Book review

摘要

This book is a case study which uses as its subject a group of musicians and which draws from an ethnographic study some principles for integrated marketing communications (IMC) and customer relationship management (CRM) effectiveness. The proposition is delivered up amply. The proposition may not at first ring true for the subject in question. The band Grateful Dead has a story. This is the jug band that Tom Wolfe wrote about in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test as being the band in residence at the early Owlsley-inspired acid trials. The band evolved through various states of essentialism and experimentation (the band whose music in its album Live/Dead inspired and featured in Antonioni's film Zabriski Point) and then settled temporarily into the Cosmic Country idiom, pioneered by Gram Parsons, yet with a difference: whereas Parsons' vision was based on a working-class Bakersfield veltanshuung, the band's heavily inspirational overtones were more Ken Kesey inspired and akin almost to the Second Great Awakening preaching of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield, and of revivalist refrains such as, "This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine." This was due in great part to the band's close relationship with the lyricist, Robert Hunter, who newly sprung from the US Army is said to have been living in the same neighbourhood of derelict cars in Palo Alto alongside the Grateful Dead's (unspoken) leader, Jerry Garcia.