cineSOURCE magazine

Dead Watch: The Dennis McNally Interview
by Doniphan Blair

Dennis McNally, historian and Dead expert, in his library, circa 2001, around the time he published his Dead biography, 'Long, Strange Trip'. photo: courtesy D.McNally

DENNIS MCNALLY, AN IMPISH, VERY
bright-eyed man who you would never believe is pushing 70, has been very busy of late. Perhaps not like when he took over as publicist for the Grateful Dead in the middle of their second bounce, the '80s Dead Head period, but almost.

A professional PhD-ed historian, McNally authored “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead” (2002) and a book about Kerouac (which earned him his first meeting with Jerry Garcia). More recently, he curated an excellent exhibit at the California Historical Society, “On the Road to the Summer of Love”, all of which turned him into the go-to guy for NPR and national and international networks when it comes to The Dead, the ‘60s and the beats (see a typical clip).

And for good reason: he provides a rational view of what can sometimes be wild, crazy or metaphysical.

Born in 1949 to a military intelligence officer—not a contradiction in terms this time, given his father later became a pastor, McNally grew up all over: Germany, Georgia, LA. He started thinking about studying history in high school perhaps because “We [army] brats were a long way from the rest of our families,” he surmises in his blog.

While getting his masters at the University of Massachusetts, a college-buddy, Christopher Ian Byrnes, not only turned him on to weed, acid and The Grateful Dead but inspired his first book, “Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation & America" (1979). Kerouac had grown up nearby, coincidentally, and Byrnes also connected McNally to the Kerouac archives at Columbia University.

Dennis McNally at his Mission District home office recently. photo: D. Blair

With his professorial mien, it's hard to believe McNally was in the thick of Dead meetings, shows, etc, but he has done his share of acid and adventuring and believes in participatory history. Indeed, even as their publicist he was working on his Dead book, earning some appropriation from otherwise laudatory critics (see NY Times review).

But wearing two or three hats at once comes with the territory.

McNally's first interview for his first book, the one on Kerouac, was with Lucien Carr, the infamous pretty-boy, in-self-defense murderer (an infatuated older beat stalked him) and hard-drinking New York editor (as well as father of novelist Caleb Carr). McNally drank his way through that gig much as he would smoke and trip his way through later assignments.

After getting the intro with Jerry and graduating to publicist, he soon fell in love and married photographer Susanna Miller, with Dead Drummer Bill Kreutzmann as the best man. Given he was already hard at work on their history and it was in the thick of The Dead's popularity explosion, we can assume that the '80s was one very busy decade for McNally.

And he has stayed busy, writing books like “On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom’ (2015) and doing dozens of interviews on the Summer of Love's 50th anniversary and The Dead, in general, and his exhibition in particular.

Despite his hectic schedule, McNally made room for a cineSOURCE. We met at his lovely Mission District home, where the interview was conducted in whispers, since his sister had pulled into town late and was fast asleep in the next room.

Dennis McNally's wedding: (lf-rt) Bill Kruetzmann, his bride historian and Dead expert, in his library, circa 2001, around the time he published his Dead biography, 'Long, Strange Trip'. photo: courtesy D.McNally

cineSOURCE: I was looking at the film ['Long, Strange Trip'] and was surprised to see you right there from the beginning.

Dennis McNally: So was I—the length of it! I had been involved with the fact checking. Then, when I went to premiere, I suddenly went, ‘I have been going on for quite a while.’ Amir [Bar-Lev, the director,] kept making me come back to do more interviews.

You were the historian and writer associated with them from quite early?

Not that early. I was a Dead Head from 1972 and became their biographer in 1980 and publicist in 1984.

You sent Jerry your book about Kerouac?

That is how I became the biographer. I have been involved with that since ’72, since I became a Dead Head. The same guy, a fellow graduate student named Chris, in fact, pointed me in both directions to do that.

Not to deviate too much but what do you think about Kerouac and how he became right-wing and kind of anti-beatnik at the end of his life?

Kerouac’s first book was ‘The Town and the City’ [1950]. Kerouac was split, very Manichean, very light and dark. On the one hand was Lowell: traditional French Canadian family, the church and, obviously, his mother. And the city: New York, where he expanded his life and all the rest, which is to say 'The Road.'

It was the tension between those two places and what he was doing on the road, taking notes, which would become the books. He would go off on these trips and then he would go home to mom and there was a tension between these two worlds. That is what made him an observer and a writer but it also made him very vulnerable.

Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, circa 1948. photo: courtesy A. Ginsberg Archives

[He was] possibly the least equipped person to deal with fame because he was basically vulnerable. As a result, when he became famous, he fell apart and stayed fallen apart until he died, basically by climbing into a bottle.

He was certainly drunk enough in the early ‘50s but now he could afford scotch and [he] stayed that way for the rest of his life. So he reverted to the town, as it were, and had little generosity of spirit left—sort of eaten out of him by fame.

Walter Salles, who made [the movie] ‘On the Road’ [2012], did a disservice. In the end, Kerouac is going to get an award in New York City and he meets the Dean Moriarty character—

Neal Cassady.

Who is still parking cars while Kerouac is going to get his award but in fact it was the reverse. Kerouac was starting to descend into his bottle, as you say, and Neal would go on to drive Ken Kesey's bus and have a second life with the hippies.

There is truth to what you just said. But there is also the reality that much of what Neal did with Kesey and the Pranksters took place when he was in something of a free fall.

He had just spent two years in prison, which cost him his job. In 1958, the police set him up and he spent two years in San Quentin for two joints. That cut him off from his job with the railroad, which had always given him a certain balance point and, seemingly, cut him off from his family.

This is a man with three children. I always felt there was a certain emptiness in his life that he filled with Kesey and the Pranksters. It wasn’t just glorious, to some extent.

Then we have to move to Allen [Ginsberg] who did make the transition.

Allen made it beautifully. Allen was much more grounded—despite the fact his mother was insane.

Neal Cassady with beloved wife Carolyn, son and, of course, automobile. photo: courtesy N. Cassady

Once he came to terms with his gayness—in therapy, in San Francisco, in 1955—and was in a city that suited him, San Francisco, he was able to write the poems he wanted to write. That satisfaction fueled him for the rest of his life, in a way that Kerouac couldn’t.

Allen was famous among poets, which what he wanted. But he wasn’t famous in the ‘50s like Jack, who, as I say, was unequipped to deal with fame.

When you are vulnerable and you suddenly become famous, you can’t entirely trust anyone’s motives around you—sexual or financial or whatever. You have all these people coming up and thinking they know you because they have read your book—basically thinking you are Dean Moriarty. [But Kerouac] was the quiet one, who sat in the shotgun seat and took notes. The only way he could cope with that was to get tanked.

I have been, in a very minor league way—thank god—in situations like that, around The Grateful Dead. Fortunately for me, I would like to think, I have been clear throughout that these people are treating me like I am famous not because of anything I have done. But because I am as close to Jerry [Garcia] as they are going to get.

I like Jerry, too. I greatly respected him and greatly loved him and greatly… So I can understand why they gush on me, shaking my hand and saying, ‘Thank you for doing what you do.’ Who can object to that?

My usual response is: ‘Thanks, I had fun, too.’ Like I say, I am not famous. I am close to someone who was really famous. It doesn’t disturb me in the way really being famous would.

Did The Dead have a moral collapse moment like Kerouac, either from fame or something? I visited the Haight in 1971. It was destroyed.

A disaster zone!

Did The Dead feel they were culpable in any way for that or that they would like to correct anything they did?

I… don’t… think so. The culprit for the destruction of the Haight was the Be-In, which was a glorious day: January 14th 1967. Unfortunately and please don’t think this self-serving but you might want to go see my show at the California Historical Society. You will see what I am saying in pictures.

One of The Grateful Dead's best known early photos: in front of 710 Ashbury Street, a block off Haight, (lf-rt) drummer Bill Kreutzmann, bassist Phil Lesh, guitarist Bob Weir, guitarist Jerry Garcia and singer/keyboardist Pig Pen (Nov, 1966). photo: courtesy GD Archives

What was going on in the Haight was 800, maybe a thousand, people experimenting with freedom, bothering few and being paid little attention to.

So they said, ‘Eh, this is great, let’s throw a party,’ and perhaps as many as 50,000 people showed up. Suddenly the media jumped on the story and ran with it world-wide and that is what destroyed the Haight. Suddenly tens of thousands—maybe a hundred thousand—kids descended on the Haight looking for the magic. They were simply overwhelmed.

Fortunately for all of us, one positive effect of all that media is it spread the substance of what was going on in the Haight around the country and the world. But one side effect was the destruction of the neighborhood.

And heroin and methamphetamines?

Again, with the publicizing of the Haight, you have all these lost children wandering around. They are perfect prey for vampires, those were the ones selling the methamphetamines and the heroin.

