Living With the Dead: Twenty Years on the Bus With Garcia and the Grateful Dead
When Scully first saw the Grateful Dead perform, in San Francisco in 1965, he thought they were the "world's ugliest band." He promptly signed on as their manager and lived with them for the next 20 years; in 1985, fresh from a heroin detox clinic, he quit or was fired amid charges (all false, says he) of misusing the band's money. His account of those years, written with the coauthor of Marianne Faithfull's autobiography, is not addressed exclusively to an audience of Deadheads. In fact, they may be disappointed by the low profile Jerry Garcia keeps in Scully's memories. He does remember the LSD and the drugs and the hazy high jinks: the souring Haight-Ashbury scene, Woodstock and Altamont, the "endless party rolling down the road." He describes Garcia as "magnetic, affable, inquisitive, approachable and infinitely benign," and that's about as deep as it gets. A few of the albums, especially early ones, get some attention, but Scully is more interested in the Dead as a social phenomenon. And after 20 years, with Garcia getting ever deeper into drugs and isolation, the group, he says, became both a self-parody and a "cash cow." Photos not seen by PW.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.