[Item #5391] Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure. Carol Brightman, Grateful Dead.
Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure
Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure
Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure
Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure

Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure

New York, NY: Clarkson Potter Publishers, 1998. First Edition, Fourth Printing. Hardcover. “How the [Grateful] Dead…survived to speak to successive generations is the subject of this intensely provocative and personal narrative. Social critic and biographer Carol Brightman, who was active in the political struggles of the era, presents a Whitmanesque tableau of America’s colliding countercultures. Here’s the Dead—with their original fondness for folk, bluegrass, and blues; their immersion in psychedelics; and their longing for a separate reality—appear alongside those they shunned: the radicals across the Bay in Berkeley. The Free Speech Movement, antiwar rallies, and trips to Vietnam and Cuba are recreated alongside Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, San Francisco be-ins, LSD trips, large and small, and rock festivals across the country. And gradually we see that while the zenith of the Grateful Dead experience was the moment of abandon to music, drugs and dance, it was as a safe haven from the turmoil beyond the gates that the music and the culture won in the hearts of fans….Meanwhile, a new portrait of the non-leader leader emerges, as those closet to Jerry Garcia, particularly his second wife, Mountain Girl, speak of his passions and his demons. We see Garcia as a musical existentialist enamored of tradition, a man possessed of a strange, all-encompassing influence who held to a vision of the Grateful Dead’s destiny even as he recoiled from the juggernaut it became” (Abridged Qtn. from Front & Back Cover Flaps). There you have it, folks: all the pretext one needs to understand the conceptual backdrop of Carol Brightman’s (1939-2019) truly ambitious work of cultural biography, “Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead’s American Adventure.” In a Burroughs-related twist, Brightman was also the author of “Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World,” — and all true Burroughsians are well-aware of Mary McCarthy’s profound early support of William S. Burroughs & his writing (see: 1962 International Writers Conference, Edinburgh). Needless to say, the McCarthy relation here is noteworthy, to say the least—and to the Burroughs-informed Beat-reader, and Double-Barrell Burroughsian, alike. In closing, the work—as it’s promo copy further suggests—is “An absorbing and exhilarating exploration of a major chapter in America’s cultural history…[It] gives us, at last, an understanding of why the Dead mean so much to so many.” [ISBN: 0-517-9448-X]. Hardcover in unclipped dust-jacket: First Edition, as indicated on copyright page; 4th Printing, as indicated by number sequence, thereon. In very fine condition with only slightest shelf-wear to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine. Dust-jacket also in very fine condition, equally estimable, with only corresponding light shelf-wear to fine-edges & corners of front, back covers & spine-edges, else pristine. Very Fine / Very Fine. [Item #5391]

Price: $20.00