BOOK OF THE LIVING DEAD

Whether you're a ''Jerry's kid'' who's ''on the bus''-that is, a follower of the , Grateful Dead rock band (you ''Deadheads'' know who you are, and thanks to your T-shirts, so do we)-or your only involvement in this rock & roll pathology is a pale nephew who still lives at home, well, is there a new book for you! Skeleton Key is the first dictionary of Grateful Dead speak, written by David Shenk and Steve Silberman, who put their, uh, Dead heads together to create this book. Killer entries include: ''Line Donkeys: (Deadheads) entering a venue with a backpack so loaded down that the friskers are overwhelmed and the long line stalls ''; ''The Flip: Ejecting and turning a cassette from side A to side B to continue recording the show in progress''; ''Lost Sailor: A Head 'severely down on his luck, in a daze, who has lost all sense of reality'''; and ''Cat Dictation: One of (group lyricist) Robert Hunter's more esoteric sources of lyrical inspiration. 'A cat dictated (the song) ''China Cat Sunflower'' to me,' (he) explains.'' Silberman predicts the book will appeal to die-hard ''Deadheads who are unfamiliar with some of the Head subcultures'' while serving as a primer for their confused kin (bringing family to a show is known as ''tripping on DNA''). He adds, ''A Dead show is somewhere between a religious experience and a baseball game. It's a quintessentially American experience.'' The white-bread Deadhead? ''We don't all wear tie-dye like the stereotype,'' says Shenk, despite the fact that the book features an appendix with the title ''How to Tie-Dye.'' Shenk describes his own sartorial style as ''Gapped out I don't think that you would know just by looking at me that I was a Deadhead. You know I have a job and everything.''