Alive with the Dead: Or A Fly on the Wall with a Camera

A visual feast of over 500 photographs offering an insider peek into the Grateful Dead scene from the mid-eighties on. San Francisco photographer Susana Millman shares her experience as A Fly on the Wall with a Camera around the Grateful Dead scene from the mid '80s onward as she became part of the Grateful Dead family and developed her skills as a documentary and performance photographer. Alive begins with Susana's friendship with Jerry Garcia, who was a matchmaker in her 1985 marriage to Grateful Dead publicist and biographer Dennis McNally and even walked her down the aisle. The photos are largely from Garcia's years with the band in the '80s and '9's and demonstrate Millman's warm, intimate style and unique access to happenings onstage, offstage and backstage. The book is written as a series of vignettes in time and place, with funny personal anecdotes from Millman and McNally adding breadth to descriptions of the complex mini-universe (fans, family, crew, technicans for sound and lights, the intimate friends who made up the extended family) that was the Grateful Dead.