In the years before his death at a Marin County rehab facility in 1995, Jerry Garcia often looked like he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. In fact, the increasingly beleaguered co-founder of the Grateful Dead was bearing the burden of several worlds, all of which were financially dependent on him. These included the famously insular backstage culture of the Dead and its road crew, who were treated like family for decades; the vast ecosystem of the Deadhead subculture, which encompassed everyone from kids who sold T-shirts and burritos on tour to Bill Walton and Tipper Gore; and the complex machinery of the band’s unlikely MTV-anointed success in the 1980s — the promoters, tour managers and hangers-on who pitched their tents beside the band’s ever-growing income stream, putting them at the top tier of the industry alongside acts like Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones.

Though Garcia always disavowed the notion of being the leader of the band, his musical partners foundered in the wake of the guitarist’s abrupt exit, uncertain of how best to honor the legacy of the adventurous music making they’d created together. After retiring the band’s storied (and highly bankable) name in a hastily issued press release, the Dead’s so-called “core four” (guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann) spent years touring smaller venues with their own groups, while arguing all too publicly about the minutiae of their business affairs and periodically burying the hatchet to come together in larger aggregations like Furthur and the Other Ones.

It is this troubled and turbulent “post-Jerry” period of the band’s career that is the subject of Joel Selvin’s new book, “Fare Thee Well: The Final Chapter of the Dead’s Long Strange Trip.” A former rock critic for The Chronicle, Selvin is one of the most prolific commentators on the counterculture of the 1960s and its aftermath. His best-seller “Altamont” was magisterial in its accumulation of little-known details of events that contributed to the darkest rock festival in history, and his lively account of the rise and fall of hippie optimism in the Summer of Love made engaging reading.

I wish I could say the same about “Fare Thee Well,” which comes across as a bilious and disheartening airing of dirty laundry of one of the most inventive and inspiring groups of musicians to ever set foot on an American stage. With grim diligence, Selvin and his co-author Pamela Turley chronicle a decade and a half of fractious band meetings, backstage bitch-fests, poisonous vendettas, failed reconciliations and ill-considered venting to the press, while grinding through a cast of supporting players who are initially eager to share the limelight with their heroes before being spat out by an organization tearing itself to pieces in grief.

Lesh’s ambitious wife, Jill, is presented in a particularly unflattering light, described over and over as a former waitress (she met Lesh while serving him breakfast in Fairfax) who seems determined to wrest control of every aspect of the band members’ post-Jerry existence, while treating mere mortals as her inferiors, as when she shrieks at a pair of backup singers, “You are nobodies!”

More Information Fare Thee Well The Final Chapter of the Grateful Dead’s Long, Strange Trip By Joel Selvin with Pamela Turley (Da Capo; 280 pages; $27)

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It’s hard to imagine anyone but the most gossip-hungry Deadheads being interested in these toxic exchanges, and it’s not apt to be a pleasant experience — akin to paging through Mommy and Daddy’s divorce depositions. By the time Selvin unleashes a withering litany of descriptions of the core four from Lesh’s perspective (Weir is described as “drunken, dysfunctional, dreamy, and fumbling,” while Hart is a “pseudo-intellectual” who can’t keep time), the reader begins to suspect that in the process of writing the book, the author came to resent his own subject.

Selvin prefaces his introduction by declaring, “I am not a Deadhead” and many of the concerts described in numbingly repetitious detail in the book were attended by Turley. While the Dead have never suffered a shortage of commentary by committed fans, the problem with Selvin’s outsider perspective is that he gets things wrong that nearly any rank-and-file Deadhead would know. He implies that after Garcia suffered a diabetic coma in 1986, everything was downhill for the Dead from that point on, yet the guitarist made a dramatic recovery, and the band’s tours in 1989 and 1990 were acclaimed as equal to the best music that the band played in its 30 years on the road.

There are also errors that can only be described as careless. In the opening paragraph of the book, Selvin insists that nobody in the band expected Garcia to die when he did, yet a hundred pages or so later, Lesh tells a “60 Minutes” reporter, “I felt like I had mourned him already when I got the call.” Selvin also refers to the lead guitar player of Phish, Trey Anastasio — drafted for the unenviable job of taking Garcia’s place at the band’s 50th anniversary celebrations at Santa Clara and Chicago — as the “uncontroversial” choice. In fact, warring Deadhead cliques nearly incinerated themselves in online flamefests in the months leading up to the show, though the consummately professional Anastasio ended up doing a fine job.

While Garcia’s sheer versatility and improvisational brio have indeed proved to be irreplaceable, the core four have bravely soldiered on in various constellations, from Dead & Company featuring John Mayer on guitar, currently on its summer tour, to Lesh’s ongoing “rambles” with guest musicians at his Terrapin Crossroads club in San Rafael. Surely, extraordinarily accomplished musicians making music together is something to be celebrated, even if their glory days are mostly behind them.

Ultimately, the best advice for a young music fan who might pick up this book looking for insight into the phenomenon of the Grateful Dead is to seek elsewhere. Like the song says, “If you get confused, listen to the music play.”

Steve Silberman is the author of “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.” Email: books@sfchronicle.com.