The life of the Dead

Band insider Dennis McNally talks about his new 600-page biography of the Grateful Dead, and answers questions about their long, strange trip.

By Douglas Cruickshank

Aug 20, 2002 | Even the many who have fond recollections (or any recollections at all) of the '60s have heard just about as much as they can bear about the 20th-century decade that can't get over itself.

And yet, there is always more -- flashbacks, confessions, photos -- for those whose appetite for the past might never be satisfied.

Most recently, the era is plumbed in "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead," a 600-page memoir by the band's publicist, Dennis McNally. In truth, it's not just about the '60s -- the book hits 1970 about midway and continues on through half of the '90s. And McNally does not throw avid fans of the band, or the '60s, a mere bone. His history of the quintessential psychedelic band, and the strangely intoxicating waves it made, is an entertaining, picaresque, and exhaustive contribution to pop culture anthropology.

Of course McNally, a long-time Deadhead whose first book was "Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America," might be expected to write the ultimate Dead tome. With a doctorate in American history under his belt, he signed on as the band's official historian in 1980 and has been the Dead's publicist since 1984. As a result, he's had extraordinary access for decades -- to band members, crew, staff and hangers-on.

But "A Long Strange Trip" also suffers for McNally's proximity. He calls up remarkable detail for this biography, but the one thing he can't provide is distance. "Inside" is the operative word in this history: Some of the story is rendered in extreme close-up, offering tidbits that only diehard Deadheads will be able to fully appreciate. Yet a gloves-off critique of the Dead's vast, and vastly uneven, creative output will have to wait for another day.

That's not to say that this fat volume offers little more than a compendium of set lists and solipsistic cooing about the boys in the band. The wealth of anecdotes powering "A Long Strange Trip" is reason enough to take it for a spin. One of the most surreal images comes from McNally's tale of the day Sens. Patrick Leahy and Barbara Boxer invited the Dead to lunch at the Senate Dining Room: "As the group entered and sat at a table near the door," he writes, "everyone noted the presence of the 1948 segregationist Dixiecrat candidate for president, South Carolina's very senior Strom Thurmond. He, of course, noted Senator Leahy's party, and as he passed the table on his way out, turned to Garcia with the remark, 'I undastand you're the leadah of this heah organization.' Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart shaking hands with Strom Thurmond was something the wildest acid trip could never have included."

While McNally doesn't hide his fondness for the band, this is no hagiography -- he's not timid about exposing the Dead's excesses and calling them on their shortcomings. After all, he says, they're "human beings, not saints." And there are several accounts that most anyone would find horrific -- Garcia's sad descent into heroin addiction, for example. As onetime Dead vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux put it, "As a whole, in general, the Grateful Dead is not benign." To which McNally adds, "Certainly not to its band members. It is a full-range experience, as Garcia was wont to say, with the good and the bad in perhaps equal measure. It is a world of theater and illusion, and there's plenty of evil around."

Following Garcia's death at age 53 in 1995, the remaining founders of the band agreed that the Grateful Dead would never again perform under that name. Good to their word, bassist Phil Lesh and drummers Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzman would not appear together in a major concert for seven years, reuniting only this month, renamed the Other Ones, to play for an audience of 35,000 at the Alpine Music Theater in Wisconsin.

I caught up with McNally just a few days after he'd attended that concert. He was in London, promoting "A Long Strange Trip." When I phoned, he was watching a cricket match on TV.

To write "A Long Strange Trip," you essentially committed to doing a biography of most of your close friends. That seems like setting yourself up for incredible headaches. Why would you do such a thing?

When I committed to writing the book they weren't friends. I only got involved with them on a personal level when I began writing. I was already a Deadhead, became one in 1972, but I only met the band members after Jerry invited me to do the book in 1980. I began to meet them in the process of writing and then afterwards became an employee.

The thing about the Grateful Dead is, it's not the people on the stage. The Grateful Dead is this mysterious entity that is composed of everyone in the room, and instruments and magic and music and all that good stuff. The fact is that the members of the Grateful Dead and the crew and all the people that are personally involved in terms of what I wrote, they have this understanding that the Grateful Dead is something separate, and the only way to honor it is to tell the truth.

I think there's a consensus that this is not a hagiography, that it's an honest report. And the people involved are human beings, not saints. The only way to honor what the Grateful Dead is, is to tell the truth. I have yet to get a single critical remark about being too honest from anyone. That's a little unbelievable, but it's true.

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