This could the year of the Relix/Jambands.com book group.

It’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time. We’d select a title, give everyone a month or two to read it, and then assemble at some fine venue or festival to discuss. I imagine we could pull in the author to join the dialogue.

My suggestion for our first book? Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America, written by longtime Jambands.com contributor and Relix Contributing Editor Jesse Jarnow, who also penned the Relix March Animal Collective cover story.

Here’s the official description from the dust jacket: “The story of psychedelics and the Grateful Dead is a secret American through-line between the 1950s and the present, an always-radical and everchanging counterculture that continues to have a transformative impact on life in America. Uncovering the hidden history of the biggest psychedelic distribution system the world has ever known, Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America animates an alternative America with the narratives of utopian homesteaders and self-taught black market chemists, spiritual seekers and pranksters, graffiti artists and government-wanted hackers, entrepreneurs and pioneering DJs, and much more.”

Jesse adds: “There were a lot of questions I wanted to know the answer to, really, and stories I wanted to know. The book is an attempt to write the narrative of psychedelic America long beyond the ‘60s, a secret history that extends continuously to the present, with the ‘60s done after the first chapter and the Grateful Dead and the Deadheads acting as the central throughline—just as they became the center of the LSD black market for nearly three decades— but connecting lots of other dots, too. I wanted to show the impact of underground psychedelics on American culture and uncover the long arc story behind it using narrative nonfiction that focuses on a range
of characters including, early Stanford computer scientists, tapers, graffiti artists, radical hackers, commune dwellers, musicians, chemists, dealers, food co-ops and entrepreneurs. There’s a chapter built around Wetlands. There’s a chapter built around Vermont in the ‘80s and Phish’s place in it. There’s a bit of Relix history, too, and a chapter titled ‘Festival Season.’ Lots of Deadheads in cyberspace. Lots of drugs. Fun for the whole #fam.”

Here are some other suggestions for your bedside table… How about Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews which we excerpted in the Jan_Feb issue of Relix ? Of course, March, historically, was the month for the Allman Brothers Band’s Beacon Theatre run, so why not pick up the expanded edition of Alan Paul’s One Way Out: The Inside History of the Allman Brothers Band ? Other upcoming titles that intrigue me include: Barney Hoskyns’ Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock; Bob Mehr’s Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, the Last Rock ‘n’ Roll Band and Dave Stewart’s _Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: A Life in
Music_. This may even be the year we see one, or both, of the announced Lou Reed biographies from Anthony DeCurtis and Will Hermes.

So what do you say to a Relix/Jambands.com book group?

Shall we go, you and I?

Later days and peace,
Dean