Bill Kreutzmann Book: Grateful Dead Drummer To Publish Memoir in 2015

Bill Kreutzmann, a founding member and drummer for the iconic rock band the Grateful Dead, has reportedly inked a deal to release his very own memoir.

The currently untitled book, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press and is scheduled for release sometime in 2015, will focus on Kreutzmann’s relationship with his late bandmate Jerry Garcia, while also featuring anecdotes about stars including Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and the Allman Brothers, according to Contact Music.

Kreutzmann, who turned 66 this week, co-founded the Grateful Dead — originally called “The Warlocks” — along with Phil Lesh, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Ron “Pigpen” McKernan back in 1964, and remained with the group until its dissolution following the passing of Garcia in 1995, making him one of four members to play at every one of the band’s 2,300 shows, along with Garcia, Weir and Lesh.

The IB Times points out that an interview earlier this year with Rolling Stone magazine, Kreutzmann revealed that he thought the band’s time was up even before Garcia died, and said that Garcia had been “kind of bored” with the band.

“I can tell you he wasn’t really happy playing in the Grateful Dead at the end,” Kreutzmann explained in the interview. “I hate to say that. I know the audience is going to hear me say that and go, “Oh, that’s not true,” but if people really think about some of the shows that were there in the last year and some of the troubles that poor Jerry had, they know that I’m not BS’ing.”

The drummer also said that he himself went to Hawaii after Garcia’s death to heal, physically and emotionally.

“Jerry and I had this gentlemen’s agreement that if the Grateful Dead ever stopped, we were both going to move to Hawaii,” he told Rolling Stone. “Unfortunately he couldn’t keep his part of the deal, but I moved there after the Grateful Dead ended in the Summer of ’95 because I needed to heal. I had really been burning hard and doing the things that everybody knows that rockers do on the road and this gave me a chance to really catch my breath and heal again.”

Besides working on his forthcoming book, Bill Kreutzmann has recently been performing gigs with his own bands BK3 and 7 Walkers and playing with a wide variety of musicians, from Phish and Journey guitarist Neal Schon to Lesh and other former members of the Dead.

via IB Times