It’s going to be Deadhead night at Bookshop Santa Cruz with a double-bill of grateful scholars. Jim Newton’s Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening, is a sprawling panoramic view of Jerry Garcia, and the Grateful Dead’s influence on modern culture. And, Dead in the Kitchen: The Official Grateful Dead Cookbook, by Gabi Moskowitz, is a veritable cornucopia of vegan and vegetarian fare.
Moskowitz’s Dead in the Kitchen, is a beautiful hardbound, embossed, and user-friendly cookbook full of recipes guaranteed to delight any palate. The forward comes from Mollie Katzen (of Moosewood and Enchanted Broccoli Forest cookbook fame) who shares her experience making and bringing meals to the Jerry Garcia Band – it’s a delicious endorsement.
Moskowitz is the author of six cookbooks and a well-known figure in the culinary world. Her BrokeAss Gourmet website is a desired destination for inexpensive cooking, and she even has a TV show based on her life called, Young & Hungry.
Moskowitz, who was 12 when Garcia passed, really captured the mood of an era with Dead in the Kitchen. It’s not remotely similar to what you would find in 1988, in the parking lot of Deer Creek, but more of a gastronomical gestalt. Combined with this being an “official” Grateful Dead book, it’s a cool package.
“I primarily worked with (Grateful Dead archivist and legacy manager) Dave Lemieux on this book. And he let me know from the beginning that it was very important to the Dead and Grateful Dead production that we have it be vegetarian. Vegetarianism, as we know it today, came about as a component of the counterculture. And the counterculture, vegetarianism, and the health food movement are so distinctly connected to Deadheads and the Grateful Dead.
“Licensing has strict rules, so you won’t find Garcia’s favorite cheeseburger recipe, or Bob Weir’s favorite dish, but Dead in the Kitchen captures the feeling of being part of a community that valued healthy food,” Moskowitz says from her home in Marin.
Jim Newton’s Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening is a skeleton of a different hue. Newton’s excellent journalistic skills reporting on California culture and politics, pays off when approaching the rich life of Garcia and the band.
Jim Newton is a heavyweight journalist whose work includes writing biographies on Chief Justice Earl Warren, Jerry Brown and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, to now, Jerry Garcia.
For Deadheads who have read most of the Dead books out there, it often feels like seeing a new version of Batman or Spiderman. There’s going to be a scene with parents being killed outside a theater (the pearls!) and a high school student being bitten by a radioactive spider. But with Rising Tide, Newton has unearthed some real gems, widening the well-known lore with a different lens.
The book draws a fascinating parallel between Jerry Garcia’s growth into a self-effacing bandleader and Ronald Reagan’s rise. In Newton’s hands, it’s not a stretch to see Garcia as the antithesis of Reagan’s world of propaganda, exploiting differences, and a general disdain for anyone different than rich white people.
“Other than my affection for the band, and my appreciation for the music, all of that, the other thing that really drew me into this is that the Grateful Dead offer a particularly fruitful way to look at the whole counterculture. Because they’re always either in it, or right on the edge of it, or coming or going. I can’t think of any other cultural or political entity that touches so many pieces of the countercultures,” Newton says from his home in Pasadena.
While Rising Tide takes place in the past, where, as mythologist Joseph Campbell, said “The Grateful Dead are the antidote to the atom bomb,” the story resonates in today’s uncertain world.
“I mean, in some ways, it’s perennial, right? So it’s not that surprising that we would still be in a struggle over freedom, community, rights, and responsibilities. Those things are not really resolvable problems. So in that sense, the struggle is the story. When I started writing this book, Trump was president and then he was gone.
“And I thought, well, done with that. And then, of course, he came back. So the book is very much written in the Trump era. Even though it’s not about the Trump era, that feeling that this battle is not won infects this book,” Newton concludes.
Kitchen Counterculture: A Conversation About Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and the Food that Fueled a Revolution takes place on Thursday February 26, at 7pm at Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz. Admission is free.
