Peter Richardson - No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead

Co-Sponsored by Amoeba Music

In Conversation with Paul Liberatore 

For almost three decades, the Grateful Dead was America's most popular touring band. While their albums sold well over time, the group never had a number one song, and they cracked the top ten only once—more than two decades after their formation—which raises the question, why did they become one of the world’s most legendary bands? Now, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the band’s creation, No Simple Highway by Peter Richardson is the first book to answer this deceptively simple question. Drawing on new research, interviews, and material from the Grateful Dead archives, No Simple Highway vividly recounts the Dead's colorful history, adding new insight into everything from the acid tests to the band's formation of their own record label to their massive late career success, while probing the riddle of the Dead's vast and durable appeal.

Peter Richardson is an author and lecturer in the humanities department at San Francisco State University and outgoing chair of the California Studies Association. Before that, he was an editor at the Public Policy Institute of California, a think-tank based in San Francisco; a tenured English professor at the University of North Texas; and an acquisitions editor at Harper & Row, Publishers. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

 

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