I was never a Deadhead and kinda lost touch with the band after Workingman's Dead, so most of this was new to me. However, it's a fascinating look at the creative process that stayed largely intact over 5 decades and the personalities that made it all happen. It made me want to find a lot of this music and give it a listen, and that's pretty high praise for the book. ( )

The Grateful Dead probably wasn't the greatest musical group of their era, nor the best known, but for a particular subset of music listeners they were somehow utterly magical ... and their fame proved to be powerful and enduring enough that it helped influence how the world looked at an entire generation of music. That fame was really less about the music itself than it was about the unique subculture that surrounded the band, and its the spirit of that subculture that this audiobook attempts to capture.

It does this pretty well, actually, through the retelling of a long series of non-linear anecdotes rather than via a chronological narrative. Taken individually, a lot of the anecdotes are pretty fun, and collectively they say a lot about the Grateful Dead subculture. A hardcore Deadhead would probably be in heaven listening to this volume.

I'm not quite a hardcore deadhead, though, and for me the stories started to blend together into a repetitive and slightly muddy pool after a while. The nature of the book's organization made it difficult for a casual listener to fit the stories into a broader context, but it was kind of fun listening to them one at a time as individual anecdotes. Unless you're pretty hardcore, I probably wouldn't recommend sitting down with the whole thing. (And even if you *are* hardcore ... who knows? I lent the audiobook to my sister, who was much more into the Dead back in the day, and she gave up on the thing pretty quickly.) ( )

I thought this book would offer more insights into the band members and more about the music. Instead it was a series of anecdotes, which bounced back and forth in time. Following the story in a chronological order would have helped me. As other reviewers have said, this book is more for the hard core deadheads. They would relish the opportunity to delve into stories probably not heard before. But a little went a long way for me. ( )

This book will be catnip for Deadheads but for the casual Dead listener (like me) it seemed like a whole lot of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. With that said, I was most intrigued by the second half of the book which examined the Grateful Dead following the arrival of MTV and the scrutiny of the MTV generation and the (mostly negative) impact that those newer, younger (maybe less serious) music fans had on the Grateful Dead live music listening experience in the late 1980s and 1990s. I was also interested in Jerry Garcia who seemed to steal the spotlight throughout most of the book with the other band members relegated to his shadow. A must read for some, a might read for others. ( )

I received an audiobook of So Many Roads through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program in exchange for a review, just at the outset of the hype surrounding the Dead’s Fare Thee Well “final” shows in Santa Clara and Chicago. I should say at the outset that I’m not a Deadhead and have never read a book about them, so I’m not going to help potential readers who want to know if there is “new” stuff in this history. However, I’m their age, have lived in the Bay Area most of my life, gone to some of the same schools as some of them, have been involved in music for most of my life, and even have Bob Weir’s old phone number (Bob, I have 25 years of messages for you…) so I can give you my opinion based on that and purely as a reader/listener.

First, David Browne needs a map. Concord is not a “suburb west of San Francisco.” That would be a damp location. Nor is Lafayette “west of Berkeley.” Also soggy. Saying that Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae is “close to Mill Valley” is curious, too, since, more to the point, it’s a lot closer to Jerry Garcia’s home at the time, San Rafael. Trivial? Maybe in themselves these errors are minor, but they suggest that the author may not be so accurate about other, more important things. Anything that calls into question the accuracy of a book of nonfiction is serious.

More importantly, the book’s organization is poor. Ostensibly, the idea was to have each chapter relate to a significant date in the Grateful Dead’s long history. But it’s hard to say what happened on a specific date without providing a backstory about the things that lead up to that day. Which is what Browne does, starting each chapter with a particular concert or other event, then flashing back to what’s been going on for the previous year or so, finally bringing us back to the event. This might have sounded swell when pitching the book, since it may distinguish it from other books about the Dead. However, it’s a very disconcerting way to listen to a narrative, going back and forth in time. Some episodes, such as the Dead’s New Orleans bust and their living in Olompali, are mentioned in passing but never described. As the narrative swoops back and forth temporally, some odd things happen, like talking about Brent Mydland after his death has already been described in a previous chapter.

I learned some things that I didn’t know about the band and its members by listening to So Many Roads, but I recommend it only to those who are already well versed in the Grateful Dead’s music and history. ( )