In her forward to Perspectives on the Grateful Dead - the first volume of collected critical writings about the band - sociologist Rebecca Adams writes "reading this volume for the first time was like being at a show" (xiv). The metaphor she spins is valid, but unimportant for the moment (we'll get back to it). What is important is the fact that the metaphor exists at all. For as long as writing has been a system of communication, people have tried to use it do describe music -- one form of communication trying to describe another.

Scholarly essays are meant to connect their subjects to a coherent world where things have fixed values. While there's always room for interpretation in an academic essay, there's rarely room for personal interpretation. Ideas can be based in intuition, but they must be supported in an essentially scientific way. In the medium of the scholarly article, authors are encouraged to be somewhat detached from their subjects, so as to provide a more objective (and, ergo, more accurate) opinion.

There's an air of justification that hovers about the works in this book. In this case, the matter at hand is the Grateful Dead. Almost each of the essays in the book has a double function: to prove that the Grateful Dead are worthy of study, as well as to prove the validity of the given paper's central thesis. And just as scholarly detachment is encouraged in academics, loving fondness is encouraged in Deadheads. This grimly uneasy paradox runs through the essays, as Deadhead scholars try to remain clandestine in their obvious glee at being allowed to run amok with a favorite subject.

Continuing in her book-as-show metaphor, Adams writes "rereading [the book] was like listening to a tape. I found myself noting details, taking a critical stance, and appreciating what I had read in a new way" (xiv). Upon first glance, the "show"'s opener - Philip E. Baruth's "Precisely How and Why I Didn't Kill Jerry: Ethnography, Surrealism, and The Millennium Shows - seemed like a clunker. In it, an author describes his experiences with Deadheads after publishing a fictional novel (in 1994) which culminated in the death of Jerry Garcia.

Rereading the piece, though, it manages to precisely pinpoint the paradox. "Nearly every promotional event or reading I've done for The Millennium Shows since 1994 has begun in approximately the same way. After the standard pause, someone will raise a hand and ask, 'Are you a Deadhead?'... if I considered myself a part of the subculture fictionalized in the novel, then clearly they were willing to treat the book as something fundamentally different than if I considered myself an outsider to that subculture" (4).

And so it goes. What is at work here are the first stages of the transition from fandom to scholarship. At one point did Shakespeare's work slip away from the groundlings and into the iron clutch of academics? The test of the Grateful Dead's scholarly legacy will be when people who never saw them begin to study them. As Steve Silberman describes it optimistically in his elegant afterward, entitled "the Curriculum Of Joy" the book is "a record of the first generation of Dead historians and interpreters laying down critical, anthropological, and sociological approaches to the subject while the memories of the experiences were still fresh..." (234).

With that keynote struck, the first set of essays are more self-contained, self-conscious, eclectic pieces. The second set are more thematic, linked by various motifs and broad concepts; segues, in other words.

During the first set, there are places where it feels as if the book is still warming up. For the most part, the first set deals with sociological aspects of the Dead phenomenon. In a sense, these are the easiest to do. I hesitate to call them "cheap", but it's very easy to slip into cliché when writing about the Deadhead subculture. Thankfully, most of these don't. Some of the more interesting of these include "Legally Dead: The Grateful Dead and American Legal Culture" by David Graser and Vaughan Black and "'No, but I've Been to Shows': Accepting the Dead and Rejecting the Deadheads" by David L. Polovitz.

As evidenced by their titles, many of these works take what are relatively commonplace observations - to adapt the latter example, people who enjoy the Grateful Dead's music but hesitate to identify themselves with Deadheads - and explore the validity of them. One recurring theme in this book is Deadhead folklore, stories and legends passed on from head to head.

In a way, that's what many of these articles do: they pass on rumors... only, this time, with footnotes and bibliographies (which are really probably the primary differences between folklore and scholarship anyway). In places, though, the method of critical selection seems to have worn a little thin. "Is There a Day of the Month Effect in 'Beat It On Down The Line'?" by Robert K. Toutkoushian is certainly emblematic of this. It takes a fairly simply explained phenomenon (people's tendency to believe that the number of beats at the head of Beat It On Down The Line mirrored the day of the month) and analyzes it through a series of complex mathematical equations. Infinitely more interesting, to me, would be the origin of such an idea.

An article like this would give a skeptic ample fodder for declaring that Deadheads aren't worth studying simply because there's no substance to their beliefs and, therefore, value in studying them. At times, this article seems to do what the harshest critics accused the Dead of doing: wanking for the sake of wanking. Toutkoushian's talents might have been better applied if he chose to study a more interesting math/GD-related topic -- perhaps the "ossification" (as Phil Lesh put it) of the band's setlists between the late 70s and early 80s.

Thankfully, seemingly useless pieces like this are rare in the book and, several articles later, the volume enters the second set -- moving from articles about the fans to articles about the music. The segue from one to another is gracefully entrancing. Walter Everett's challenging "'High Time' and Ambiguous Harmonic Function" examines both the song-writing of the song and how the principles behind it may have an effect on the listener.

Everett's essay leads naturally into a wonderful discussion of the language of writing about music entitled "Space, Motion, and Other Musical Metaphors" by Shaugn O'Donnell. In turn, out of that, the metaphors of music and space get twisted into metaphors for life cycles and rebirth, and we're floating into Marjorie C. Luesebrink's analysis of Alan Trist's Water Of Life... and on it goes through the second half of the book. Through a series of conceptually linked essays, the book remains completely engrossing, managing to transcend questions of whether or not this is material worthy of objective study. The study here manages to be both academic and devoted at once.

By the time one gets to Rachel Wilgoren's "the Grateful Dead as Community", it's as if one is emerging out of the tail end of an intense drumz > space segment. The songs that traditionally followed the incredibly out music of the early and middle part of the second set could generally be grouped, in terms of song structure alone, with tunes usually played during the first half of the night. And, just as the songs following drumz > space have an increased impact due to their placement, so do the essays that close out the book.

One more aspect of the book that's probably worth mentioning is its steeply academic cover price of sixty dollars. For many, that's prohibitively expensive. Paying $60 to see any band is absurd, let alone read about them. This is not a book about the Grateful Dead in any conventional sense, though. It doesn't so much impart pure information about the Dead than present a number of new frameworks through which to view both the band and the experience of listening to them.

As an admitted Deadhead with a professed interest in academically geeky topics, the book was of great use to me, proving a background for some more obscure corners of a mysterious world. Certainly, the writing is dense -- though it is extremely rewarding. For others, the subject matter might be a little much. The book focuses on increasingly minute details of the Grateful Dead universe. For those who have passed 101, or even 201, this is a recommended read.

JESSE JARNOW is a creative writing major at Oberlin College, where he is working on a concentration in fiction. He is a writer and editor at JamBands.com. His work has appeared in Signal To Noise, Dupree's Diamond News, the Oberlin Review, and the Anonymous Church Of The Hypocritical Prophet.