Jerry Garcia's Amazing Grace [With CD]

The legendary Grateful Dead front man died in 1995, but the remains of his creative corpse continue to be unearthed (think CD releases from the vault, limited edition screen prints-perhaps even fresh batches of those trippy Garcia-designed neckties). This thin gift book couples a 1993 recording of the American standard Amazing Grace with a handful of Garcia paintings culled by his widow, Deborah Koons Garcia, from over 400 works. The CD's single track of Jerry's familiar, slightly off-key waver, accompanied by Grisman on the mandolin, Rice on the guitar and a little background coughing, is gentle and pleasing; the book, unfortunately, is neither. Garcia's art, which ranges from childlike landscapes to realistic line drawings to jagged acid abstracts, is interesting enough, but the pages are a mess of bright, weirdly cropped details laid out against stock computer-generated backdrops; the lyrics to Amazing Grace scroll along the tops and sides of the pages in cumbersome digital fonts. With its childlike sense of graphic design and its uninspiring celebration of an already much-celebrated rock star, this book seems less like a tribute-or even a vanity project-than a an attempt to pass off access to a famous man's archives as an uplifting piece of poetry.