Nicholas Meriwether, Director, Center for Counterculture Studies:
"For years, fans and critics have raved about the Grateful Dead's concert at Cornell's Barton Hall on May 8, 1977. Yet for all of the accolades, this celebrated show has never been fully explored and explained— until now. Peter Conners tells the story of this remarkable event with zeal and precision, teasing out the magic from the myth and showing how this night became a legend."
Greg Yost:
"Cornell ’77, the new book written by Peter Conners and published by Cornell University Press, is not only a well-researched volume, like exceptional album liner notes on steroids, it is the ideal companion to the Barton Hall recording."
Eric Gudas:
"I recommend Cornell ’77 to anyone, Dead fan or not, who would like to know how one three-and-a-half-hour concert can, apparently, disappear into the mists of time for the musicians who played it, but stay vivid for decades in the memories of at least some of the almost 5,000 attendees, the concert’s organizers, and the Dead’s road crew, as well in the imaginations of untold listeners who only experienced the show through Cantor-Jackson’s recording on cassette tapes and CD-Rs."
Michael Simmons:
"The book Cornell '77: The Music, the Myth, and the Magnificence of the Grateful Dead's Concert at Barton Hall, by Deadhead Peter Conners, is a smart history.... It's also a lot of fun.... And in his exegesis of the Dead classic 'Dark Star,' Conners's own writing becomes psychedelic—a challenge for any scribe, and one he meets with a poet's lyricism and insider's experience."
Doug Collette:
"Peter Conners' writing is the silver lining of intelligence in this book and the author carries on stylishly entertaining the reader as he enacts the ratification of his premise: that this late Seventies spring show at the institution of higher learning in Ithaca, New York was/is the ultimate Grateful Dead performance."
Peter Richardson, San Francisco State University, author of No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead:
"Peter Conners draws on an exceptionally wide range of sources—musicians, sound engineers, ticket takers, tapers, groundlings, record executives, archivists, journalists, and historians—not to argue that the Barton Hall event was the best Grateful Dead concert ever, but rather to show how it encapsulated the Dead's unique project and its extraordinary reception. By situating this remarkable concert in its place and time, Conners also demonstrates why the Dead's project continues to matter today. Cornell '77 will show aficionados and casual readers alike how the Ithacan part stands for the Dionysian whole."
