Book: Between The Dark And Light
The Grateful Dead Photography Of Jay Blakesberg
Foreward By Phil Lesh, Edited By Blair Jackson (Backbeat Books)
Reviewed by Shaun Dale

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Jay Blakesberg started photographing Grateful Dead shows as a teenage fan in 1978, and in the process developed not only one of the finest image archives of the band's latter days, but one of the finest rock photography careers of the last couple decades. This volume, edited by noteworthy Dead biographer Blair Jackson, covers the band through its dissolution and its reincarnation as The Other Ones, along with side trips that document Grateful Dead sidebands like the Jerry Garcia Band and Ratdog.

Along with the stage shots and posed portraits of the band members, Blakesberg provides photographic documentation of the totality of the Grateful Dead scene, from the parking lot vendors to the rows of folding chairs holding the DAT decks of the band's sonic chroniclers. The festive holiday productions Bill Graham concocted for New Year's Eve, Mardi Gras and Chinese New Year are colorfully presented, and some of the notables who shared the stage with the boyz over the years, from Ornette Coleman to Bob Dylan, are captured for pictoral posterity.

The book only covers about half of the Grateful Dead's long, strange trip, but it's an important half, and one that has received too little attention from some quarters. It's a near definitive pictoral review of the last 25 years of the members, fans and friends of the Grateful Dead, and a book no Deadhead will want to be without.

© 2003 - Shaun Dale