This Is All A Dream I Blogged: Chapter Two

November 19, 2015 / Thoughts On The Dead / 0 Comments

I know Bear didn’t look like Curtis Armstrong of Booger fame, but that’s who he is in my head.
When Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse found the drawing that would become the famous skeleton and roses poster, they tore the page out of the book; I did not know that, and I would never endorse such behavior, but it is adorable.
Sue Swanson and Eileen Law and Rosie McGee and Mountain Girl (and other women) are interviewed and this is a good decision, not for some nebulous feel-good fairness reason, but it is both an excellent narrative choice and a better reflection of whatever reality might have been than the previous method, which was “asking the dudes in the band.”
The Diggers seem like interesting people, but whenever I hear them discussed, there is a better-than-even-money chance that Peter Coyote will be involved. There is no Peter Coyote in this book: I checked.
There’s a great story–I won’t tell it to you; buy the damn book–about a guy named Brian Rohan, the lawyer who negotiated the Dead’s first deal with Warner Brothers that teaches an important lesson: always be unreasonable with people in suits. Anything else is taken as a sign of weakness.
Wait: one of the people in the oral history is David Gans.
But he wrote the oral history.
We’re through the looking-glass here, Enthusiasts.
Bobby, while at the Monterey Pop Festival, becomes best friends with Jimi Hendrix.
Then Mickey joins the band and everybody gets busted.

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