Customer Reviews

The Millennium Shows

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_The Millennium Shows_ is one of the best Grateful Dead related books ever published. The scenes described in the book are familar to most Deadheads. Baruth "predicted" an event which actually happened in the real world of the Grateful Dead. Most works of fiction surrounding rock bands are pretty bad, but this one stands up: a fun and enlightening read overall.

This is a fine and critically needed novel that links the Sixties to the Nineties (and beyond) in a beautifully stark prose. As a Sixties Airplane/Doors/punk counterculture political type, the Deadheads were a constant frustration because we could never scrape them off their black-lighted dope-mattresses for our moratoriums and sit-ins. Yet we always suspected they had some kind of handle on the true "counterculture," if only because they seemed familial and, besides, we never understood a single word Jerry said. And look: Sixties politics is not just dead but repealed and reversed, yet Deadheads still live. Baruth's hallucinogenic book oughta top the best-seller list, because the Sixties and Nineties kids are natural allies who just haven't met each other yet.

This novel has gained some deserved fame among Deadheads and fiction lovers. The mysterious main character, who goes by the name Story, takes us on a tour of that now-lost culture in its final glory. It is also a novel about complex personal and group relationships and the problems of individual and group identity. In other words, it is much more than a celebration of the Dead. It begins with the recognition that the Grateful Dead phenomenon was always about the swirling, color-filled culture of the people who followed the Dead from show to show. This book was published in a limited edition and has never been re-issued. It is no longer so easy to find an inexpensive copy.