Dancing with the Dead—A Photographic Memoir: My Good Old Days with the Grateful Dead & the San Francisco Music Scene 1964-1974

Rosie McGee, and a number of other women, brought the Feminine element to a testosterone-heavy all-male band and rock scene. It took women of special resilience to rock and roll, and Rosie was one. The hippie movement refused to go along with back-to-back-to-back wars and, in finding new drugs, the psychedelics, also found new art, and new artful dodges to the depressive downers of previous Beats.The Merry Pranksters took the painted clown and made him manic with their Acid Tests. The bumper stickers - "What if they gave a war, and no one came?" "Make love, not war." Tim Leary chimed in merrily pranking himself and guileless teens with "Turn on, tune in, drop out." [then what?] The Grateful Dead, and other San Francisco bands, with the help of Bill Graham, gradually came to monetize their alternative lifestyle, making it possible to continue, even thrive, and include at least some others, where Rosie was in a Family, and helped make it happen through the hard-broke years, staying “turned on”…necessarily mingling with people “living on reds, vitamin C and cocaine,” “having a hard time, living the good life” but eventually hitting it big.Florence Nathan, in her 20s, made the choice, when the rock circus came to town, to join it, longing for a life different from "the sterile life of my parents" but found herself just scraping by as a young adult, alone in an apartment, having drifted into secretarial work in the business district, downtown S.F. The drip, drip, drip of T.S. Eliot's "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons..." threatened to pull her down, but with electrified music, and with sugar cubes that took you higher than Mr. Kite, thanks to Owsley and associates, who swore enlightenment was just around the corner, a whole new world opened up through the looking glass.The kaleidoscopic images of The Scene whirl through this book as she steps back and gives us her photographer's eye on the outside and the inside goings on, that only some could share, due to space limitations, and due to the inevitable fact that - at some point - the doors on the Further bus close, and it's gone in the chugging of half-burned hydrocarbons, or were those brain cells? She doesn't seem to care. She was on the bus...we get to join her through her memories, dreams and reflections. She doesn’t say exactly how, but as the years rolled, she got motion-sick. At some point she simply got off. Later, she courageously refuses to succumb to turmoil and isolation, and returns to a concert already on…"As I danced that night, I was overwhelmed with love for the band and especially for Phil. There's no way to describe what it is like dancing inside that vortex of musical communication, once again..." (Chapter 6, p.235).Still there's a sense of an unfinished symphony here...The Kris Kristoferson song "Bobby McGee" Rosie took her reborn identity from, is about joy in life lived, and grief in love lost, that Janis made so poignant and golden in her brief, burning last year. We are given a fairly full view of the life Rosie lived, but only glimpses of the loss. Sobbing over a rotted teepee she meant to spend another summer in, in someone's backyard in Marin (p.276), can only mean she was struggling not to return to a foursquare life, to keep the hope of hippiedom alive.Florence Nathan, renamed by others in sympathetic resonance with the Merry Pranksters method of monastically altering identities, and the song Janis made golden, crossed with the rose-colored glasses she says (at the end of her book) she viewed the world with, became reborn in a new name. But there's yet the question from another song of Kristoferson's to be responded to, "The Pilgrim, chapter 33." Was the going up worth the coming down?"As far back as I can remember, I lived a life backlit by romantic delusion." (p. 309) Rosie writes. She says she fell in love with another man, and if you scrape through the acknowledgements, you find she has a son with her man's last name (p. 312), but nothing more is said. Is there a package left on the porch, as yet unopened? Would it be by chance A Box of Rain? Or has the music died, and it’s really over? Over, once again.

