Kembrew sez, “The blog Poetry & Popular Culture just covered a copyright conflict involving the Grateful Dead and J.T. Dutton’s young adult novel ‘Freaked,’ which HarperTeen is publishing early next year. The novel is about a 15 year-old kid obsessed with the Grateful Dead.”
In her original manuscript, Dutton had opened every chapter with a quotation from a Dead song, titling each chapter with the title of the song being quoted from. When it came time to publish, though, Ice 9 Publishing–which somehow owns the rights to all of the Dead’s songs–wouldn’t grant permission to Dutton to use all of the lyrics she wanted to use. Ultimately, Dutton was allowed to quote from ‘Dire Wolf’ and was given leave to use brief phrasings from the songs here and there within the text (as with ‘She can dance a Cajun rhythm…’ in the preceding passage).
So in short, because of the exigencies of copyright law and the concerns of Ice 9, the ‘Freaked’ that you’ll see at the store is not the ‘Freaked’ that Dutton had in mind. But never fear! Yours truly has managed to acquire what is now believed to be the list of quotations Dutton wanted to use as chapter epigraphs in the original book but was not allowed to use in the final version. Here they are. And remember, you heard it first here:
If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung . . .”
(Thanks, Kembrew!)