Friends of the Devil: West Texas Cowboys, Brown-Eyed Women, and Other Sunshine Daydreamers from the Songs of the Grateful Dead - Hardcover

Pappademas, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 059373274X ISBN 13: 9780593732748

Publisher: Random House, 2026

Synopsis

I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be: a rip-roaring, kaleidoscopic deep dive into the mythos and songs of the Grateful Dead, with over one hundred vibrant, original paintings.

“A wildly original, audaciously funny tour of the Grateful Dead and the mythical world they built . . . Alexander Pappademas and Joan LeMay brilliantly explore the Dead’s genius.”—Rob Sheffield, author of Love Is a Mix Tape

Friends of the Devil invites you to plunge headfirst into the dreamworld of the Grateful Dead, where music and myth intertwine and history dissolves like a tab on your tongue. This captivating exploration brings to life not only the songs that have enchanted Deadheads for generations but the stranger-than-fiction stories behind them.

The gang’s all here: An anonymous female convict in America’s notorious prison and Playboy bunnies on acid. Joseph Campbell and the Zodiac Killer. College revolutionaries lost in the desert and Bob Dylan wandering in out of the cold. In these pages, the abstract epic “Dark Star” gives shape to a movie gone mad, and “Terrapin Station” winds its way to Robert Hunter’s brain from sixteenth-century France via the hollers of Kentucky.

With Joan LeMay's original paintings breathing fresh new life into the ramshackle, blacklight-ready aesthetic of the Grateful Dead, Friends of the Devil is a rich and rollicking journey—a gift for longtime fans and a delightful, informative, and often moving treat for anyone new to the band's wild magic. Join us in revisiting the past, where every page is a step back in time and a ripple in still water, and every story shines like a glimmering stone on the golden road.

About this title

About the Author

Alex Pappademas is the author of Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant—The Movies and Meaning of an Irrepressible Icon and the co-author, with Joan LeMay, of Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Soul Survivors from the Songs of Steely Dan. He is a writer and editor at GQ, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Los Angeles Times, and Grantland. He lives in Los Angeles.

Joan LeMay's fine art has been shown internationally in galleries, alternative and institutional venues, and public spaces since the late 1990s. Her paintings have appeared in dozens of publications, books, and music videos and on album covers, band fliers, and posters for independent film. She is the co-author, with Alex Pappademas, of Quantum Criminals. LeMay plays bass in the bands Bull Thieves and Viennetta. She is based in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Bertha

“Tuning” —> “Bertha”

“There’s no Grateful Dead songs that take place at home,” John Mayer once suggested. This was a few years ago, on Rick Rubin’s podcast “Tetragrammaton,” during an interview in which Mayer—who by then had been the lead guitarist of Dead & Company, the world’s most elite Grateful Dead tribute band, for almost a decade—often seemed to be making the case for the Grateful Dead’s greatness to Rubin, the bodhisattva of Malibu, still a skeptical headbanger at heart.

“These are all people on the move,” Mayer said. “All the time. The spirit, the world—if you put all these songs together and built a town, nobody lives there.”

So let’s start there. Let’s start in a town where nobody lives. Let’s try to see what’s going down.

When we meet people in the Grateful Dead’s songs—in the ones they wrote in collaboration with lyricists like Robert Hunter, John Perry Barlow, and others, and the songs written by other people that they picked up and, typically, transformed, sometimes subtly and sometimes radically—we meet them on the run. Their narrators are, in song after song, fleeing or seeking or returning, living out their own versions of the same story the Appalachian singer Henry Whittier was telling in 1923 in “Lonesome Road Blues,” the earliest known recording of a Black blues song better known, once the Dust Bowl migrants who Alan Lomax called the “Grapes of Wrath people” took it up, as “Goin’ Down the Road Feeling Bad”—I ain’t gonna be treated this way. I’m going where the climate suits my clothes.

A five-word Grateful Dead lyric, from “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleloo,” that’s also a complete short story: “Hello, baby, I’m gone, goodbye.”

An ethos in eight words, from “Friend of the Devil”: “Set out running, but I take my time.”

The last word of “Cassidy”—the last imperative in a song full of imperatives, from a catalog of songs that are also full of imperatives—is “fly.”

The first line of “Bertha” is “I had a hard run,” and the next one is “Running from your window.”

In “Bertha,” the narrator is footloose and feckless and begs Bertha not to come around and trouble his existence. He runs from Bertha and into a world of hardship and mishap. If you count “running” and “run-in,” the first verse of “Bertha” alone contains ten uses of the verb “to run.”

Between the song’s live debut in 1971 and the end of the band in 1995, the Grateful Dead opened with “Bertha” approximately 130 times. It’s the first song on the live albums Hundred Year Hall and The Grateful Dead (the 1971 double-live colloquially known as Skull & Roses). It’s a good statement of intention. They’d play “Bertha,” and they were off and running.

There’s a story about who Bertha was.

Once there was an overpowered military-grade electric fan that, when switched on, blew so hard it bumped across the floor of the Grateful Dead’s office, a rattling-bladed mangler hungry for fingers, and Bertha was the name they gave her.