The history of the Grateful Dead is more than a chronicle of the lives of a handful of musicians. Stories of this band reveal how an important and historic art scene developed. In the future people will look back with envy on those who had the opportunity to join in the performances and culture of the Grateful Dead. Like Paris during Belle Epoque or after World War I, people will wonder what it was like to be in the artists' studio, hang out in their bars, live in their house, meet their friends, find out what they thought, see how the movement all got started. These questions from the future are what make Rosie McGee's Dancing With The Dead valuable.McGee's book is like the first person accounts read by celebrities in a Ken Burns documentary. It says 'this is what it was like to be there at inception. These are the people who were there. This is what we did. This is how we did it.' When Burns gets lucky he'll find a photo that somehow survived the wars and can now illustrate what life looked like inside the history.Dancing With The Dead relates stories and provides images of the houses, parties and events that created the legend of the band. Memories from acid tests, living at 710 Ashbury, the house in Los Angeles, the house at Olompali, Mickey Hart's ranch, Golden Gate Park, The Avalon, The Fillmore, The Matrix, Columbia University, Central Park and Altamont are all here. Better, the book has a catalogue of photographs rescued from 40-year-old contact sheets that were nearly destroyed during a life on the road.The important thing about these pictures and McGee's story is not as much in her life with the Grateful Dead as her stories of life around the Grateful Dead. Rosie McGee describes events in the San Francisco music scene that will give future generations context and perspective on the legend of the Grateful Dead and the complex social and cultural legacy it left in its wake.Rosie's description of a cross-country caravan of hippies and movie production people on a quixotic quest to capture the zeitgeist of the 60s on film documents the fervor with which people followed the dream of peace and freedom and it illustrates that short moment when an entire generation believed it could change the world with love and effort. The metaphor is completed in the photo of Rosie's tied-dyed teepees set in open fields in the early morning sun. The image is inspirational and instructional in art and freedom, perhaps more so when we learn what eventually happens to the teepees.The worry of this book is that it is only published in an electronic format. This gives it a kind of impermanent feel as if her story may not be there for others to read in 100 years. That would be tragedy.The art of the Grateful Dead will survive and continue to hold people's interest for a long time. `I was there' recollections such as McGee's Dancing With The Dead will continue to grow in value to fans and historians alike. Perhaps a publisher will be found to print McGee's book on paper to give it substance and an opportunity for preservation in a form that can be easily preserved and shared.For now, McGee is selling copies of her photographs. Buying her images is a good way to preserve and share the art. These are some fine photographs of iconic figures in American music, but, unfortunately, photographs only incite memory (real or imagined) they don't preserve it.

You know how Amazon will start the review's by offering one good and one not so good. I normally read them both simply out of curiosity but it almost cost me the enjoyment of reading one very good book. After seeing for myself I don't really understand the one negative review I read but to each his own I guess. I loved the book and consider it money well spent. Beside the fact the pictures were excellent , I didn't know that it was Rosie McGee that took all these timeless photographs. The Human Be In , hanging out on the steps of 710 , Sylvester Stewart aka Sly , Jesse Colin Young , Owsley Stanley , touring in Europe , the list goes on. The visual record of what would have been lost had she not taken all these important photographs can't be measured. And as a longtime Dead fan who has read just about everything that has been published on the band since buying Hank Harrisons' History of the Grateful Dead back in the early 70's ; it was nice reading a different take on the scene from not just a woman , but one who was there. It wasn't just a rehash of what I have already read. My only problem with the book was it ended too quickly , mostly from the difficulty I had putting it down once I started.Thanks for sharing Rosie !!

Whilst this book is a must for Deadheads there is much here for anyone with more than a passing interest in the music scene of the West Coast in the middle to late 60's. There are some fabulous photographs of the Grateful Dead family but there are some great shots of the Jefferson Airplane and a lovely photograph of John Cipollina. As Rosie was part of the scene she has some great relaxed photos to share.Yes it was an age of sex drugs and rock `n' roll but this is no kiss and tell account and all these issues are dealt with a maturity not often seen.As Phil Leash's girlfriend Rosie is well placed to share with us an insiders account. It comes across just how small the scene was when it started with the Acid Tests. How it blossomed at the Gathering of the Tribes in early 1967, flourished at Monterey Pop but by Altamont in 1969 the dream had faded. Rosie was witness to all these events and more. This is an essential addition to the cannon and well recommended.

This book is simply fantastic! I couldn't put it down, i read it in two days and was left wanting more. What a trouper Rosie is, written in such a lovely warm conversational way, you feel like she's there telling you the tale. Incredible new insights and details into a story I thought I'd wrung dry. An absolute must for any real commited Dead head. Beautiful from beginning to end.

A nice memoir. well written and evocative to anyone like myself,a dedicated "DeadHead",great days, fondly re-called by aninsider. Essential reading for anyone interested in that extraordinary phenomena, The Grateful Dead", Good photos too!