The problem with the ‘60s is that we came to the conclusion—correctly I would say, to this day—that we had been lied to about marijuana and LSD. I don’t know if you are aware but the federal schedule of dangerous drugs includes heroin, marijuana and LSD— and that is not intellectually defensible. To lump them all together is insane.

In a weird way, the hippies did the same thing for a while, ‘If they are lying about one, they are lying about them all—let’s try them all.’

If you read Peter Coyote’s autobiography [‘Sleeping Where I Fall’, 1998], you read Diggers saying that, ‘Shooting heroin is a revolutionary act.’ Bullshit. Just plain bullshit.

‘Oh, we are outlaws, we are cool.’ Yeah and it’s unhealthy and it's stupid and it will cause you to have hep C!

Did The Dead ever make a concerted effort to stand up to that?

Stand up to what?

The Canned Heat had a song, ‘Amphetamine Annie’, for example.

McNally hard at work, as a publicist for his client, Jerry Garcia. photo: Bob Minkin
No. No advocacy. They were anti-authoritarian individually and collectively, to an extreme. Being willing to tell anyone what to do was against their religion, against their personal stance—especially Garcia.

To the point [when] he witnessed ten thousand people climbing over a fence, and the people on the inside tearing apart the fence to let them in, he would [still] never agree to sign pleas to the audience to chill out and don’t do this or don’t do that.

Where did that happen?

Noblesville, Indiana, a place called Dear Creek, on their last tour.

The Dead were led by Jerry every step of the way?

Yes, Jerry the most.

My impression is the Dead came late to recording and they were being very strategic and smart about it. I think they saw The Jefferson Airplane go down early to LA and get chewed up.

Ehh, not so much. They were suspicious of LA, of the recording industry [but] I don’t know if they saw The Airplane as being chewed up. Jerry was part of the ‘Surrealistic Pillow’ recording sessions [released Feb., 1967, but recorded in December]. He advised them; he laid couple of tracks down; he is listed on the record as guru or something. It was a joke but he was involved.

They were simply less ambitious, in that sense. They were in it for the music and not the money—[although] I am not saying The Airplane were.

But The Airplane—Marty [Balin] was very clear—but they were good at it. They wrote good songs that had good harmonies. It was years before The Grateful Dead wrote good songs, they were just slow. Their first album—

I loved their first album.

I don’t think well of it, in the sense that it is rushed, literally. They were doing amphetamine and being speedy. You can hear that in the tempos, some of them. Compare that album to ‘Surrealist Pillow’ or Jimi Hendrix’s first album [‘Are You Experienced’, 1967]. It is not in their league, in terms of the recorded sound and the song writing, for starters.

Until they got [Robert] Hunter, they couldn’t write a lyric worth a damn. I am sorry, but ‘Creampuff War’ [off their first album, 1967] is not a good song.

But ‘Beat It On Down The Line’ had a funky spirit. There are ten three minutes songs.

McNally with the Dead Head fraternity's most famous confrere, Minnesota senator Al Franken, circa 2000. photo: courtesy D. McNally
But all covers, virtually. There is ‘Golden Road’ but, again, that is kind of contrived and bit obvious.

Anyway, I think that they were intimidated by the recording scene in LA and [their first album] is not their best of what they are capable of.

Then they do a brilliant album—truly brilliant, so experimental that very few people get it: ‘Anthem of the Sun’ [1968].

Then they encounter 16 track, [did an album] and tried to mix 16 tracks doing nitrous [oxide, known as 'laughing gas']—not smart. They lost it in the mix: another album that could’ve been spectacular but was ehhh.

That was ‘Aoxomoxoa’ [1969]?

Yes. So what do they do? Because they owe Warner Brothers a quarter of a million dollars in recording costs, which is like ten million now, for any number of reasons—[mostly] because it suits their music—they come up with ‘Working Man’s Dead,’ which is pure genius.

They went as simple as possible and it was recorded in a way that was almost live. They rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. They knew the material and they [literally] recorded it in order. They conceptualized it and then they listened to it and then recorded the album.

In LA?

No they never went back to LA. They recorded it at—you have to look at the album. It was at 16 Brady Street, right behind Market and Van Ness, where Fillmore West was.

Just to jump back to the first album: it parallels how Dylan only recorded covers and was just testing the waters. But ‘Aoxomoxoa’ was a great album.

It is a great album [but] it could be ten times better, if it was better mixed.

