Not Just Skeletons From the Closet

The hardest moment for Dennis McNally in the more than two decades he’s served as historian and publicist for the Grateful Dead was not when group leader Jerry Garcia died--seven years ago this Friday--of a heart attack while in a drug rehab center. Nor was it the earlier death of a band member, the 1990 overdose of keyboard player Brent Mydland.

It was an incident at an Indiana concert a month before Garcia’s death that to McNally marked more of a spiritual death in the ‘60s-rooted community that had gathered around the San Francisco band. “The worst night with the Grateful Dead was at Deer Creek in the summer of ‘95,” he says. That Sunday of the Fourth of July weekend, several thousand people who had shown up at the outdoor amphitheater without tickets stormed the back fence and rushed into the already crowded facility, while others in the parking lot threw rocks and bottles at security.

“It’s not because we had a bunch of kids break into the show, although it was frightening to see,” McNally says. “It was that a large part of the audience turned and cheered them on.... It did break Jerry’s heart. It broke everybody’s heart.” The next day’s scheduled concert at the same location was canceled, the first time in the band’s 30-year history that the audience had caused a show to be called off. It was devastating for the band for whom the audience members were not merely fans, but an extended family--the storied Deadheads, a community germinated in, and maintaining the legacy of, San Francisco’s mid-’60s Acid Tests and Summer of Love.

The influx of people at that concert who had no connection to the communal spirit and just wanted to party was so pronounced that it put the future of the annual summer tour--for which thousands of Deadheads would caravan from show to show with quasi-mystic zeal--in doubt. Garcia’s death only made it official.

For McNally, what the Deer Creek disaster portended and Garcia’s death made real was both a personal tragedy and a professional nightmare. But it was also a moment of truth. Since 1980, he’d been charged with writing the official history of the Grateful Dead. The closing chapter had now played out, and he had work to do.

The result is “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead,” a comprehensive, colorful and complex look at the band and its surrounding culture, due in bookstores on Tuesday from Random House’s Broadway Books.

Starting with the musicians’ childhoods in the ‘40s and ‘50s, the 620-page book leaves little about the band and its milieu unexplored--from the intertwined formation of the group and the Haight-Ashbury scene to Deadheads now walking the corridors of power (Laker coach Phil Jackson and Sen. Patrick Leahy [D-Vt.], to name but two) and the Dead brand-name marking everything from neckties to Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream.

The book balances insights into the characters’ psyches, cultural anthropology of the extended family, vivid peeks behind the scenes of the band’s singular concerts and the evolution of the music as it reached into and ultimately enriched a distinctly American mythos of drifters, outlaws and seekers. “Jerry’s death made the book possible,” says McNally, 52. “He’d invited me in 1980. I spent about four years doing basic research, got hired [as publicist] in ‘84, and tried to do both for a year and a half. But for time reasons and the emotional reason that I was a historian and respect history, I realized the two do not go together. So I spent the next 11 years being publicist and taking notes on the side.”

He’s remained the publicist for the ongoing Grateful Dead Productions--which oversees an array of enterprises including members’ individual bands, a stream of archival CD releases (more than 30 full concert albums since Garcia’s death, plus two massive box set anthologies) and related concert ventures. This past weekend, in fact, the four surviving members--singer-guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh and drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart--performed together for the first time since the leader’s passing in a two-day “Grateful Dead Family reunion” festival at Alpine Valley, Wis.

“Emotionally, [the current role] is nothing the same as being publicist for the Grateful Dead,” McNally says. “But that [distancing] made it possible for me to write a very nonapologetic version. The band members vetted it for facts, but it is not the authorized story. This is my version. And anyway, the experience is so subjective that the idea of an official version is hilarious.”

Kreutzmann concurs that no “official” history would be possible. But both McNally’s thoroughness and perspective impress him. “Other people have written books about us and either tear us apart or go the other way like we could do no wrong, and [McNally’s] much more honest,” says Kreutzmann. “I’ll take the truth any time. And it served to tell me a lot of things I didn’t even know. When there are this many people in a family it’s hard to know what’s going on all the time--especially with the early history.”

