Dennis McNally is a board member of two non-profit organizations, the Northern California affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union and Music in Schools Today. He comes from a military family and graduated from High School in Maine. He attended St. Lawrence University, received a Masters degree and Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in American History. His Doctoral dissertation was a biography of Jack Kerouac, the Beat writer, which was published by Random House, in 1979, bearing the title Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. By the late 1970's he became a Deadhead, moved to San Francisco, and was hired by Jerry Garcia to become the Grateful Dead's biographer and historian. By 1984, the Dead made him their publicist, a position he still holds today. After over twenty years of first hand experience and research he published the first and only official history of the Grateful Dead. In August 2002, Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc, published A Long Strange Trip. The Door sent its left coast correspondent, Bob Gersztyn to interview McNally, in between his numerous bookstore and radio appearances.

THE DOOR MAGAZINE: How did you become the Grateful Dead's biographer and historian?
MCNALLY: It's not really all that complicated a story. I wrote a book about Jack Kerouac called Desolate Angel and in the course of it I wanted to write a book about The Grateful Dead. I felt that there were all kinds of direct historical connections. Neal Cassidy, who of course is the Dean Moriarty character in "On The Road" and was involved with "The Merry Pranksters" with the Grateful Dead, is the obvious link, but in general there's a historical progression there that I wanted to explore. It turned out Jerry Garcia thought the same thing, which was kind of convenient for me. On a more personal level I was thinking about doing something about the beat generation in general, and there was a guy in my life who one day said, 'no, you should do Kerouac, and I can help you out. You can stay with my friends in New York City.' When you're a broke graduate student this is very attractive, so, I started on the Kerouac book. He also turned me on to the Grateful Dead. I had this personal connection.
DOOR: Explain the motif with which the Grateful Dead named themselves.
MCNALLY: Their first name was the Warlocks, which they'd taken from Tolkien. One day Phil Lesh was going through a record rack and discovered a record by "The Warlocks". Somebody [was already] called the Warlocks. Which we're pretty sure was the band with the guys that are in ZZ Top now. Not all of them, but a couple of them, the two guitar players. So they needed a new name, and they were going round and round and round, until finally, literally the truth has it, Jerry Garcia stuck his finger into a dictionary, and it landed on Grateful Dead, which is a motif identified by Francis Child's who was a musicologist and Folklorist, around the turn of the last century. He was an American although he was working with English Ballads. In the motif it goes back in Folklore to the Egyptians. It's an old story and has been retold as long as stories have been told. In a Grateful Dead song or folktale, a guy, usually a man, is walking along the road and comes across a body that is not getting a proper burial, takes care of that and resolves it's fate. Which makes it the Grateful Dead, because your spirit is not at rest if you're not properly buried. He often does this with his last dime. Then as he travels further along the road the spirit of the dead person comes back, usually in the form of an animal, to help our original hero in whatever lies in his path. So what the Grateful Dead are about is not so much death, really, what the motif is about is generosity and acting from the heart, because the guy spends his last dime on an unknown stranger, but it comes back. It's like Karma, and they chose it, and it's an interesting story because almost nobody liked it. Phil Lesh liked it. Bobby said, I don't know about this. It seemed creepy. It seemed too heavy. But it was one of those things where, as I wrote in the book, without trying to be too heavy duty in my storytelling, they didn't choose it, it chose them, because it was instantly their name from the day they began. I mean, from the day they chose it. They could never have gotten rid of it, no matter what they did.
DOOR: You talked about Jerry Garcia mentioning, after an LSD trip, he said, "For me, in my life there was no turning back. There was no back. Not just thinking back, but the idea of backness was gone." Explain that.
MCNALLY: Well his whole world had changed, quite simply. I think he's just trying to elaborate on the notion that there were no options. The whole terrain of life had realigned. Whatever direction he chose at that point, it was forward. To go back would imply that there was the same personality that he could retreat to, and it was gone.
DOOR: How did LSD originally enter into mainstream society?
MCNALLY: Albert Hoffman identified LSD during World War II. In the 1950's the CIA, in all its naive wisdom, decided that it had possibilities as a weapon and they created a program called "MK Ultra". And they distributed it, sometimes with disastrous results, because they wouldn't tell people that they were getting it. The military intelligence did that, mostly they did things like have hookers giving it to guys in drinks. So we're talking about really stupid stuff. They also had a more formalized program in V. A. hospitals. One of which was in Menlo Park, California, which is near Palo Alto, which is where what was going to be the Grateful Dead was hanging out. One of the people that was in that program in Menlo Park was a guy named Ken Keasey, who was working in the psych ward and was getting the stuff among other things. Of course some of it was drifting out of that program into informal experiments through a man named Vic Lovel who was also part of the program. He was a shrink, not a member of the military. Also, one of the subjects who just got it four times, once a week for four weeks, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and then a mixture of all three the fourth week. His name was Robert Hunter (Jerry Garcia's writing partner and lyricist). So that's how the members of The Grateful Dead seemed to learn about LSD, or at least first heard about it. Hunter experienced it in 1962, but it wasn't until 1965 that a friend of theirs showed up with it in a non-formal way. I might add it was still legal at the time.
