Reviews
Like any formidable memoir from a counterculture veteran, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead is heavy on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. You know the kind I'm talking about: hotel after-parties that snap into orgies, acid trips that trail across decades and more than 2,000 concerts that begin in small clubs and lead to gigs alongside the Great Pyramid of Egypt. But Bill Kreutzmann, founding drummer of the Grateful Dead, has produced more than just a tourist's guide. What emanates, maybe more than he intended, is a testimony to friendship and profound sadness when it abruptly ends.... The book is dense with acid trips and capers on both coasts and overseas. Dead fans will enjoy juicy stories. [ Deal ] reads like Kreutzmann is on the next barstool slapping your back between laughs., "Like any formidable memoir from a counterculture veteran, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead is heavy on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. You know the kind I'm talking about: hotel after-parties that snap into orgies, acid trips that trail across decades and more than 2,000 concerts that begin in small clubs and lead to gigs alongside the Great Pyramid of Egypt. But Bill Kreutzmann, founding drummer of the Grateful Dead, has produced more than just a tourist's guide. What emanates, maybe more than he intended, is a testimony to friendship and profound sadness when it abruptly ends.... The book is dense with acid trips and capers on both coasts and overseas. Dead fans will enjoy juicy stories. [ Deal ] reads like Kreutzmann is on the next barstool slapping your back between laughs." -- Chicago Tribune "A frank and revealing look at the group's touring adventures, complex interpersonal relationships and equally intricate music-making, and at Kreutzmann's own life, including his drug and alcohol issues, the inspiration of Native American chief Rolling Thunder and his mother's tragic suicide death." - Billboard.com "Kreutzmann doesn't mince words or pull any punches." - The San Diego Union-Tribune "[ Deal ] offers plenty of insight, opinion, observations and analysis that are unique and of great interest to fans." - Houston Press "A candid, freewheeling autobiography." - Philadelphia Daily News "Admitting that Bill Kreutzmann will give equal space to the drugs along with the drums and dreams captures in a nutshell what made the Grateful Dead such a precious commodity all those years: they told the truth and didn't try to hide anything. And that's just what drummer Kreutzmann does, from page one." - The Morton Report "What is different from other rock biographies . . . is Kreutzmann's everyman observation. . . . It is a personal tale of universal intention told with humor and the sense of fun that was crucial to the experience of a Grateful Dead concert and the counterculture itself. Like the daily lives of every hippie freak (or an acid trip), it wasn't always easy street, but it was always an adventure." - Counterpunch.org "Kreutzmann is casual, matter-of-fact, unaffected and down to earth in a way that makes you feel you've known him for a long time. He can be blunt and brutal at times, but he always feels honest, which for me is the key to a memoir like this. He doesn't sugarcoat and doesn't make excuses. Being in the Dead meant lots of drugs, sex and mayhem, and the pages are laced with all of it." - VintageRock.com "His informal style lends itself well to the increasingly fast pace of his life as he discovers the pleasure of music, his passion for playing and his abiding devotion to the Dead as they coalesced in the mid-Sixties." - GlideMagazine.com, "Like any formidable memoir from a counterculture veteran, Deal: My Three Decades of Drumming, Dreams, and Drugs with the Grateful Dead is heavy on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. You know the kind I'm talking about: hotel after-parties that snap into orgies, acid trips that trail across decades and more than 2,000 concerts that begin in small clubs and lead to gigs alongside the Great Pyramid of Egypt. But Bill Kreutzmann, founding drummer of the Grateful Dead, has produced more than just a tourist's guide. What emanates, maybe more than he intended, is a testimony to friendship and profound sadness when it abruptly ends.... The book is dense with acid trips and capers on both coasts and overseas. Dead fans will enjoy juicy stories. [ Deal ] reads like Kreutzmann is on the next barstool slapping your back between laughs." -- Chicago Tribune