‘Alligators’ [on ‘Aoxomoxoa’] had so powerful an effect on audiences they stopped playing it by 1971.

They grew for 30 years [but] they grew very slowly. Their audience grew from 1965, when they started, to 1975. Those first ten years they morphed through stage after stage after stage.

They started as a cover bar band. [Then] they become a heavily blues-influenced band because Pig Pen is their front man and he has a great voice—their strongest quality in some ways. Eventually they became this LSD psychedelic band from another planet.

The Dead play Haight Street circa 1967 in one of their innumerable free concerts. photo: courtesy GD Archive

That was a big shift, of course, and Pig Pen did not feel comfortable with that.

No, but they accommodated him by coming back down to earth at the end of the show with ‘Love Light’. And he played some congas and all that in the first set, where they weren’t playing psychedelic jams for an hour. In terms of musical competence, he had a great voice, blew some decent harp and played some keyboards. But in a band with Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh, he wasn’t as good.

How did they commit themselves to playing these three-four hour sets?

Maybe they got up to three hours, the longest shows were in 1973, don’t ask me why. They didn’t know how to stop. They just got to that stage where they were playing endlessly long—but that didn’t last long. Physically you just can’t keep it up.

I would imagine it was a commitment to the mystical experience because they knew that most of the kids coming were taking acid.

That goes back to the acid test. [It was] the primal experience as The Grateful Dead that defined them for the next 30 years. In November and December of 1965, along with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, they played eight or ten show but they were not shows—they were the acid tests.

Everyone who got into the room paid a dollar, including Jerry and Kesey. Of course it was not pure [altruism] because, at the end of the night, The Dead and the Pranksters divvied up what money there was. But the symbolism was important: everyone paid to get in. The show was who was in the room. It was not a Dead concert, OK? There were times when they didn’t play.

So people would just dance?

Dance and the Pranksters had a so-called band, which was just people making noise. The point was the event was about everyone in the room. And the Grateful Dead, if they chose to play, they were soundtrack.

The significant thing was: they kept that as their paradigm for the next 30 years. They thought of their audience as partners in a quest, not the romantic paradigm of ‘I am the artist. I will emote and you will reward me with money and applause.’ The Grateful Dead saw that they were a dance band, the dancers were the visual show and they just happened to be the soundtrack

Who helped created that structure: Kesey?

It was the experiment itself—the experience itself!

But in ‘65 they didn’t have ‘Alligators’ or other psychedelic tunes.

A '65 Acid Test where The Grateful Dead played, if they wanted, or just tripped out. photo: courtesy GD Archive
No, they are slow. Well, they had a couple of odd songs that weren’t very good and they got rid of them.

It was a solid year before they started writing anything and two years before they started writing good songs, really good songs. ‘Dark Star’ is two years later and it is a great song [but] it comes out of nowhere, almost.

And there’s ‘St Stephen.’

I was going to say. Then in ’68 they started writing some of their classics with Hunter lyrics, although written not for the music. He had written this stuff and they showed him the music and [he said] ‘Oh, this goes together.’

They had been together three years before they started consistently writing good songs and four years before Hunter and his girlfriend moves in with Jerry and his wife and daughter, Mountain Girl and Sunshine— Kesey’s birth daughter.

It is that proximity where they started writing the material that would become ‘Workingman’s Dead’ and ‘American Beauty,’ where you have these tight, focused songs—songs meant to be songs. So it was a learning experience and it went on forever.

The Airplane? Well, Grace [Slick] brought two masterpiece songs with her when she joined the Airplane ‘Somebody to Love’ and ‘White Rabbit’ [both of which charted in the Top 100 in 1967].

The material on ‘Surrealist Pillow’ was recorded 14 months after The Airplane started rehearsing—that is really fast. Plus you have all these wonderful harmonies. Plus you have Jack [Casady, bass] and Jorma [Kaukonen, guitar] rocking, carrying everything on the musical strength.

The thing to remember about the Haight-Ashbury was [it was] not [just] the Grateful Dead. That is an anachronism caused by the fact that they lasted the longest and they grew and ended up with this enormous audience. Even in San Francisco in 1965-66-67, The Dead were absolutely popular but there were more Airplane fans. And there were lots of people who said, ‘I prefer Quicksilver.’

Not to mention across the bay there was Creedence Clearwater.

That was a little later, they start recording in ’68. They had something like 8 singles in the top ten—

16 and three platinum albums!

But that was in ’69, a couple of years later.

And across the Bay and more clean cut.