DOOR: The book tells that the Dead's skull and lightening bolt logo was red, white, and blue with a 13 point lightening bolt that represented the number of stripes on the original American flag. I'd like you to comment on this and the statement, "They may have been stoned but they were still patriots."
MCNALLY: That logo of course initially had a practical purpose. They were simply marking crates at a time when all these concerts were big festivals and they needed a logo just to be visible so that they didn't mix up road boxes. But when they designed it, it was a clever sort of manipulation of the flag into a completely different context, or elements of the Flag. The fact is, yes, they were patriots. The Grateful Dead are the most American of bands. They're a synthesis of all American music and they advocated very traditional American values of Liberty, Tolerance, and Justice for all. It's hard to argue with any of that stuff.
DOOR: People who weren't present during the 1960's don't realize the repressiveness in the whole social and political scene at that time. An example you cite in your book is from 1969, when the Dead were in Memphis, Tennessee and were told that if the kids got out of their seats to dance that the band would be arrested. Explain that.
MCNALLY: (Laughs) Difficult, huh? There was a famous concert in Cleveland in the middle 50's with Allen Freed and others relating to early rock & roll, the first wave. They'd have these rock concerts in city auditoriums. They came to associate dancing with violence, and vandalism, so they banned dancing. The Grateful Dead came out of a scene in San Francisco where there's explicitly a dance hall. The Fillmore and the Avalon were dance halls. No seats, it wasn't a concert, it was a dance hall. If you read about the early visits of The Grateful Dead, or in particular the Airplane. When they left San Francisco and traveled to other cities like Bakersfield, Wichita and Memphis, over the late 60's early 70's, there were a lot of ongoing problems with the question of whether or not the kids danced. Of course to us looking back on it, it seems insane. I mean, what do you do at a rock & roll concert? You dance! That wasn't the case at the beginning. It took a lot of aggravating work to deal with that.
DOOR: Why was a mythology scholar like Joseph Campbell so enthralled with The Dead?
MCNALLY: Because what he saw at a Grateful Dead concert, which was his first pop music concert, probably in his adult life, was as he put it Dionysus in 1986. It was exactly what he'd been talking about. He'd always said that the essential messages of mythology, of Greek mythology, like the worship of Dionysus, of ecstasy, that they day endured, and he walked into a Grateful Dead concert and said, 'I understand this completely.' And I might add that the Grateful Dead had been reading him for their adult lives, and for him to completely, not merely approve, but just caressed it, instantly, was one of the great validating moments of their lives.
DOOR: I noticed a quote by Phil Lesh where he said everywhere we play is church. Elaborate on that.
MCNALLY: I'll give you another. Mickey Hart once said, 'We're not in the entertainment business, we're in the transportation business. We move minds.' The Grateful Dead started from their very first concerts in the "acid test" days as your average garage band that worked in a bar. Then they started coming together as musicians. Then for two months they dropped out of the music business, with Ken Keasey & the Merry Pranksters, and they played these weekly parties called the "acid tests". They were experiments starting with 20-30 people and moving on to about 5,000 people, taking acid and seeing what would happen. It was not a concert. They were not the show. The show was everybody in the room. They simply contributed as they saw fit. Well that really set the template for the way the Grateful Dead worked for the next 30 years. They weren't the show. The audience was the show. Everybody was the show. They simply supplied the soundtrack. That means that they related to their audience as partners in a quest, not as subjects, not as we entertain, you be entertained. They related to the audience as equals, as peers. They were going after something a little more than just entertainment. They were trying to do something a little spiritual. It was undefined, it was culty only in that everybody sort of agreed on it. Since nobody had any idea of how to do it, other than to listen very carefully to the music, it didn't ever get into hardcore weirdness, but that's what Phil meant. What they were doing was always a party, but it was a Dionysian party. It was a party that had a spiritual purpose to it.
DOOR: Explain what happened when Mickey Hart's father, who was a businessman, and a Christian minister, became the Dead's business manager.
MCNALLY: His religion had nothing to do with it. He was a con artist. Since he seemed to be insincere about every other aspect in his life one assumes that he was insincere about that also. At the time they didn't have anyone with any business experience and he did. So they brought him in and he stole them blind.
DOOR: What was the Dead's relationship with Scientology?
