Sunshine Daydream - One Girl's Tale... Book Review

I got higher spinning continuously to "Morning Dew" than I could ever get off any drug.  I went places that are not of this plane. My soul was cleansed and the strength to carry on filled my body and mind. "Morning Dew" became my church.  - excerpt from Sunshine Daydream - One Girls Tale of Life on the Bus

Wow, what a great read.  This is the story of "real" Deadheads - the kind that went on tour for their living and made it a real life choice. Talia's book chronicles several years on tour in the late 1980s (and a little bit in the 1990s too I think).  

When I went to Dead shows (always on the West Coast for me and I made it to Vegas too), there were the righteous hippies that had school buses and really seemed to live in a completely different "system" than the rest of America.  These folk were active in environmental issues, would clean up the parking lot, and would generally "walk the talk." This is the kind of Dead family that Talia Rose was a part of.

Incidentally, as I've attempted to recapture the Dead experience at other types of shows (Phish, etc), one of the main things missing is the presence of these kind of "rainbow family hippies" who really would enhance the experience with their presence.    

An Ethnographic Foray Into an Often Dark Subculture 

The book is detailed and long.  For me it was hard to put down, but I am not sure if it would be nearly as addictive to someone who's not a Grateful Dead fanatic.

One thing is for sure  - Talia pulled no punches and you can see the dark side of the Dead tourheads in this book.  Within the first 40 pages of the book (420 pages long!) she is addicted to heroin - and that's the very beginning of life on tour for her.  She manages to get away from that deadly addiction and experiences the ups and downs of life on tour for a few years. 

There's lots of great shows and beautiful experiences - including a lot of psychedelic adventures. Talia is influential in getting Deadheads to take care of the parking lot in order to make a better impression on the surrounding communities and lessen the Dead tour "footprint."  Talia also shares many great camping and travelling adventures, including her experience travelling to the Telluride Shows for the Harmonic Convergence (which would be the #1 show to go to if I had a time machine).  

But as much joy and fun as there is "on tour"  there's also many disturbing accounts of shockingly bad parenting, addiction, betrayal, and the Feds infiltrating Dead tour.

Talia and her Dead family network are based in Northern California in between tours and make money selling legal and illegal items on Dead tour.  Talia experiences more car trouble during this few years than most people will experience in a lifetime, and really makes me glad I never bought that VW bus I always fantasized about.

Talia has constant obsessions that people are photographing and watching her on Dead tour and it seems she is being paranoid but then she eventually gets busted by the DEA.  In once scene the Feds offer her a deal that she can walk away from her (very serious) LSD charge if she can implicate one of the band members in conspiracy to traffic LSD! This indicates to me that there really was a war against the Dead  by the authorities and I think the fact that people were tripping and starting to "think differently" or "radically" might have been been part of "the system's" fear.

Prison Life and Unfair LSD Sentencing Activism

Sunshine Daydream does a great job telling the reader what it was like to be plucked away from tour to go on trial and then eventually to prison for drug trafficking.  This was a part of the experience for a lot of Deadheads that I've met.

Talia was a influential in the movement against unlawful LSD sentencing (unlawful due to the practice of weighing the material that LSD came on).  She was part of an underground network of prisoners who communicated via letters and she got in trouble many times in prison for this type of activity.  Ultimately, I know the Grateful Dead band members even spoke out about this unjust sentencing practice and the issue got a bit of media exposure.  I am still not sure if the unfortunate souls who who were unfairly sentenced for exaggerated LSD quantities ever got much leniency as a result of this kind of activism.

The prison experience part of the book was very interesting to me.  Talia continues to experiment with psychedelics, frequently tunes into to The Grateful Dead Hour show (which understandably becomes a lifeline for her), and ultimately makes peace with the prison experience so it does not destroy her.  She also dedicates herself to writing (probably she was working on this very book). I found this kind of inspirational.

Life after prison shows her looking in on the touring lifestyle, but things have changed - but has she changed or is it the Dead scene?

...This is a great book about life on tour, and anyone who is a Deadhead will enjoy it

Sunshine Daydream -One Girl's Tale of Life on the Bus Book Rating: N/A(not going to do any more numerical ratings of books like this because they are not perfect yet I am too appreciative of their existence to give anything but a 10.0).

DeadBase X Book Review

This is the granddaddy of all Grateful Dead books and a must have for any tape trader or Dead fanatic. It's subtitle is The Complete Guide to Grateful Dead Song Lists. The key words in the title are that it is a complete guide to the song lists - much more than just the song lists themselves.

This reference book contains such an interesting and thorough breakdown of Grateful Dead set list information that I don't even know where to begin describing it.

While I have never read DeadBase from one page to the next (that's not the idea), I have referenced the book frequently during the writing of this blog for information such as the following:

• when a song started being played
• when a song stopped being played
• how often the song was played
• what set was the song played in usually (and all exceptions)
  
• what songs frequently came before and after

All of that type of information is available at a glance for any song the Grateful Dead played. And that is just the beginning. You can see breakdowns of the timings for tapes after tape that shows how long each song is (and transcribes every spoken word between songs). What is the longest known version of Eyes of the World on tape, you ask? Well it was June 1th, 1963 clocking in at 21:05 (took me less than a minute to get that info).

There are also counts of how many times each song was played year in year out and a ton of Deadhead demographic information that the Deadbase X team collected through surveys of Dead tapers and fans.

The most enjoyable part of Deadbase is the show reviews in which a variety of reviewers gives a summary of the concert. I've read reviews of mainly later Dead shows and I think that every review is fromm someone who attended the show. There are over 400 concert reviews in Deadbase.

When I bought Deadbase X a few years ago, I had to buy it directly from the authors as it is now out of print. I was able to get included several of the annual "DeadBase Yearbooks" from 1989 through 1992. These yearbooks have pictures from many shows, show reviews from every show in the given year, ticket stubs and venue seating charts from every show.

The guys from Deadbase really know how to capture the Grateful Dead experience because they chronicle things like "what people were talking about in the parking lot" for each show too. If you have great memories of Dead shows, I guarantee you the DeadBase books will unearth memories you have long forgotten and this can be a very sweet (and bittersweet) proposition.

As an aside, I had the pleasure of a brief e-mail exchange with one of the authors of DeadBase when I purchased the books and I mentioned off handedly how surpised I was that it had already been 10 years since the Grateful Dead ceased to be (due to Garcia's death). He wrote back a note and we briefly discussed how it had been too painful to even listen to the music for a long time after Jerry's death.

At the time when I ordered DeadBase X, (it must have been 2005) I had just started listening again and it was very emotional for me - but also very positive. My renewed interest in the Grateful Dead experience and music led to me re-collecting all the music, buying all of the books again, and ultimately the creation of this blog. It was nice to hear from the author himself about his experience, and I've enjoyed DeadBase X ever since.

DeadBase X Book Rating on a Scale of 1-10: X.0 (10.0)