And they are writing three-minute songs. Brilliant, brilliant but three-minute songs. The Airplane had [three-minute songs] but even The Airplane jammed, Quicksilver jammed, Big Brother jammed, even with Janice. So the improvisational thing was different. Yeah Creedence—great stuff.

Did they see themselves as the mystical gatekeepers, not in an egotistical way, but more like: ‘This is what we are here for. Our jam is so people can reach enlightenment.’

McNally in his clean, well-lighted room, hard a work. photo: D. Blair
I wouldn’t use the work enlightenment, that would embarrass them. But Phil Lesh said, ‘Everywhere we play is church.’ That gets at what you are saying. I don’t know about gatekeepers, because the audience was their partners, but they were on a quest. They knew it and they tried for it. In that improvisation, there was the potential for magic AND to fall flat on your face, which they did from time to time.

Sure. I had the honor of seeing them at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1971.

OK.

Lying on the floor, tripping my brains out.

Of course.

And hearing how, in the middle of a jam, Jerry would introduce a theme and keep repeating it and he would drag the band over. To me, it was very mystical.

Absolutely. It is treating music as conversation rather than performance. The essence of improvisation is you have to listen to your fellow musicians very carefully and they mastered that.

There is the great show in 1974, in Miami, in which—I forget the order of things. It starts with ‘Dark Star’ and then they go into this weird jam. Different musicians are playing different songs and you hear three different songs. Eventually, as though they are arguing or discussing, at the end of the jam they proceed to play the three songs.

Wow!

Oh that is what they were doing, figuring it out. They were good that way.

When did they realize they were getting this massive secondary bounce of the Dead Heads?

It became obvious in the ‘80s. There [was] the whole concept of people following them for every show of the tour, which didn’t happen so much in the ‘70s. You might go to two or three show in your neighborhood but people weren’t taking off on tour.

You can blame it on Ronald Reagan. What happened was: just as Reagan becomes president, greed is enshrined as good and whatever happened in the 60s was clearly over. To quote Jerry, [it was ] the last adventure possible in the ‘80s. There is no more circus but you can follow the Grateful Dead around and have your own adventure.

Berkeley "free speech" marchers in a shot from McNally's show at the California Historical Society. photo: courtesy D. McNally

That’s when the phenomenon of Dead Heads started growing larger then life. They saw it happening and went, ‘Wow, isn’t this amazing!’

When I became the publicist, I went to a band meeting and I said ‘I should go on the road.’ This was not usually done and the crew regarded anyone coming on the road with grave suspicion—namely you were taking bread from their children’s mouths.

I said, ‘You are a story wherever you go. If you trust the promoter to monitor the media, the TV cameras, the photography, you are not going to get what you want—trust me. And if you ban the media, particularly TV, from the show, what they are going to do— because you are a story—they are going to get shots of Dead Heads smoking joints in the parking lot and the trash. Though [they are] not anti-you, they are going to get a story because that is what the media does. But if I am there, they are going to come in and get their story and it is going to be music and pretty lights. They are going to be happy and you are going to be happy and I am going to keep them out of your face.

Un-huh.

That was my job, to make all this happen, invisibly, and I got good at it.

And you would hire a photographer

No the Dead Head photographers would flock and the local newspaper photographers, it was a question of how many you could fit into the ‘pit’ behind the barricade in front of the stage.

Circling back to the last question I was surprised how much the movie focused on Jerry since he was one of six as

If you asked the band members they would all say their best friend was Jerry, the guy they related to the most was Jerry. He had the largest personality; he was charismatic. The fact is that Amir focused on Jerry is largely a function of storytelling; you need a beginning middle and end. Thanks to the interview Jerry did with American Movie Channel about that movie [‘Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein’], Amir hada running thread through the whole project and it ended with Jerry’s death. It was a fit.

Musically Jerry was simply one of six but rock and roll is guitar based and when you play lead and are a primary vocalist, you get a certain amount of attention. I once called him boss and someone said, ‘Don’t call him boss,’ and he said, ‘You can call me boss, just don’t ask me to make decisions.’

He didn’t want to be in a position of being responsible for anyone else. You have to seethe Grateful Dead as not him or even those six guys; the Grateful Dead was everyone in the room at the time.

It included all their employees, the crew and so forth and they all had input, especially the crew. So it’s not a conventional organization, to put it mildly. The reason for that did come from Jerry because, as I say, he didn’t want to live a conventional life. He didn’t care about money and he made sure that the crew was, by far, the best paid crew in the world because he was almost slightly guilty that they were dragging them along. ‘We got to play, they had to work.’ So they were overpaid in the scheme of what the industry called for.

