Captain Trips: A Biography of Jerry Garcia. This item is unavailable.Captain Trips: A Biography of Jerry Garcia

Avid Dead fan and chronicler Sandy Troy probes Jerry Garcia's personal and professional life through childhood and adolescence, Summer of Love acid tests, drug busts, three marriages, a brush with death, and his comeback. Troy also traces the Dead's highs and lows and Garcia's musical relationships with songwriter Robert Hunter and other musicians in the Grateful Dead.

Just in time for the enduring, canonical Grateful Dead's 30th anniversary next year, Troy has written the first complete biography of bandleader Garcia, the only rock guitarist to have an ice cream flavor named after him. The author examines Garcia's life and career up to and including his surprisingly staid wedding this past February. Included are Garcia's adventures with Ken Kesey during the mid-Sixties, his recurring health problems and revolving drug difficulties, and his creative pursuits, both within and without the Grateful Dead. Because Troy (author of the Dead biography One More Saturday Night, LJ 5/15/91) traces not only Garcia's own musical career but the development and evolution of the Dead through the past 30 years, his book can also be considered a worthy collective biography of the band. Given the Dead's continuing popularity, their importance in 20th-century popular music, and the growing recognition of Garcia as an individual artist, this should be seriously considered for academic as well as public library music collections. [See also the review of David Shenk and Steve Silberman's Skeleton Key on page 70-Ed.]-Bill Piekarski, Southwestern Coll. Lib., Chula Vista, Cal.
--Bill Piekarski, Southwestern Coll. Lib., Chula Vista, Cal.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.