The Music Never Stopped: Fifty Years of Friends, Family, and the Grateful Dead (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798193316114)

The Music Never Stopped is not really a book about the Grateful Dead.

It is a book about a life in which the Grateful Dead kept showing up.

Steve McGurl was fourteen years old when he climbed into a red Pontiac GTO convertible and headed to the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, New Jersey, for his first Dead show in June 1976. The first song he heard that night was "The Music Never Stopped." Nearly fifty years later, the title feels almost prophetic.

What follows is a funny, candid and deeply personal journey through family, friendships, college, marriage, children, careers, old cars, soccer fields, concert halls and the people who came and went along the way. Jerry Garcia and the Dead provide the soundtrack, but the real story belongs to the people: lifelong friends like Lenny and Gary, his brother Kevin "Wheels," friends Pete and Michael, his wife Elizabeth, and four children who each developed their own relationship with music.

Along the way are nights at the Capitol, Madison Square Garden, Giants Stadium and Dead & Company; Jerry Garcia on Broadway; a giant Stealie hanging in an Austrian hostel; a Jerry tattoo; and two unforgettable father-daughter wedding dances-including one to "If I Had the World to Give," only weeks before Dead & Company unexpectedly revived the song after thirty-nine years.

Funny, nostalgic and occasionally bittersweet, The Music Never Stopped is ultimately about friendship, family, memory and the strange way music becomes attached to the moments and people that define a life.

As Steve puts it:

The Grateful Dead didn't mean anything to me. And somehow, they meant everything.