Nestor Ramos
August 30, 2009
Sitting on his shady deck in Pittsford, it's hard to imagine Peter
Conners as an expert on counterculture.
He has a job as an editor at a local publishing house, a wife and
kids going to the same Pittsford school he once attended and a home
in the town where he grew up.
But the success of his book, Growing Up Dead: The Hallucinated
Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead, has brought Conners, 38, national
attention as an expert on all things Grateful Dead.
Conners' book chronicles the true story of his time spent following
the Grateful Dead on tour between 1987 and 1995, and since its
publication earlier this year, he's heard from dozens of readers
moved to seek him out.
"When you say 'Deadhead' to people, they lock in. They can picture
it," Conners says. "A lot of people I've found aren't sure how to
reconcile this stuff that they did with their adult lives."
Some are lawyers, teachers, doctors and professionals. Others are
still on the road and still others didn't survive the ride.
So the book is about more than the Grateful Dead. It's about the
diverse, vast group of people who came together in support of the
band, and about the experiences they shared.
"I think it's fantastic," said Stephen Robinson, who's known as
Shasta in the book. "It's a privilege for those of us who traveled with him."
Robinson, now a litigator in San Francisco, also grew up in
Pittsford, though he and Conners did not get to know each other until
well into high school.
"We lived just around the corner from each other, but went to
different elementary schools," Robinson said.
But they got to know each other, as they both were among the
thousands of people who followed the Grateful Dead around the
country. And with Growing Up Dead, Conners is one of the first to
chronicle the experience from a fan's perspective.
"Some of the band members have written books," Conners says, but his
memoir fills a void. "I didn't have access like that. It changes your
perspective if you really get that kind of access." Instead, Conners
found an "everyman perspective."
In its heyday, the scene built up around the Grateful Dead was
gigantic so much so that it "was starting to get out of hand,"
Conners says. "The Dead scene will never happen again because it was
just one band."
Conners graduated from high school in Pittsford in 1988 and set out
for college, but it didn't last long. He'd been an indifferent
student, he says now, and classes and studying gave way more and more
to road trips to concerts. The years that follow are the basis for
the stories that make up the book.
There is one other key subject: Pittsford.
"One-third of the book is being around here and growing up in
Pittsford," Conners says. If he can't create something artistic that
reflects the great things about this place, Conners says, he's failed
as a writer.
By at least one measure, he's succeeded: Across the country, the book
sells unusually well in the suburbs.
"You don't have a lot of people writing about growing up in the
suburbs," Conners says. "You have a lot of people leave and then move
back and raise their kids here."
Robinson says he never expected his friend would one day write a
memoir about the times they shared with so many others.
"At the time, he was really just writing poetry, and that's when he
really began crafting himself as a poet."
But Conners, who has published poetry and fiction and is at work on a
nonfiction book about Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg, has extended
himself since then.
"It's all words," Conners says. "That's the way I've always looked at writing."
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NRAMOS@DemocratandChronicle.com
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