ROCK SCULLY - Living with The Dead

I never met Rock Scully. One Saturday afternoon early in September 1974 I turned up at a large house on the King's Road to interview the Grateful Dead's Phil Lesh - one of the more memorable chats I had in my short career as editor of Zigzag. The house apparently belonged to a character named Tom Salter - "a middle-aged Cockney suffering from cocaine dementia' - according to Scully in his supremely entertaining but, I would hope and guess, unreliable memoir Living With The Dead. Various people drifted in and out of the room as Lesh and I discussed the details of dissonant counterpoint but regrettably I don't remember Rock Scully being one of them. And now, at the age of 73, Scully has passed away, nearly twenty years after Jerry Garcia whose own demise in a drug-addled mess some hold Scully partly responsible for. And reading Living With The Dead it would be easy to draw that conclusion. A trustworthy history of the Grateful Dead it is not, but as an account of the gigantic and startling amount of drug use that went on, primarily involving Garcia, and the logistical mayhem it caused, it is in turns eye-watering, miserable, and very amusing. It contains the most evocative description of the Acid Tests that I've read anywhere and is particularly revealing about the band's relationship with LSD supremo Owsley Stanley. In the obituary in the New York Times Douglas Martin states that in recent years Scully, drug and alcohol-free, had settled in Carmel to look after his mother, paint houses and involve himself in civic issues. That he lived as long as he did is probably some sort of miracle given the horrendous volume of mind-boggling chemicals that passed through his body but I for one will sing along to Uncle John's Band today in his memory.

My Books Of The Year

In no particular order the ten best books I've read this year are :

Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi
Burial Rites by Hannah Kent
The five Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St.Aubyn (I count these as one book as I read them all back to back in one week)
Harvest by Jim Crace
H Is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald (for once all the acclaim is completely justified)
Quiet by Susan Cain
The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber
Godfrey's Ghost by Nicolas Ridley (thank you Andrew Weatherell for the recommendation)
Travels With Epicurus by Daniel Klein
Water & Sky by Neil Sentance

As usual, I wish I'd had time to read more and write this blog more regularly. The pile of unread books continues to grow but I've decided there's nothing I can do about that except sleep less.