About this item
For almost three decades, the Grateful Dead was America's most popular touring band. No Simple Highway is the first book to ask the simple question of why--and attempt to answer it. Drawing on new research, interviews, and a fresh supply of material from the Grateful Dead archives, author Peter Richardson 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. Arguing that the band successfully tapped three powerful utopian ideals--for ecstasy, mobility, and community--it also shows how the Dead's lived experience with these ideals struck deep chords with two generations of American youth and continues today.
About the Author
Peter Richardson has written critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead, Ramparts magazine, and radical author/editor Carey McWilliams. His essays have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, and many other outlets. A busy book reviewer, he received the National Entertainment Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013. Richardson has been featured in documentary films, newspaper and magazine stories, podcasts, and public radio programs in North America and abroad. He also speaks frequently at universities, museums, book festivals, and historical societies. His professional experience includes editorial stints at the University of California Press, PoliPoint Press, the Public Policy Institute of California, and Harper & Row, Publishers. Since 2006, Richardson has taught courses on California culture at San Francisco State University. In the 1990s, he was an associate professor of English at the University of North Texas, a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Iceland, and an NEH Summer Seminar fellow at Harvard University. Before that, he earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Born and raised in the East Bay, he now lives in Sonoma County.
