1988 - A novel by Alan Neal Izumi, Forward by Robert Hunter.
Reviewed by Jesse Jarnow
Rooting through the overflowing shelves at the Relix offices one mid-summer's day, I came upon a crate of, well, relics: a large supply of a book called, simply, Dead Tour written in 1988 by Alan Neal Izumi. I'd remembered seeing ads for it when I was an impressionable youth buying copies of the magazine at the local record shop, scouring the classifieds for people trading Blues Traveler tapes and skimming the personals for gorgeous hippie mamas not presently incarcerated. "Huh," I said. "Can I have one of these?"
"Please, please, take it!" someone said. "We've got tons." So, I took it. A couple of weeks later, on a lazy Saturday morning, I popped in a Brent Mydland-era Dick's Picks and began reading. The title, which could mean well anything in the context of a book published by a magazine devoted to The Grateful Dead, is actually somewhat literal. This is a murder mystery: *dead* tour.
Izumi handles the job with surprising acumen. Novels set on tour - and there have been a few other homespun ones over the years - have the potential to sink swiftly into endless inside references by way of witty but meaningless social observation, letting the sociological setting drive the plot instead of the characters. Izumi side-steps this issue by making his protagonist a neophyte getting increasingly more involved in the culture.
More importantly, the murder mystery itself is engaging. Instead of being a generic crime plot placed whole into a new context, Izumi has crafted a story whose very situations and ultimate movement could only grow out of the circumstances of being on Grateful Dead tour. There is no way that this story could have possibly been written by Raymond Chandler. There are no hard-boiled detectives, and there are no femme fatales.
Indeed, the tension of the plot unfolds out of the characters themselves. Izumi takes certain stereotypes - The Protester, The Stoner, The Drug Dealer - and watches them as their ideologies clash with reality. It is from this that the murder mystery arises. If one is familiar with the murder mystery as a genre (and in this culture it's hard not to be), then one fully expects a tale of gritty noir. The surprise at every turn is that it is not.
This is not a classic of western literature, but it is an interesting product of the Grateful Dead scene of the 1980s, a complex subculture of pleasures and desires often cloaked in the damning illusion of bogus peace and love. Izumi navigates gracefully between the two, somehow capturing the innocence of the joy without ignoring the heinous darkness that shadows it.
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2. Dead Tour by Alan Neal Izumi
