvia and other psychedelics and THC are illegal but I can go purchase a gun, no prob, or of course can drink myself silly and take my car out on the highway whenever. There are tons of more pressing issues in the world than the illegality of cannabis/psychedelics but they definitely should not be in the same legal class as potentially fatal, addictive drugs, and decriminalizing or even fully legalizing and seriously taxing them seems like something a semi-enlightened rational society would do. Anyway, if you’re at all interested in this sort of thing, or if you watched and enjoyed “The Spirit Molecule,” this is definitely recommended.
True Hallucinations: Being an Account of the Author’s Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil’s Paradise by Terence McKenna
Acquired this after reading the first parts of Tao Lin’s Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change about McKenna and knowing a bit about him from “The Spirit Molecule,” a Netflix documentary about DMT. The day I finished Tao’s book, this arrived, as well as a 1100-page ARC I’ve been looking forward to reading for two years, something I assumed I’d start reading as soon as I removed it from the mailer. But first I decided I’d take a look at this Terence McKenna book — and then I read ~50 pages that first night, giddy, completely forgetting the enormous, long-awaited ARC next in line, reveling in the humorous, flowing prose with shades of Melville as they set off into the Amazon in search of their own version of the white whale, in this case a rare psychedelic plant or concoction kept secret by the natives with a name like oo-oe-oe — something like that — but then are distracted by quite magical mushrooms growing everywhere in the jungle. There’s one chapter, an aside from the current story in South America, that’s essentially a sex scene a few years earlier in a small town outside of Katmandu that’s easily one of the best sex scenes I’ve ever read, ending with the two lovers on a roof covered in a mysterious obsidian psychofluid.
My initial instinct was to read this as fiction, a major, previously unknown addition to the Amazon canon, along with Cesar Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, Werner Herzog’s Conquest of the Useless, the beautiful Ciro Guerra film Embrace of the Serpent, and Herzog’s two great Amazon films, Aguirre: The Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, both of which are quests, the first with a Spanish conquistador searching for El Dorado, a mythical city of gold, and the second with a half-cracked failed businessman (formerly failed to bring ice and a railroad to the Amazon) who intends to build an opera house in Iquitos and bring Caruso there to sing but winds up pulling a steamboat over a huge hill between two rivers and calling it a success. Herzog’s films are from 1972 and 1982, so the first was probably shot right around the same time the McKenna brothers were in the jungle tripping their faces off, which is pretty much what happens in this after maybe 80 pages.
They wind-up eating a ton of mushrooms, taking ayahuasca with mushrooms on top, seeing UFOs, hearing the sound of the universe, experiencing the essentially fractal nature of time — Dennis McKenna, the author’s younger brother, believes he can make any phone ring in the world, even in the past, and therefore makes his recently deceased mother’s phone ring twenty years earlier and talks to her, although she doesn’t believe she’s talking to him because he’s only three years old and he’s sitting quietly next to her. Dennis, generally, breaks on through to the other side, spouts wickedly inventive, scientifically tinged psychobabble as though he’s discovered the fount of the bards of yore, and seems like he might have slipped over into something more like schizophrenia than psychedelic enlightenment. The italicized excerpts from Dennis’ journals I found unreadable after a while, as was a lot of the second half of this — like listening to someone tell you their dreams in a way that’s sure that their dreams are not only real but also prophetic and of super-significance to the future of humanity.
Having learned in Tao’s book that Terence died of a brain tumor, I couldn’t help thinking that some of the voices in his head weren’t the mushroom talking to him but more so sadly derived from early-stage cancer. This can also be read as the brothers’ weird way of mourning their mother’s death — and it’s momentarily affecting if considered in that light but also seems like a stretch. I can’t say I read the last half of the book so carefully, didn’t read every word of this, skimmed pages of psychedelic psychobabble about UFOs etc, but again I loved the opening pages in which they set off to encounter the white whale of the mind — essentially they’re devoured by the mushrooms they eat and live inside the belly of the beast for a few weeks and inside it’s all spectacular — and after a while spectacularly boring — psychedelic fireworks. After about 120 pages of this I looked forward to the enormous ARC and its promise of long passages of descriptions of child care, trying to write, and doing dishes in Scandinavia — the quotidian wonders of old-fashioned nonlenticular reality never seemed more interesting to me, which seems to jibe just fine with the coming down after-effects of such experiences from what I can remember from long ago.
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The books above aren’t the only ones I’ve read related to American psychonautics or read some of or started and donated to the local library’s book sale (I can’t really recommend any Phish-related books) but mostly they’re the ones I read and wrote about in any sort of detail in the period leading up to the early formation of the conception of the book that would become Chaotic Good (many of the books, particularly those consumed in audiobook fashion, I added later).
As mentioned a few times above, I’d definitely of course recommend Jesse Jarnow’s Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, which makes the semi-recent five-hour Dead documentary and the biography included above seem like leaflets (the one about the writing of “Black Peter” is tops). I also listened to and can recommend for the most part the Phish-related podcasts After Midnight (five episodes about the Big Cypress Y2K festival, with Jesse Jarnow), Under the Scales (interviews with Trey and Mike, as well as Tom Marshall’s Q&As about lyrics, and episodes about Trey and Tom writing sessions), Undermine (the early episodes particularly), Alive Again (four episodes about Trey’s music outside Phish), the Helping Friendly Podcast, and Analyze Phish (with Scott Aukerman and Harris Wittels).
And finally, kinda semi-unrelatedly, here’s a shot of Chaotic Good, emblazoned with a stupendous “love and light” sticker, on the floor of the July 30, 2023 Phish show at MSG:
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).