Was there a leader of the crew that helped him form that relationship?

Yes. A guy named Ram Rod was one of the moral centers of the world of The Grateful Dead, the de facto crew chief, the senior member, and Jerry’s roadie for a long, long time.

I actually have a little resentment about Jerry, how he checked out.

You are not alone.

But the film really redeemed him. It really made me see how he suffered in the end.

He certainly did and it is not about drugs. He died because he refused to take responsibility for his own health. Okay? He was a poster child for a heart attack, which is what he got. He had raging diabetes, which he did not treat properly. He smoked; he was overweight; and he had this character disorder which is called ‘Not taking responsibility for yourself.’

Everybody, most everybody, when they get around 40 and start feeling mortality make some accommodation to eat right, exercise a little—most of us.

McNally marveling at the miniaturized recording technology he wished he had when doing his indepth interviews for his 'Long, Strange Trip'. photo: courtesy D. Blair

You are looking pretty good yourself.

Right around 40, I quit all drugs, quit smoking and I had to start exercising because I was going to get fat—all the drugs and cigarettes kept me thin. I felt I had to deal with all of that. After a while it becomes self-affirming, you get addicted to the endorphins.

Basically he wanted to be Huck Finn. You have to remember it wasn’t the drugs that killed Jerry, it was the heart attack. He was overweight, he smoked—god only knows what his lungs looked like—and he didn’t really exercise.

He pretended to at times but he was faking it and all of that was about not wanting to be responsible. He didn’t want to be responsible for the Grateful Dead and have to play 80 shows a year. He didn’t want to be responsible for 50 people including me for their salaries. He didn’t want to be responsible to a million people for their pleasure. He wanted to it to be just fun.

Like what 50 shows a year?

Who knows? Fewer. It was something out of his childhood, where he wanted to be Huck Finn with a guitar in his lap and a joint in his mouth and just go down the river. But it was not meant to be.

If it wasn’t Jerry who was the emotional center that kept Yhe Dead on track?

It was Jerry. Every band member will tell you they related most to him. He was the sun and everyone else’s gravitational pull was towards him, he just didn’t want to make decisions.

Was there a manager? Who woke them up in the morning?

They were adults. They got their asses out of bed. They had a road manager who was their manager, they had a conventional structure and they went on stage on time and played. Who woke them up? They called the hotel operator and said, ‘Give me a wake up call at such and such a time.’

You mentioned Jerry was not a money guy, so the band was fairly communal?

It was certainly a collective in the earliest days. After a while they lived separately, they got salaries. They were averaging $125 a week through the early ‘70s, which seemed to be enough. They did not start making sizable money until the ‘80s, when they were selling out all their tickets and it built up into a tidy sum.

When did they start moving to Marin?

There’s a bust a 710 Ashbury Street [where they lived communally] October 2 1967, of which there is photo in [my] photo show. Later in ’67, and by ’68, they had all moved to Marin. Haight-Ashbury had become a less interesting place. They were getting awakened in the morning by the voice of the Grey Line bus conductor, ‘There is the notorious home of the beatnik Grateful Dead’—time to leave.

So they did believe in a certain high level of collective organization?

Everyone got the same amount, equal shares. I think the crew got an equal share into the ‘70s.

Book store, featuring McNally's book on far left at California Historical society. photo: D. Blair

They also—considering Mountain Girl had been with Kesey—did believe and practice a certain level of free love?

Well they were rock stars and had ample opportunities, so monogamy was a long shot. But again everyone meets women who had a past. It is not as though Mountain Girl after she hooked up with Jerry she went back to Kesey. We are not talking about an affair.

But some low levels of jealousy?

Certainly that, yes.

They practiced what they preached?

The older they got, the more monogamous they got because of the nature of the beast.

Even Pretty Boy Bob finally got married and is in a very strong relationship with—

Two daughters, one of whom is going off to college this fall.

Do you see any connection between the freedom and exploration of The Dead and Silicon Valley?

What you need to do, instead of getting the short answer from me, is read a book ‘What the Dormouse Said’ by John Markoff, who covers Silicon Valley for the New York Times, which traces the connection of LSD to Silicon Valley.

The irony is the Dead Started in Palo Alto.

That too. The answer is LSD had a great deal to do with just the concept of concluding that the way to build computers was not to build enormous ones that filled entire rooms that people came to but to make it so everyone got one and put them into a network.

