(Da Capo Press)

www.dacapopress.com

BY JOHN DWORKIN

Categorizing Peter Conners' Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead is like trying to pigeonhole The Grateful Dead themselves: difficult and not very useful. It's part memoir, journalism, sociology, history, and drug culture exposé. But mainly Conners has written a heartfelt, entertaining, and appropriately scattered coming of age story. If the book were a film (and man, could it ever be!) it'd be co-directed by Cameron Crowe and Richard Linklater, and would play like Dazed And Confused meets Almost Famous - but in Conners' screenplay William Miller takes acid and smokes weed.

Covering the years 1987-1992 (age 16-21), Conners weaves in and out of three general approaches in describing his experiences: Academic, prankster deadhead, and personal/confessional. He is at turns a social theorist, rock history geek, lyrics dropper, counterculture analyzer, fan, tripping balls new-age freak, and insecure boyfriend. But he's also a poet having fun turning phrases like "urban indifference," "hippie bureaucracy," or his hilarious and insightful description of the mind's state during an acid trip as "post verbal."

Anyone who's been enamored with The Grateful Dead, even for a short time, will be able to closely relate. Conners' descriptions of his memories act upon the reader as flashes of light illuminating buried memories. They may have you laughing out loud; or sometimes just grinning from the recognition of truth.