MCNALLY: A number of people in the Grateful Dead dabbled in Scientology in the earliest days. Robert Hunter did very briefly and David Nelson studied it. In each case it was only briefly. As Hunter later said, they'd been reading about it in the context of so many other neo-science fiction kinds of things. When they got very far into it they decided that it just wasn't for them and moved on. Tom Constanten later on was much more involved with it. How long I'm not sure but it hadn't been a very long time.
DOOR: The Dead & politics have seldom ever mixed, but one of the humorous episodes that you mentioned was the telephone conversation between Senator Patrick Lahey & Warren Christopher, in the middle of a Grateful Dead concert.
MCNALLY: Senator Lahey was at our show and the White house operators tracked him down to RFK. A note was handed up to the stage and there's Warren Christopher explaining to him some new policy developments. Clinton was actually retaliating against Saddam Hussain. After a while Christopher makes a comment that the radio's on rather loud, and Pat's saying no, that's Sting, and Secretary of State Christopher was not exactly up on American Pop music. So what occurred was what you would call, basic non-communication. It's Sting, he's a musician, and he's opening for the Dead. None of this quite penetrated Secretary of State Christopher. It was simply bizarre for a Grateful Dead concert.
DOOR: Could you elaborate on the non-materialistic attitude of the Dead in general and the way that Jerry Garcia reacted about their stolen equipment truck?
MCNALLY: Jerry adopted a non, or even an anti-materialistic point of view, a deep point of view in his teens. And that extended to a time when some of their equipment was stolen and he was doing an interview while they were looking for the equipment and he was literally saying things like, "maybe this is some kind of Karmic event that is the result of the fact that we're being a little more successful now, and it's sort of okay to steal from the Grateful Dead", as it were. He was happy that they got the stuff back of course, but what it boiled down to was anti-materialism. He simply did not attach much value to possessions. Even later in life when he had quite a large income his attitude was that it was okay as long as he didn't keep it. He lived paycheck to paycheck. Even though was getting a huge amount of money coming in, he spent it just as fast as he made it. He felt as long as it wasn't attached it didn't matter. That's why for instance the employees of the Grateful Dead enjoyed very considerable salaries, because if you were going to make a lot of money, you were going to share it, and that was his point of view.
DOOR: You state that the new age began in Haight Ashbury. Why?
MCNALLY: What I wrote was, much of what could be perceived for better or worse in the "New Age", began or was influenced there. The rationalist's and the techno structure said that only things that were quantifiable and scientific could possibly be real. Frankly, LSD was at the root of that. Once you've experienced that certain old parities are vulnerable, and that for better or worse, because I don't know that I necessarily agree with all the New Age-y stuff. It's just that the challenge was simply there. Anything that provokes or settles questions, which is certainly what happened in San Francisco in the 60's probably should be cheered, and that's what happened. So you get all of these various practices. Whether it's something as silly as crystal gazing, to a more rigorous and serious study of ESP, as later you see with Dr. Stanley Krippner, all of these thought-provoking questions arose out of what was going on in the Haight.
DOOR: Exactly what was the experiment they did with Dr. Krippner?
MCNALLY: Stanley Krippner was a very, very interesting guy who had conventional academic degrees, as a psychologist in areas that normally academic Sciences don't tread. Among them ESP and dreams. Some the Indian musicians associated with Ravi Shankar, like Ustad Allarakha, were hanging around with Mickey Hart and the Grateful Dead a little bit. Jerry Garcia was speculating that there was sort of a range of consciousness, and that there were just stages of consciousness. Obviously sleep is one of them, and being very high is one of them and day-to-day life is one of them. Jerry speculated as his bright and creative mind frequently did that there was some kind of inner connection between possibly being very high, and in the dream state, and ESP, so they created an experiment. It was a rigorous double blind experiment in which members of the Grateful Dead audience would attempt to communicate via ESP with a person who was sleeping 30-40 miles away in a laboratory. Dr. Krippner produced an article about it for a very sober scientific journal. He refereed the entire thing, which was quite serious. It produced results that he felt indicated a fair degree of connection. I forget how many pictures they sent, but at least a couple of them were images that seemed very directly connected to the pictures, that were being reported by the dreaming subject. It was amazing stuff, nothing absolutely shattering or conclusive, but an indication once again that what the Grateful Dead were up to was a little more interesting than just people wandering around on the street selling crystals.
DOOR: Do you think that music has the possibility of creating unity on a global scale?
MCNALLY: I don't know. It seems like it's a noble ambition, I suppose in theory, but kind of unlikely. Although it is said that music is the global language. The fact is that we all listen to dramatically different kinds of music. I don't know how well you would relate to music from Japan or China, it's a different scale literally.
DOOR: A couple of years ago there was a segment on CNN about a Chinese rock star, who they dubbed as the Chinese Bob Dylan. He was a dissident and part of the Tiananmen Square uprising. Why the government allowed him to perform was a mystery, but they showed a clip of him performing with a guitar, in front of a packed auditorium, in Beijing. This was mind blowing.