So Steve Jobs was, in a sense, a disciple of The Dead?

In that way, yeah. Certainly in terms of psychedelic experience. All the people who were deeply involved in the origins of the computer industry had some sort of psychedelic experience.

I just went to the Rainbow Festival and The Dead are alive and well in the Rainbow community. What do you think The Dead have to tell us about surviving the Trump Era?

Umm. Jerry had political opinions but he was fixated on keeping the Grateful Dead phenomena separate from politics.

Which is the high art position.

As historian, McNally doesn't like to predict the future but does admit, 'All I can say is I’m glad I am old.' photo: D. Blair
He wouldn’t vote, which I regarded as dumb. He felt the compromises you make when you vote—picking the lessor of two evils, for instance—was a moral line he couldn’t cross. I myself would say, ‘If you don’t vote you don’t have any right to bitch.’

The answer to surviving the Trump Era is, from my point of view, in addition to resisting whatever your own personality and ethics suggest, is to simply live your own life outside of the kind of values he propagates, that he represents. Which means to be inclusive and to care about other people and to not make making money the single measure of success.

I spend a lot of time at the Zen Center. I have sat in conversations that I can only reflect on, almost with awe, how every single value we espouse Trump not only thinks the opposite but is not be able to comprehend it at all.

At one of the Republican debates, and I didn’t really watch them at any length—believe me, it was astonishing: someone said something to him and he said, ‘You can’t say that to me, I am a billionaire.’ That is the whole story of his personality.

But I guess we have some practice since the Dead phenomena, as you said, emerged during Reagan.

And Bush. We didn’t get to the White House until a Democrat invited us. Clinton and Gore.

Carter didn’t?

No. It was a little early in the day. In 1972 McGovern ran into them on an airplane and asked them if they would do a concert and, uh, no [they didn’t]. I am sure the voting members of the band voted for McGovern.

What do you think when people think of the Summer of Love period? What do people really need to know to get the whole historical picture?

About the Summer of Love? What I went into for three hours with Dutch TV and the Today Show this morning was there was this incredible intellectual content. What was going on in the Haight, is still going on in our current lives, whether it is challenges to gender, traditional gender behavior, relationship with nature, organic food, materialism, relationship to Asian thought and culture. All of this was going on in the Haight.

The problem with the media coverage of the Haight was that they fixated on the obvious, what they saw, silly stuff like love beads and flowers in your hair, and blah, blah blah. Because what was going on looked so odd to them—sometime inadvertently, sometimes intentionally—they reduced it to caricature. Certainly the treatment of Grateful Dead: ‘Uh, hippies!’

By the time we were done Harvard Business school students were writing theses and business papers on how the Grateful Dead worked. Because what they were doing was very old fashioned and seemingly wrong. For instance, spending insane amounts of money on their sound system—except it was their link to their audience. It was a wise investment. Overpaying their crew, except at the same time you never had to replace crew.

Well with Owsley as you first crew leader—

He wasn’t really a crew leader, it was much more arcane then that.

Nevertheless, he was a stellar member of a staff that represented incredible achievement in regards [to sound equipment].

At the same time he was also maddeningly inefficient. Timing wise he was on another planet—they had a lot of late shows because he was still fiddling with the equipment.

But he developed his acid manufacture technique inn three weeks at the Berkeley library or something.

I don’t know if it was three weeks. He also had a mentor, his girlfriend Melissa was a graduate student in chemical engineering.

Yeah, those were some very good points. If you were to look back to what groups influence Garcia and Hunter and their lyrics, what would you say? The romantic poets?

The romantic poets of course [but more] the classic American song bank. I produced an album that will come out seven—why do I say seven? Because the latest Owsley thing is seven. It is a five LP vinyl box, there will also be CDs, of Jerry before the Grateful Dead. Bluegrass stuff.

Hunter has many roots as a writer but what they shared in common was the American folksong tradition so when they came to write ‘Workingman’s Dead’ and ‘American Beauty’ in particular where everything coalesced most thoroughly, that is what they were working on some folk with country flavors.

But there are some very strong poetic elements.

[Hunter] is a natural poet, absolutely—T. S. Eliot. He translated Rilke. There’s a website called the annotated Grateful Dead by a guy named David Dodd. He goes through the lyrics and without trying to explain anything he footnotes all these cultural references that Hunter throws and that’ll give you an impression of the wideness of his vision and what he read and so forth and so on.

