Grateful Dead Scrapbook

Ben Fong-Torres speaks tonight at 7:30 pm about the Grateful Dead Scrapbook at one of our favorite places:
Booksmith (http://www.booksmith.com/)
1644 Haight St.
San Francisco

Here's the info:
Grateful Dead fans are legendary for their Dead-ication to the band and its enduring legacy of freewheeling musical exploration. Grateful Dead Scrapbook collects rare removable memorabilia and evocative images culled from the Grateful Dead Archives at the University of California, Santa Cruz, including never-before-published photos, flyers, fan letters, and other ephemera. To accompany the eye-popping visuals, renowned journalist Ben Fong-Torres draws on his personal knowledge of the San Francisco music scene in a rich text that conveys the Grateful Dead's story in a fresh way, centering each chapter on a pivotal song that encapsulates a certain era of the group's songwriting, performance, and community. An attractive slipcase and an audio CD round out the book's beautiful design, delivering a richly illustrated volume as colorful as the band itself.

Ben Fong-Torres is the author of Becoming Almost Famous: My Back Pages in Music, Writing, and Life, The Doors, Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to Twenty Years of Rock and Roll, and Hickory Wind: The Life and Times of Graham Parsons, among other books. He began writing for Rolling Stone with its 8th issue in 1968, and his writing has been published in numerous other magazines. He contributed the main biography of Jerry Garcia for People Magazine's tribute issue on the occasion of the singer's death in 1995. Ben lives in San Francisco.