Customer Reviews

Sweet Chaos : The Grateful Dead's American Adventure

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

If you're looking for more insight about the Dead, or even just some history, this book is certainly not the place to start. The Dead, who have always proclaimed themselves to be a non-political entity, find themselves (in this book) tied to political events in the 1960's and 1970's that had little or nothing to do with them. There is precious little about the band or the Deadheads in this book, and what does appear is generally a re-hashing of events that are well known to anyone with a passing interest in the band. The book lacks focus, wanders from the 1960's to the present and back, shows little insight and leans heavily on Rock Scully's book on the Dead (which came out in 1997, and is hilarious - you must read it). I ended up skipping many tedious passages about the Berkeley SDS movement and American radicals travelling to Cuba via Canada in the 1960's other random political triviati that had zero to do with the subject that this book purports to be about: namely, the Grateful Dead. A better title for the book would have been "Random Musings on the My Life, the 60's, and the Big Whatever. My Sister Ran The Dead's Light Show!" This is NOT a book about Jerry, Phil and the gang. Save your money.

Ms. Brightman is clearly intelligent and well organized. However, the goal of the book often appears to steer the writer to make this very observation. There is quite a whiff of ego in this work. While I did read the political sections out of a vague guilt or distant interest, I found them to be particularly self-indulgent. I knew I was in trouble when she quotes Robert Hunter leading her to examine "Ship of Fools," and she has to check sources for the words. Not a good sign, although perhaps this distance allows a decent critical eye instead of the heavy syrup often attributed to Dead books. Still, every few pages I get a vision of the author jumping from the page, saying "Look at me!" This book is worth reading, chiefly because Mr. Garcia is an endlessly fascinating character, but you will not read it twice. Go for the paperback...

This book is a bit of a hopeless mishmash. The author tries valiantly to put the Dead in the context of the times in which they lived, but she fails in a big way by spending an enormous time describing what they were not -- part of the radical political movements of the 60s and early 70s. And to make matters worst, she drones on endlessly about her own participation in the politics of the day. By the time I reached the end of the book, the whole thing had become a meaningless drone.

The combination seems appealing: the sister of the Dead's lighting coordinator and an award winning author -- one and the same -- and out of it should come some insight into the long strange trip. It is clear that the author is "not on the bus" and misses the target by a few feet. Her insistence on connecting the Grateful Dead to the politics of the 60s and 70s is a far stretch and most of the focus of the book is not on the long strange trip, but the politics of the 70s. One leaves the book with little understanding of the "culture". That notwithstanding, the book is stimulating and thoughtful and well done and recommended for anyone serious about the GD phenomena. However, for the non-deadhead I suggest reading David Gans' books as he is about as dialed in as it gets. I think the definitive book on the Grateful Dead has yet to be written; maybe Rebecca Adams will pull it off.

Jerry Garcia once said, "We don't want to change the world. Whatever we changed it to would probably be worse than what we have now." This remark sums up the determined apoliticism that the Grateful Dead maintained throughout its 30 year history. Activism, after all, is about confrontation; and, to quote Garcia again, "avoidance of confrontation is almost a religious point with us."

Carol Brightman's book is not about the Dead, except tangentially, insofar as the author knows some people in the Dead's family in virtue of being the sister of the band's lighting designer. Rather than a book about the Dead's American Adventure, we get a book about Carol Brightman's American Adventure -- in the Berkley radical scene of the 60s, a scene that the Dead clearly did not identify with, actively shuuned at times, and by turns found amusingly deluded and numbingly boring -- but never particularly important.

To the extent that the book does deal with the Dead and attendant phenomena, like the band's famously devoted fans, it adds very little to the mountain of literature on the subject which has appeared since Garcia's death in 1995. If, like the author, you are someone who embraced 60s political activism and was baffled by the psychedelic apoliticism of the hippies, you may find something interesting in the book. But if you are looking for a book about the Dead, you will be irritated by the author's relentless self-reference -- which really borders on narcissism -- as well as her vaguely condescending perspective on the band's fans and their concerns.

After reading the book, it is difficult to shake the cynical sense that its title had more to do with marketing strategy than with the book's subject matter. Had I known that the book was really a combination of the autobiography of a writer I had never heard of, and a historical analysis of the 60s from the perspective of the tedious radicals of the time, the high probability is that I would not have purchased it.

In the typical Berkeley-60s fashion of raising hell and trekking off to Cuba to feed the masses with sugarcane wisdom of velvet nuclear threats, Ms. Brightman violates the very essence of ketalar: too much "me" and not a lot of Candace. Reluctantly, I drudged onward, only to find that the Dead, Kesey, the Pranksters were really a band of dishwashers and not LSD-maddened partymakers that the policymaker wannabees could stomach without some scotch on the rocks. I think Carol would have down a far better job had she delivered her statement on sheets of waxpaper so that the proletariat and Deadheads could revel in the twirling sentiments that Jerry's inspired solos were wont to do. Nevertheless, she misses the very point of pointedness and creates a drugstore adventure for the flowerpower radicals who now make big bucks on Wall Street and only wish the dark stars still crash. However, if you really need a woolly fix on a radical point of view, then, by all means, buy this book and wonder why the topic fascinates anyone trying to make a buck.

This book has gotten hammered because it has a lot of autobiography and a lot of political and sociological content.

Listen to most people talk about the Dead, and it's autobiographical, it's about the experience and less about the music. I'm not faulting Brightman for writing about it in that context.

Also, if you are a boomer deadhead, then marches on Washington or the draft as political happenings during the time you began listening, or the Dead's playing on your college campus and your conscious effort to adopt hedonism instead of politics may be describing your trip. This book touches on your life and how the Dead fit into it.

It's NOT a biography of dead members, either.

It's for deadheads, for sure. Ones who had or have other interests outside the minutiae of each song in each performance.

But if your only interest is classifying that really awesome bass line from Philly, or what the best Scarlet Begonias was in 1977, then look elsewhere, the Compediums or Wybenga's book. (I like the latter as well, for different reasons.) If you really want to know all the gory details behind the trip, then Scully or McNally are your guys.

I am actually only halfway through this work, and am debating whether or not I will finish it. Carol, what ARE you writing about? Do we really need yet one more rehash of the Acid Tests? Do we care at ALL about your acitivies in Cuba and North Vietnam (I might suggest that in the case of the latter country your youthful idealism was particularly misguided, and is shameful to the 50,000+ Americans who died in Vietnam, even though I agree it was an unjust war)?

Including the Dead in the title of this book is disgraceful. This story was better left spoken to friends in your living room. For those who really want to read about 60s radicalism, the Dead and other related matters, there are a number of better options out there.

This book reads like an unfocused, first-year graduate student research paper. Perhaps a rewrite might elicit a better grade from Professor Jane Fonda, or whomever the intended audience of this book may be.

The book is more about Carol Brightman than the Dead. The references to herself just snowball as one reads on until you ask yourself, "Like, who are you, Carol Brightman?"

Also, she retells stories she obviously read elsewhere, like Skully's book.

If you're a Deadhead, you'll find this book annoying. If you went to Cuba and Viet Nam during the 60s and were more into radical politics than psychedelics, you might like it.

I got this book as a Christmas gift, and I approached it with kneejerk Deadhead prejudices (fueled by some of the reviews here, I must admit.) I was pleasantly surprised.

One criticism I share: I don't think that Ms. Brightman's activist past and her insights about it are interesting enough to stand alone in the market.

I was intrigued by what she has to say about the spiritual aspects of the Dead experience. It seems to me that she understands and respects certain facets of the experience that most outsiders don't. It is equally clear that she doesn't really "get it."