The Grateful Dead's 100 Essential Songs

Grateful Dead fans and academics Barnes and Trudeau, members of the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, provide illuminating if overly detailed profiles of what they deem the band’s 100 greatest songs. Each profile lists the number of times the band performed the song, memorable performances of the song, and elements that make the song essential listening. For example, the band debuted “Lazy River Road” on February 21, 1993, and they played it 65 times, including during the band’s final show in Chicago on July 9, 1995. According to Barnes and Trudeau, front man Jerry Garcia “was still in fine voice and plays it beautifully. . . it is a great window into what the Dead sounded like in their last years on the road.” The Dead performed “Casey Jones,” the story of a train engineer who wrecks his train, 312 times beginning in 1969 through 1992. “Truckin’,” arguably the best known Dead song (a “rocker that gets the crowd on its feet dancing and singing along”), made its debut in August 1970, and the band played it 519 times between then and 1995. Barnes and Trudeau’s entertaining book provides a useful introduction to the Dead’s representative music, offering first-time listeners a starting point and encouraging fans to pick up the songs and listen to them again. * Publishers Weekly *
In The Grateful Dead’s 100 Essential Songs, Barry Barnes and Bob Trudeau—both members of the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus, which is a section of the Southwest Popular Culture Association meetings—provide fact-filled profiles of the one hundred songs they believe are essential listening for, in their words, “a serious appreciation of the music of the Grateful Dead.” Of course, Deadheads are bound to quibble about which songs make the cut for this book, and so that conversation, like the music, will go on forever. In many ways, the book serves as a nice guide for first-time listeners who might wonder why people devote their musical lives to the Dead and what about this music keeps them listening to it. After all, the attraction that many find in the Dead’s intractable jams and musical explorations simply bore many listeners who can’t hear the reasons anyone would want to listen to the music, let alone listen to it obsessively. This book won’t convince those listeners—there are simply too many facts about which first-timers won’t care—but it will give them a starting point for finding the songs that might take them down that road. * No Depression *
In a stimulating overview of the band’s performing repertoire, these authors blend their personal concert experiences with the evolution of performances of the band’s most memorable compositions. An indispensable element of their publication is a vast online repository of their favorite live versions of the songs, including many taped personally by Barnes. -- Michael Parrish, San Jose State University, co-organizer of the 2014 So Many Roads conference
An in-depth look at the Dead’s great American songbook, informed by the authors’ many decades of thought, analysis, and participation in the Grateful Dead phenomenon, this book takes up the question of the band’s finest songs with a compelling, refreshing, and thought-provoking look at these time-honored classics. -- Nicholas G. Meriwether, director, Center for Counterculture Studies
The Grateful Dead left an immense trove of recordings—live performances and studio takes—all tied together with improvisation in a manner that amounts to a musical genre all its own. New arrivals to this cultural banquet are going to need some help navigating this mountain of music; in The Grateful Dead’s 100 Essential Songs, two longtime fans of the music offer a delightful road map to help you get started. -- David Gans, musician and author of Conversations with the Dead and This Is All a Dream We Dreamed: An Oral History of the Grateful Dead