Fairfax Recreation and Wayfinder Partnership Event: Jim Newton and Chris Jennings Here Beside the Rising Tide
Need to know
- Ages: All are welcome
- Location: Fairfax Women’s Club – 46 Park Road
- Date: Saturday, December 6, 2025
- Time: 4pm – 6pm
- Cost: Free
- Contact: Anne Mannes
About the program
Jim Newton is joined by local Chris Jennings for a conversation about his new book, Here Beside the Rising Tide: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead, and an American Awakening (Random House).
“By writing this book, Jim Newton informs the rest of the world what Deadheads have known for years: that Jerry Garcia was more than a world-class musician, he was an American icon.”—Trixie Garcia
This free event will be held at the Women’s Club in Fairfax. No registration required.
About the book
A kaleidoscopic history of the Grateful Dead that explores the American counterculture through the life of iconoclastic frontman Jerry Garcia, and his merry band
In 1965, in Palo Alto, Jerry Garcia opened a dictionary to a fable in which an appreciative soul repays the generosity of a traveler, a “gift of the grateful dead.” After a traumatic car accident that injured him and killed a close friend, Garcia had resolved to build his life around music. He had practiced relentlessly and caromed across the northern California folk and bluegrass scene. He had gathered up some fellow musicians and formed a band.
Now they had their name.
Following the history of the Grateful Dead means tracking American cultural history through a period of radical reconsideration. The Dead played at the Acid Tests and the Human Be-In and Woodstock, at the occupation of Columbia and the Bail Ball for People’s Park. They performed at the base of the Pyramids during a lunar eclipse, at Madison Square Garden to defend the rainforests, in San Francisco to sound the alarm over AIDS and at Huey Newton’s birthday party. For three decades, the band explored the meaning and limits of freedom.
The radical message of the Dead, to reject the mainstream and build a bohemian community, radiated across the world, manifesting itself in art, music, business, and politics. Here Beside the Rising Tide tells the story of those disparate shafts of light, putting Garcia into a broader context while tracing his eventful life.
Nearly a century after his birth, Garcia’s influence stretches onward, expressed in guitar licks and a gentle way of life, one of excellence and gratitude, chasing freedom, living moment to moment, guided by song—the gift of the Grateful Dead.
About the guest panel
Jim Newton is a journalist, teacher, and author of Justice for All, Eisenhower, Worthy Fights, and Man of Tomorrow. He was at the Los Angeles Times for twenty-five years as a reporter, bureau chief, editorial page editor, columnist, and editor at large. He lives in Pasadena, California, and teaches at UCLA, where he founded and edits the award-winning public affairs magazine Blueprint.
Chris Jennings is the author of Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (2016) and the forthcoming End of Days: Ruby Ridge, the Apocalypse, and the Unmaking of America (2026). A former editorial staffer at The New Yorker, he grew up in New York City and graduated from Deep Springs College and Wesleyan University. Jennings lives in Northern California with his family.