MCNALLY: Yeah. I have no doubts.
DOOR: Peter Max was part of the "Moscow Music and Peace Festival" back in 1989, just before the Soviet Union collapsed. He said that at the time he couldn't tell the difference between the crowd there and a crowd back home in the USA, except for the language. What was especially interesting about that was the fact that it was only in the early 1980's that the Communists allowed rock groups, like Steve Miller and Bob Dylan to perform there. What is the potential for world unity from this perspective?
MCNALLY: You can't keep any society sealed 100% all the time. China's tried to do it over thousands of years and it couldn't. Ultimately economics bring in things, e.g. Marco Polo, and along with economics comes the arts. The economics is the first wedge and the arts tag along behind them, as people communicate. I would daresay that 99% of all China still does not know about anything resembling rock & roll, at least rural China. They're listening to state approved music, which is much more traditionally "Chinese", as opposed to whatever this guy is doing in a packed out room. It's a packed out room with a relatively small number of people. One of the threatening things I see in this world is the development of a monoculture. Where everybody's got a Timex watch, Gap pants, goes to McDonalds, etc. if you follow my point. That's much more likely than in the artistic area. Twenty years ago it would've been Michael Jackson and now it's some kind of Amalgam of Rap and Hip Hop, which seems to be the most popular entertainment thing right now. On that level, I'd oppose it. I think it's a more interesting world with a lot more variety and a lot more diversity. So that people listen to a Pakistani singer, and a Tango player from Argentina, and an American Jazz player on the same day. The idea of a fusion, frankly doesn't appeal to me. I think the various flavors are much more interesting independently.
DOOR: What happened when Bear (the Dead's LSD chemist and soundman) gave Mickey a Tibetan Drum made out of a human Skull?
MCNALLY: Again, it was one of those interesting, psychedelic, & psychic experiences. A "damaru" was a drum made out of a Human Skull. Mickey immediately ran into kind of a hard time, at the time. He was literally bumping into things, falling down, dropping things, stumbling over things, and twisting an ankle, whatever. Eventually he decided, well maybe I shouldn't have this Drum around? A skull's a pretty heavy-duty thing. He discussed this with Phil Lesh and they decided to return it to the Tibetans, which seems to have been the wise course. There was a Tibetan Buddhist in Berkley, that they went to visit, and they gave it back to him. He warned them that it had been a wise choice. It was very powerful because it wakes the dead, that was their phrase for it. Shortly there after Mickey was in a car accident, so maybe he didn't give it back fast enough, as I speculate in the book.
DOOR: Comment on Bill Krutzman's statement that words make us enemies, but music makes us lovers.
MCNALLY: It's simply that nonverbal communication is more effective than the direct type, for maintaining the purity of the music. He was the one who said it best, but ultimately all the band members subscribed to this approach.
DOOR: Is that the glue that held them together for so long? In the last years of the Beatles they didn't tour and they didn't even record together.
MCNALLY: That's exactly right. When the Beatles stopped making music together then the magic of their union fell apart. The same certainly was true of the Grateful Dead. They decided that what kept them together was the magic that occurred when they played together, and it worked.
DOOR: The Grateful Dead discarded the American dream of financial success. What was the new dream and the new mythology that they were pursuing?
MCNALLY: That life be lived for creativity and for the pursuit of ecstasy. That it be a dance rather than a plod to financial success. That freedom be explored for it's potential in human evolution and not for potential for its commercial exploitation.
DOOR: The 1980's were one of the most conservative periods in our recent history prior to 9/11, yet the Grateful Dead's popularity increased exponentially in the middle of it. Why?
MCNALLY: It was as Jerry Garcia put it, the last American adventure. It was exactly because things were so conservative, and not only at the top, but moving down through the levels of society. The whole of America was deciding that greed was good, and that we were just there to make money, and that's what life was about. Obviously that applied to a large number of people, but it didn't apply to everybody. There's always going to be somebody that doesn't fit into that, and for them following the Grateful Dead around was sort of the perfect counter-statement. And it worked.
DOOR: The Dead found inspiration for music in some odd places. Like the pump on Mickey Hart's ranch being the inspiration for "The Greatest Story Ever Told".
MCNALLY: When you start taking music as your life seriously you pay attention at all times. Mickey's pretty extreme that way. Mickey saw a rhythm everywhere. I should say heard rhythms everywhere, and that included the pump, and this pump had a peculiar rhythm and he got into that. Eventually it grew. Phil Lesh once had a little satori like moment standing on a ridge taking a leak, and he composed a piece of music that celebrated that moment. It's just a question of consciousness and what you're open to, and maybe the Grateful Dead were a little more open than the average band.

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