A new book on the Grateful Dead is due out on June 19th of next year, and it’s shaping up to be quite the read. While a number of projects have detailed the legacy of the Grateful Dead—including, most recently, Amir Bar-Lev‘s extensive documentary Long Strange Trip, which was released earlier in the summer—relatively few works have looked at the band following iconic guitarist Jerry Garcia‘s death in 1995. Dubbed Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter Of The Grateful Dead’s Long, Strange Trip, in the upcoming book, journalist Joel Selvin will look at exactly that, detailing the turbulent relationships among the surviving members of the group in the twenty-two years since Jerry’s death.
Described as a “tell-all biography of the epic in-fighting of the Grateful Dead in the years following band leader Jerry Garcia’s death in 1995,” Selvin’s upcoming Fare Thee Well will examine the relationships between and lives of the “Core Four”—Phil Lesh, Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann—up through to the Grateful Dead’s 50th anniversary Fare The Well shows in Santa Clara and Chicago in 2015.
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The book marks yet another cultural history from the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author and former staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. In the past, Selvin has written about the Rolling Stones’ Altamont (Altamont: The Rolling Stones, The Hells Angels & The Inside Story Of Rock’s Darkest Day, 2016) and the Haight-Ashbury (The Haight: Love, Rock, and Revolution, 2014, in collaboration with music photographer Jim Marshall) and has co-written Sammy Hagar‘s autobiography Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock (2011).
You can read a description of Joel Selvin’s upcoming book on the members of the Grateful Dead and their lives after Jerry below. You can also pre-order the book, which is due out on June 19th, via Barnes & Noble.
The Grateful Dead rose to greatness under the inspired leadership of guitarist Jerry Garcia, but the band very nearly died along with him. When Garcia passed away suddenly in August of 1995, the remaining band members experienced full crises of confidence and identity. So long defined by Garcia’s vision for the group, the surviving “Core Four,” as they came to be called, were reduced to conflicting agendas, strained relationships, and catastrophic business decisions that would leave the iconic band in shambles. Wrestling with how best to define their living legacy, the band made many attempts at restructuring, but it would take twenty years before relationships were mended enough for the Grateful Dead as fans remembered them to once again take the stage.
Acclaimed music journalist and New York Times bestselling author Joel Selvin was there for much of the turmoil following Garcia’s death, and he’ll offer a behind-the-scenes account of the ebbs and flows that occurred during the ensuing two decades. Plenty of books have been written about the rise of the Grateful Dead, but this final chapter of the band’s history has never before been explored in detail. Culminating in the landmark tour bearing the same name, Fare Thee Well charts the arduous journey from Garcia’s passing all the way up to the uneasy agreement between the Core Four that led to the series of shows celebrating the band’s fiftieth anniversary and finally allowing for a proper, and joyous, sendoff of the group revered by so many.
[H/T JamBase; Photo: Chad Smith]