They were very bright guys and they were very well read. They may not have gone far in formal education but they were voracious readers.

What were some of the central texts of their reading: Kerouac, of course.

I am sure they read Alan Watts, it has been almost 20 years since the book came out it is not like I can remember every line. They had a broad knowledge of American literature. Jerry in particular read science fiction, read Bradbury.

Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke?

I came up with Heinlein as a young man, I was a Heinlein fanatic and I walked into the studio on the day he died and said, ‘Heinlein died today.’ And Jerry said, ‘Yeah, I always preferred Ray Bradbury.’ [laughs]

Considering the philosophical complexities of the death of the Haight in 1970 or whenever it started, I think the movie does a good job of examining the dark side.

I think Amir [Bar-Lev] did about as good a job as you can do. About as honest as you could even though he had to leave out whole realms including Carolyn for instance, Mountain Girl, because she didn’t want to do the interview, it is not his fault, he tried.

They separated at a certain point and Jerry got another—

More than one.

To me, as a writer and amateur historian, the good times and the achievements are fascinating but the dark and problems are also fascinating.

Yup.

Unfortunately, there is a normal reluctance to tackle that. But somehow we have to dig through and find those issues, because that is our gift to our kids.

Yeah, no. You have to acknowledge that but I think Amir found a good balance in all that.

What are your top five ‘hippie’ books? ‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’, ‘On the Road’?

Well, ‘On the Road’ is beat not hippie but it is a source. Don Juan, Carlos añeada [1968]; Alan Watts, ‘The Way of Zen’ [1957]; ‘Another Roadside Attraction’, Tom Robbins [1971]; ‘Be Here Now’, Baba Ram Dass [1971].

‘Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test’?

Absolutely, it’s part of the story.

It is written by a very straight guy, Tom Wolfe, but a great writer.

True on both counts.

Richard Brautigan?

Yeah, ‘Trout Fishing in America’ [1967], absolutely. Believe or not, I have to look something up: ‘Living on the Earth’ [1971], by Alisa Bay Laurel, she lived at the Morningstar Ranch. Also believe it or not ‘The Tassajara Bread Book’.

How about that book on the bottom corner of each page of ‘The Whole Earth Catalog’ [1970]?

‘Divine Rights Trip,’ absolutely, and the Whole Earth Catalog, in general.

Did Leary write anything that great?

I am not a fan. I think he was an egotistical scammer—not a scammer… If there is one lesson in LSD is that you are
part of a whole and ego—there is almost no point to it. That is not a lesson he ever learned.

Who would you rate as the top three hippie philosophers?

’Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism’ (1975) by Art Kleps. He was on that scene [with Leary at Millbrook] and he had some conventional philosophical academic training.

He analyzed LSD from a philosophical standpoint and I think he is spot. He goes into a very funny thing: he analyzes it like a horse race, all the religions—‘[stuff like] it made sense in relation to this but not this.’

It comes out that Zen is the one that makes the most sense. There is also ‘Earth House Hold’ (1969) by Gary Synder.

There was Jerry with Hunter behind him. There was Ram Dass and Leary. There was [Herbert] Marcuse or going back to Aleister Crowley. Who do you think really influenced things?

Castañeda. The lyrics of Dylan—that’s what he won the Noble Prize for.

What do you think about the claims that Castañeda forged those books?

I wouldn’t use the word ‘forged’ but possibly. I think the point is made whether it is literally true or metaphorically true.

One last question: Is SF over or do we have another crack at it?

There are a lot of dividing lines. SF is fighting for its collective soul right now. I am historian, I look back. I don’t predict future but it is a depressing time.

But SF was in a fight for its soul in ’69 when the Haight died. It was in a fight for its soul when they killed George Moscone.

That, too. That led to where we are now.

What is going on now is death by money. We are drowning in vast sums of money—in the rest of the United States, too. We are talking about income inequality and that is very difficult to resist. You can recover from the assassination of a good mayor and a groundbreaking Supe [Harvey Milk].

But money changing everything—she was right [Cyndi Lauper].

And there is an obsession with machines rather then content.

Welcome to America.

And once you switch over how do you go back, even though those machines are to get content?

I don’t have the answer to that. All I can say is I’m glad I am old.

[mutual laughter]

I mean, seriously, 99% of what is happening now, I have nothing to do with and I am fine with that.

Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker ('Our Holocaust Vacation'), who can be reached .

Posted on Sep 01, 2017 - 09:04 PM