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:
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.
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 this fairly commonplace American variety of psychonautic experience 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 they’re the ones I 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. I’d also recommend Heads by Jesse Jarnow and definitely of course his 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 Phish show at MSG:
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. 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 acquire a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between or Incidents of Egotourism in the Temporary World directly from me (the publishers are kaput).