Rockin’ the Region with Dennis McNally

My interview with Fred Tackett of Little Feat happened because of their publicist, Dennis McNally. I didn’t know who McNally was, but my friend Annie Sullivan questioned if he was the same guy of Grateful Dead fame. A Google search confirmed they were one and the same. McNally became the Grateful Dead’s biographer in 1980 and publicist in 1984. 

McNally and I had been emailing, and I said to him, “You have had quite the musical experiences in life.” 

“I’ve been at it for a while, yes,” McNally replied.

In 2002, McNally published the New York Times best seller, “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead”. On May 13, his latest book, “The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties,” was released. McNally sent me a copy, and I look forward to reading it.

McNally has been Little Feat’s publicist for about 10 years. The last manager of the Grateful Dead, Cameron Sears, and his partner, John Scher, became Little Feat’s managers. As McNally put it, “I came along for the ride.” His ride with the Dead lasted until 2004, when GD’s production shut down. 

While McNally was in graduate school at UMass Amherst in 1977, he wrote a book on Jack Kerouac (“Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation & America”). 

“I wrote it for a lot of different reasons,” McNally said. “The guy who encouraged that was sort of a big Deadhead. In the course of researching that, he took me to my first show, gave me my first hit, and I started becoming a Deadhead. There’s obvious connections between Kerouac and the Grateful Dead, not the least of them being Neal Cassady would pose as Dean Moriarty in “On the Road,” (a Jack Kerouac novel). Cassady was hanging out with Ken Kesey during the acid tests, the early days of the Dead. I wanted this to be my second book. A very long story later, I met Jerry [Garcia]. It turned out ‘On the Road’ had been Jerry’s bible as a young man. Eventually, he said, ‘Why don’t you write a book about us?’. I thought that sounded like a nice   idea, which I had wanted to do for 5 years.” 

After Jerry died, McNally finished the Grateful Dead book, which came out in 2002. His next book, “On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom,” was a deep background of the relationship between white people and Black music, and how it affected white values.

McNally was invited by the California Historical Society to create a photo exhibit on the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. 

“All the museums in the Bay Area were excited about the anniversary. I said sure, that was fun. About halfway into it, I realized that’s a book. That was my usual 10 years ago. I started working on that, and now I’m done! It spread, it’s not just the Bay Area, it also involves LA, NY, and London. It ends at the Monterey Pop Festival,” said McNally.

McNally loved that scene, but only until it got commercialized and publicized. 

“The fall of ’66 was really the Summer of Love,” said McNally. “For starters, because SF is really warmer in the fall, we have our summer in the fall. The scene in ‘66 was marvelous. It’s everything you read about, think about, and imagine. Then what happened is they had a party to celebrate it, called the ‘Be-In’ in January of ‘67. It attracted thousands more people than anyone could’ve imagined. Suddenly, there’s a tidal wave of media that is interested in what’s going on. All the word was in May, as soon as school’s out, every college or high school kid in America is coming to SF. As a result, it was more of a scuffle than this benign thing. My book ends at the Monterey Pop Festival in June ‘67 because that’s the high water mark, as I described it. The whole idea of people with flowers in their hair, happy, listening to the music, very high, very mild, and very wonderful, and it was really like that for four days in Monterey. It was something very exceptional. Then, unfortunately, the realities of having too many people in one place, at one time, complicated matters.”

McNally said he’s always been interested in the music of the ’60s and ’70s and the whole scene. 

“The thing that dawns on people after a while, about the ’60s, is that they never went away. The peace movement didn’t win, in terms of politics, but it helped slow the war down. What did happen is, it won culturally. If you eat organic food, do yoga, study Zen, worry about the environment, care about gay people having rights, etc. That all derives from the ’60s. It’s still real, except of course we have a president who’s against all that, so it’s a little more complicated, but there it was,” said McNally, who ended our conversation with a reminder of the Grateful Dead.  “It’s been long, it’s been strange, and it’s definitely been a trip.”