A history of the Grateful Dead that kaleidoscopes into an examination of the American counterculture through the life of its iconoclastic frontman, Jerry Garcia, and his merry band

In early 1960’s Palo Alto, Jerry Garcia randomly opened a dictionary to a fable in which an appreciative soul repays the generosity of a traveler by delivering him a fortune, a “gift of the grateful dead.” After a traumatic car accident that injured him and killed a close friend, Garcia had recently resolved to build the life he wanted, which meant making music. He had practiced relentlessly and caromed across the northern California folk and bluegrass scene, gathered up some fellow musicians and formed a band.

Now they had their name.

Following the history of the Grateful Dead means tracking American political and cultural history through a period of tumult and radical reconsideration. The band broke through in 1966 at Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, parties where the line between performer and audience ceased to exist. The Dead played at the Human Be-In and Woodstock, the occupation of Columbia and the Bail Ball for People’s Park. They took one look at Altamont and passed, hours before it disintegrated into murder. They performed at the base of the Pyramids during a lunar eclipse, at the gates of San Quentin to protest the death penalty, at Madison Square Garden to defend the rainforests, in San Francisco to sound the alarm over AIDS and at Huey Newton’s birthday party. The band waged a thirty-year campaign to explore the meaning of freedom.

The radical message of The Dead, to reject the mainstream and build a bohemian community centered in San Francisco, radiated across the world, manifesting itself in art, music, business, and politics that remain with us today. Here Beside the Rising Tide tells the story of those disparate shafts of light, putting Garcia into a broader context while telling the story of his life.

Nearly a century after his birth, Garcia’s influence stretches onward, expressed in guitar licks and immersion in a gentle and forgiving way of life, one of excellence and gratitude, chasing freedom, living moment to moment, guided by song—the gift of the Grateful Dead.