The Grateful Dead: Rising from the grave

It's shaping up to be quite a year for the Grateful Dead, the band that ceased to exist in 1995 after the death of its de facto leader, Jerry Garcia. Seven years on, there's a new sense of celebration. For starters, there has been a spate of historic releases and gigs by offshoots such as Phil and Friends and Ratdog (the latter completed a rapturously received short European tour last month). Then, to cap it all, there was the emergence, in front of 30,000 ecstatic acolytes in Wisconsin two weeks ago, of The Other Ones, a reunion of all the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. Not bad going for a bunch of musicians some of whom are now pushing 60 and have been too easily dismissed as clapped-out hippies.

So, it's a particularly good time to meet the Dead's official historian and publicist, Dennis McNally, the author of A Long Strange Trip, a newly published "inside history" of the band's 30-year career. He's in London to promote his book and has just completed a series of radio interviews, trying to explain to sceptical Britons what it is about the Dead that is so special. He is a slight, charming man in his fifties, and his historian's scholarliness is tempered by a youthful dose of the same questing enthusiasm that fired his employers during their great musical adventure.

"We're not done yet; we're not done at all!" he says. "I'm not generally one for symbolism, but it's very interesting that it took seven years for the rest of the band to recover from Jerry's death, to go back on stage to play seriously as, in effect, a reconstituted Grateful Dead – though they will never use that name again. And this band can really play. Performing at those two Alpine Valley shows was as authentically joyful an experience for them, as it had been for many years.

"I mean, watching Jerry, with all his drug problems, not take care of himself during the Eighties and Nineties was an extremely painful experience for everyone."

But can the rest of the band ever overcome the loss of Garcia, who, for many, was the Grateful Dead? "The Other Ones have dealt with the problem of not having Jerry by changing," says McNally. "Frankly, I think it can be better than when Jerry wasn't himself. To think that you couldn't improve on the Grateful Dead in 1995 – as some fans do – is just silly. The Dead then were too often lacking a major element, and Jerry himself was aware of that."

And Jimmy Herring, the guitarist who has the unenviable task of filling Garcia's shoes in The Other Ones? "Oh, he's a terrific player – he has no fear. He's just being himself, and, in the process, he's covering most of the realms that Jerry did. There are a million things that Jerry did that he's not doing, of course; and he's not as eccentric as Jerry. But the combination of a lead guitar and two keyboards changes things significantly for me. It's just excellent music. I'd like to see where this band is halfway through this tour – they could really go places."

McNally has been around the Dead long enough to know about these things. In 1979, Garcia hired him as "official historian" (how many other bands would foresee the need for such an apparent luxury, let alone deserve it?) after reading McNally's first book, a literary biography of Jack Kerouac and the Beat scene. McNally retains his fan's enthusiasm for the band, even after 20 years of witnessing the less-than-happy reality of this particular American dream. The first night he saw the Dead, in 1972, he realised they were the living continuation of a stream of bohemia that was sparked off by Kerouac and his muse Neil Cassady. And he remains as passionate about some of the band's later years, by which time they'd had a Top 10 single with "Touch of Grey" and were struggling to keep alive the cosy intimacy of their shows in the faceless stadiums of Middle America. That made the Dead's all-too rare appearances in Britain and Europe, where they played some outstanding shows free of the problems of thousands of ticketless fans trying to gatecrash gigs, stand out.

"Some of the 1990 shows were simply first-rate and we got fabulous media coverage. The Hallowe'en show in Paris was wonderful, as was the night at Wembley when Tony Blair was in the audience and they did 'Maggie's Farm'. I said, 'Look, we lost a little money, bringing 50 people over first class, renting Mercedes, and so on; we didn't break even playing relatively small halls. But if we go back, as a normal tour, and work some festivals, within a year or two, we could be able to finance these tours, have fun, and have none of the problems we face back home'. But at that point the band was simply not in the frame of mind to build something, that was just too much work, and various band members said, 'I'm not going to Europe without my children, my nanny...', and so on."

But the crushing blow to the dreams of British Dead Heads came from an unexpected source. The road crew – who, as "family" members, had equal say in all band meetings and could veto any decision they didn't like – "didn't want the hassle of filling in all the paperwork to clear our equipment through customs. It was just so dumb".

More's the pity, because, as one of the latest releases from the band's legendary "Vault" of live performances demonstrates, they could be especially inspired abroad. Steppin' Out With The Grateful Dead chronicles their visit to England in the spring of 1972, and captures them introducing a slew of self-penned songs that sparked the imagination of at least one young fan who caught them then: Elvis Costello has testified to the strength of the band he saw at the Bickershaw Festival that May. These finely honed tales of Americana contrast nicely with the lengthy improvisatory excursions for which the band was always justly famous.

McNally is as well-placed as anyone to define what it is about this latter aspect of Grateful Dead music – what fans describe as "It" – that makes it so enduring. "A state of grace, a feeling of ecstasy that is achieved when you've got six guys all improvising. It's not rock'n'roll, where you've five guys comping and one lead player playing. There are these moments when they go 'out' and they somehow manage to play this incredibly abstract music that barely still holds to the melody, and yet there's a pulse going through, rhythmically and melodically, that keeps you glued there.

"The Grateful Dead shatter musical shape better than anyone this side of John Coltrane. They were the only band I know that wedded rock form and true improvisation, when everyone improvises. Even in jazz now, you have great music, but with all due respect, it's not truly all improvisation. In that freedom there is this marvellous opportunity for complete catastrophe – which I've heard – or grace, and "It' is when the grace happens." The evidence from The Other Ones – and its fellow-Grateful Dead offshoot bands – is that we can expect to see and hear more of "It" in the future. The rhythm guitarist Bob Weir was so fired by the small but enthusiastic welcome he got when he brought his band Ratdog to Britain last month that he wants to come back next year. And, who knows, he might even be joined by his other former Dead colleagues.

In the meantime, McNally's book offers not only some of the most vivid writing about the rock'n'roll experience, but a fascinating glimpse into a side of American culture that is still thriving, still evolving, and will simply not fade away. As he says: "Any time you get a story about a group of people who literally do nothing that's expected of them, yet who win in the end, I should think that bears reading."

'A Long Strange Trip: the inside history of the Grateful Dead' is published by Bantam Press, £20

'Steppin' out with the Grateful Dead' (4-CD set) is out on Arista, £29.99