Alive with the Dead: Or A Fly on the Wall with a Camera

A visual feast of over 500 photographs offering an insider peek into the Grateful Dead scene from the mid-eighties on. San Francisco photographer Susana Millman shares her experience as A Fly on the Wall with a Camera around the Grateful Dead scene from the mid '80s onward as she became part of the Grateful Dead family and developed her skills as a documentary and performance photographer. Alive begins with Susana's friendship with Jerry Garcia, who was a matchmaker in her 1985 marriage to Grateful Dead publicist and biographer Dennis McNally and even walked her down the aisle. The photos are largely from Garcia's years with the band in the '80s and '9's and demonstrate Millman's warm, intimate style and unique access to happenings onstage, offstage and backstage. The book is written as a series of vignettes in time and place, with funny personal anecdotes from Millman and McNally adding breadth to descriptions of the complex mini-universe (fans, family, crew, technicans for sound and lights, the intimate friends who made up the extended family) that was the Grateful Dead.

Millman is best known for her photography of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead from the mid-1980s on through later incarnations. In addition to being featured in Grateful Dead albums, films and publications, her work has also appeared in a wide variety of music and more general publications including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Interview, and Time. Susana Millman progressed from being a good friend of Jerry Garcia's―so close that he acted as the father of the bride at her wedding to the band's publicist, Dennis McNally―to becoming the band's unofficial photographer.

Grateful Dead Percussionist, two-time Grammy winner and author of a variety of books on percussion including Planet Drum, Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Spirit Into Sound, and Songcatchers.

Author of NY Times best-seller biography of Grateful Dead, A Long Strange Trip / The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. Also author of early biography of Jack Kerouac, Desolate Angel, and study of race and American cultural change, On Highway 61, which won the Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award in 2015.