Sweet Chaos: The Grateful Dead's American Adventure, by Carol Brightman

For better or worse, my adolescent bodymind was permanently altered by its encounter with the Grateful Dead in the early 1980s. Murky days for the band to be sure, but the shows my teenage drug buddies and I caught throughout California, and especially at the dusty Ventura County fairgrounds, poured psychedelic kerosene onto the dying embers of the hippiedom we emulated. The Dead offered more than a hedonic escape hatch into a world of ritual song, wink-wink symbols, and patchouli-drenched...