In McNally’s account, the Deer Creek disaster is almost a replay of the situation in the band’s heady Haight-Ashbury days, when young would-be hippies flocked to the Bay Area in search of spiritual and/or hedonistic freedoms and spoiled the vibe.

“Both times were cases of system overload,” McNally says. “But the people who fell into the Haight fell into it in an organic way, on a very individual or small-group basis, having felt themselves drifting away from conventional society and toward less material values and questioning. The Deadheads became Deadheads in an organic way, not because they heard a hit on the radio.”

McNally is hardly the stereotypical Deadhead. He favors an unassuming manner over tie-dyed exuberance, and lives a relatively quiet life in San Francisco with his wife, photographer Susana Millman. (They have an adult daughter, Season Ray.) He’ll passionately discuss San Francisco Giants baseball as readily as Grateful Dead music. His musical tastes run to jazz and he’s more comfortable in lone or small-group settings than in communal revels. And he entered the Dead family through a backdoor, having been a scholar on Beat writer Jack Kerouac, who held a position similar to Garcia’s for an earlier generation of American bohemians. (McNally’s first book, “Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America,” expanded from his doctoral thesis, is slated to be republished by DeCapo Press next spring.)

An Army brat born in Ft. Meade, Md., he spent his teen years in Maine after his father retired from the military to become a Unitarian minister. He graduated from St. Lawrence University in 1971 and then attended graduate school to study history at the University of Massachusetts, where he focused and formalized his interest in the counterculture. “I was never a hippie,” he says. “At that time, I guess you would say I was more political. There were May Day demonstrations in D.C. in the spring of ’71. I took a little pepper gas in that. I got to graduate school in the fall of ‘71, and you could still smell tear gas on the coat I wore.”

Early on at graduate school he set his sights on writing a book about Kerouac and the Beats. And then in 1972, a friend initiated him into a related world. “He bought me my first ticket [to a Grateful Dead show], stuck a tab [of LSD] in my mouth and said, ‘Have a good time,’ ” he says. “A few months later, I came to the revelation that what I’m really up to here is a two-volume history of bohemian America. The first covers the ‘40s and ‘50s with Kerouac, and the second the ‘60s and ‘70s--and since I’m slow, the ‘80s and ‘90s--with the Grateful Dead.”

A brief introduction to Garcia backstage at a 1972 concert, when he saw that the guitarist had put a photo of Kerouac on his dressing room wall, confirmed the link. “When the Kerouac book was done in ‘79, I sent [Garcia] a copy and waited,” he says. “I knew if I’d marched up to them and said I wanted to do a book, they’d say, ‘Go away.’ But after he got the book, I spoke to Jerry and we talked about Kerouac and we spoke some more and, eventually, he said, ‘Why don’t you do one about us?’ I said, ‘Good idea!’ ”

McNally was given full access to the Dead, but soon realized that an official position in the organization would give him a better vantage. “The way it came about was perfectly Grateful Dead,” he says. “The way you worked for them was you were evaluated as a friend, and whether or not everybody could put up with you, because everybody [in the band] got a vote. And after you passed the test, if there was a job you could fill, you got the job. I got the publicity job because the secretaries complained that no one was dealing with the media. Garcia said, ‘Get McNally to do it.’ No more thought than that.”

Although it took 23 years for McNally to write his second book, he’s already at work on a third, which will take another angle on Americana by tracing the cultural journey along the Mississippi River from the source in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

But he maintains that the cultural journey the Dead and Deadheads carried from the ‘60s holds just as legitimate a place in the fabric of American life. “As borderline anarchy, it couldn’t last,” he says of the world in which the Dead was spawned and, to many people, still represents today. “But that was the template for the Grateful Dead experience, and they stayed true to it, from when everybody was paying a dollar for tickets to grossing $60 [million] or $70 million a year. Jerry didn’t mind making money, as long as he spent it. To keep money around was to turn you into a materialist.

“Here it is 2002 and we don’t have enough perspective to know for sure, but if the world does not go to hell in a handbasket environmentally, it will be because of what we learned in the ‘60s. Feminism, homosexual rights, civil rights--a lot of stuff happened in the ‘60s that will take another hundred years to see where it leads, but it’s clearly a pattern.”