(Every big band is a business. Mail to open, papers to file. The idea of the Grateful Dead having an “office” is still funny. Another day at the office: The fan is chasing us again, man.)

There’s another story. There almost always is. Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead lyricist and non-touring band member who wrote “Bertha,” and who left behind a lot of explanations of his lyrics for someone who always said he preferred not to explain them, said the fan became Bertha only “after the fact.”

“Bertha . . . is some vaguer connotation of birth, death, and reincarnation,” he told a radio interviewer in 1978. “Cycle of existences, some kind of such nonsense like that.”

That shaggy-dog Buddhist read on “Bertha” hinges largely on the way Jerry sings the words “bar door” in the third verse. It sounds like “barn door” but also like “bardo,” as in the plane between life and eternity. A zone where you might linger, waiting to graduate from the karmic wheel, resisting your return to the raw deal that is material existence—birth-a.

(Counterpoint: A friend of mine has never heard “Bertha” and not pictured a cow: I had to mooooooooove.)

Maybe the words are just there to give the music shape. “Bertha” sets the singer’s anxious plea to an urgent, tumbling rhythm, a beat that gets ahead of itself. The guy running from Bertha is running flat-out across uneven ground. He’s hopping fences, holding on to his hat, somebody’s clothesline trailing from his ankle.

He runs from her all night. He hides in a bar, in the jailhouse, in the rain. He dresses in green, dives under the sea, but can still hear her calling, calling, calling.

Sometimes Jerry sings “Bertha” like she’s a kissing bandit and he’s ticklish. And sometimes Jerry sings it like she’s chasing him with a rolling pin or a butterfly net. Maybe it’s another seventies song about a man who won’t be pinned—the old dichotomy of wives and moms, balls and chains, versus the wide-open road where boys can be free. But the pull of domesticity is also romantic, if you believe the people we love and who love us and pull upon us gravitationally are our karma. (Which I do.)

The point is motion, human flight, keeping your fingers out of the whirling blades of circumstance. The Dead’s songs map a country where escape is the national pastime. When you start listening for it, you hear it in every song.

Long distance runner, what you standing there for? Really had to move. This space is getting hot. More good advice: “If all you got to live for / Is what you left behind / Get yourself a powder charge and seal that silver mine.”

There’s also a silver mine in “Uncle John’s Band.” The singer tells us he lives in it, and that he calls it “Beggar’s Tomb,” because to live anywhere, to stay in one place, constitutes a kind of death.

“I’m gonna sit right here,” says the narrator of “Big River,” after following his own footloose lover all along the Mississippi, from St. Paul to Davenport, through St. Louis and Memphis and Baton Rouge, before losing her in New Orleans and dumping his blues in the Gulf of Mexico, “until I die.”

Staying still, sitting, stopping, stuckness, is death. Or it’s a fate worse than death.

There actually are a few Grateful Dead songs about home, to be fair. It’s where Uncle John is going to take his children in “Uncle John’s Band.” It’s where the four winds might blow you safely back to, if you’re lucky. Where you just might get some sleep tonight.

Home is where the earth-mama in “Let It Grow” goes down to the river to gather water in the morning, where you can watch the seasons change, dialing into the cycle of life and death and renewal and your place in it.

Home is dogs in a pile.

But home is also where you go to die in bed, like poor Peter from “Black Peter” or the guy in “Dire Wolf.” Home is where your doom knows to find you.

In “Brown-Eyed Women,” home equals obligation. Fires to tend, a plow to drag, while you think back on your wild years, about red grenadine and ladies saying “Please.” And it’s also a tumbledown shack in Bigfoot County. (Home has a roof that can collapse and kill you in a snowstorm.)

Just about anywhere is better than being alone with your memories. (Another philosophy of life, from another song the Dead didn’t write: “I’d rather be in some dark hollow where the sun don’t ever shine / Than to be in some big city, in a small room, with you upon my mind.”)

Home, in one Bob Weir breakup song, “Looks Like Rain,” is where the narrator wakes up to find his bed empty because his lover’s gone. Of course, in another Bob Weir breakup song, “Black-Throated Wind,” home is where the narrator finally resolves to return, having learned from hard experience that you carry your pain wherever you go, and if you run you can drown in the American night.

It’s a conundrum framed most clearly in “Truckin’,” written by Robert Hunter the first time he joined the Dead on tour instead of working from home: “You’re sick of hanging around, you’d like to travel / Get tired of travelin’, you want to settle down.” At the end of the song, the narrator says he’s going home—but only long enough to “sit down and patch my bones” before getting back out there. (In “Brokedown Palace,” home is where you rest your bones by the waterside—but that song’s about dying, too, the great homegoing at the end of everything.)

You get so you can’t live anywhere else. The music never stops, even when the band’s all packed and gone.

But sometimes home is the one place you can’t run to.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 059373274X
• ISBN 13: 9780593732748
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: LeMay Joan
• Number of pages: 304