The Millennium Shows

Albion Books

Part of the novel first appeared in 1990 in the Denver Quarterly as a short story, I Am These Dead.

A long excerpt from the book was subsequently included in The Grateful Dead Reader (Readers on American Musicians), Dodd/Spaulding, 2000.

New edition published by Kearney Street Books in 2012.

Publisher information (1994 edition)

Baruth's novel follows a Deadhead named Story as he passes through a vibrant world of tie-dyes, music, and friendship on his way to the grandest of futurist finales: a show on New Year's eve, 1999. Story remembers nothing before his first show. Carrying a credit card that has never been refused, he moves from show to show, through the small matriarchal societies that make up the world of the Deadheads. Life - love, joy, memory - is the music of the Dead. 'My life is a set-list,' the novel begins, but gradually Baruth reveals the layers of memory and lost identity that conceal Story's secret. Baruth uses Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a model for Story's epic journey across the country. Like the sailor doomed to tell forever the story of the slain albatross, the archetypal Deadhead is compelled by a secret guilt to recount his tale endlessly - a tale of clashing inter-city groups, lost young people, and the endless surveillance of helicopters, cameras, technology. The shows of the novel's title take place the weekend of the changing of the Millennium, the largest outdoor concerts ever held. They become a meeting ground for realism and fantasy, surrealism and painstaking detail. The Millennium Shows is a true fusion of literary tradition and popular culture that is destined to become a cult classic.