The double title of Susana Millman’s new coffee table book, “Alive with the Dead — Or — A Fly on the Wall with a Camera” (263 pages, $60) says a lot about what makes it different from other Grateful Dead photo collections.

To be sure, there are some of the requisite pictures of the Dead in concert that are staples of most rock photo books.

“I started taking pictures as a way of communicating how much fun I was having going to shows,” she says. “One of the first things that impressed me when I went to see the Grateful Dead was that it was the only time in my life I’d seen so many people together with a common energy that didn’t involve an enemy. In sports, you have common energy but you root against the other team. This wasn’t against anything. It was all positive.”

But what sets her apart is that by marrying into the Grateful Dead family, she was granted the kind of intimate access to the band and its employees that other photographers can only dream about. She was often the only photographer around, the fly on the wall with a camera, during many of the band’s private moments, charity events and special occasions.

Backstage photos

Her backstage photos capture such luminaries as Ken Kesey, Bill Walton and Carolyn “Mountain Girl” Garcia, the late Jerry Garcia’s former wife. She also snapped off a rare photo of Garcia with his first wife, Sara Ruppenthal, mother of his daughter Heather.

Millman was already a Deadhead and a budding photographer when Garcia, the band’s charismatic patriarch, played matchmaker, suggesting that she and the band’s then-publicist and historian, Dennis McNally, author of the definitive band bio, “A Long Strange Trip,” would make a fine couple.

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“One day Jerry said to me, ‘Hey, man, you and McNally ought to get together,’” she recalls. “I said, ‘OK, I’ll give it a try.’ After Dennis passed the test of putting me on the guest list, we began dating.”

When she and McNally decided to get married, she needed someone to walk her down the aisle in the absence of her father, who had passed away. So she asked Garcia, who agreed after she promised that he’d get to walk on water (the ceremony was on a covered swimming pool). And, on Sept. 29, 1985, Garcia gave the bride away in a ceremony officiated by Wavy Gravy at a South of Market nightclub. Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann was best man.

“Jerry’s only caveat was that the marriages he’d participated in haven’t worked out so well,” she says. “But here we are still married 31 years later.”

Weir ties the knot

At another band wedding in 1999, she was there snapping photos when the Dead’s Bob Weir, wearing a kilt, married Natascha Muenter at his Mill Valley home on Mount Tamalpais. Weir was the band’s heartthrob, a role he relished when it came to entertaining groupies. Millman not only shot the wedding, she recorded the groom’s toast, which she includes along with the wedding pictures.

“The song goes, ‘My mama told me you’d better shop around,’” Weir said, raising a glass. “And I sure did a lot of shopping.”

A former Marin resident now living in San Francisco, Millman is particularly proud of the photos she took of the saffron-clad Gyuto monks and their tantric choir at a series of shows and appearances organized by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart in 1985. In another sequence, Hart is also pictured in the San Quentin chapel with his wife, Caryl Ohrbach Hart, and group of inmates standing in front of a large cross.

When the photos were sent to a company in China to be printed, Millman got a worried email from the Chinese.

“They saw the monks in their red robes and the cross in the chapel and wanted to know if this was a book about religion?” she says with a giggle. “They must have thought the Grateful Dead was some obscure religious cult in America.”

The book’s producer, Freddy Hahne of Watermark Press, managed to convince the Chinese that “Alive with the Dead” is about music, not spirituality in the strict sense, and the first limited edition of 1,000 hardcover books rolled off the presses in August. They come inside a black linen slipcase with the Dead’s iconic skull and roses embossed in silver on the front.

‘Post Jerry World’

Near the back of the book, Millman includes pages of photos headlined “A Post Jerry World,” a chapter focused on events after Garcia’s death in 1995. They include shots of his Golden Gate Park public memorial as well as a section of pictures, titled “Inhale to the Chief,” taken in 1996 at one of President-elect Bill Clinton’s inaugural balls.

The book is divided into decades, beginning with the 1980s and going right up to last summer’s Dead & Company concerts with John Mayer.

In his foreword, Mickey Hart writes, “In a real sense, Susana fully became a photographer shooting the Grateful Dead. … After all, as an improvisational band we had to play in the ‘now,’ and that’s what a great shot captures. We used our instruments to be in the moment, she used her cameras.”