When did the 1960s become The Sixties? Depends who you ask, but certain moments have passed into legend: 5,000 UC Berkeley students occupying Sproul Plaza; Bob Dylan plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival; Timothy Leary exhorting the crowd at the Human Be-In to “tune in, turn on, and drop out.”
Dennis McNally’s The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties adds dozens more hinge points to the list, none as close to the author’s heart as an exchange that took place in early 1958 at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Two students had a question for their teacher, assemblage artist Wally Hedrick: What does beat mean? “You’re beat,” he replied, and sent them to City Lights Bookstore to pick up a copy of On the Road. “One of those students was a young local named Jerry Garcia,” McNally writes. “He’d follow the path of Kerouac... for the rest of his life.”
The Grateful Dead also has many origin stories, but if a 15-year-old Garcia hadn’t met Hedrick, the band might never have formed, much less become the still-truckin’ standard bearers for the psychedelic movement. Nor would McNally’s life have turned out anything like it has. Born in 1949 in Fort Meade, Md., the self-described Army brat bounced between Germany and the U.S. for his first 12 years, until his mother died and his father retired from the military and enrolled in theological school in Maine.
“Looking back,” McNally says over Zoom from his home in the Mission District, “I realized that I self-appointed myself the historian of the counterculture largely because when it was giant in the ’60s, I was in the backwoods of Maine or way upstate New York and couldn’t participate.” Traces of the East Coast are still discernible in his voice and no-bullshit delivery despite his having lived in San Francisco for the past 49 years. “I just sort of read about it and watched it and became curious. By the time I got to San Francisco, it was different. The Haight-Ashbury was just holding on.”
Before he followed in the footsteps of thousands of other flower children, McNally received a crucial bit of advice from a grad school friend at the University of Massachusetts. “We both worked ridiculous hours,” he recalls, “and then, around two in the morning, we would get together and imbibe a little and relax for a half hour before going to bed.” One night, McNally was casting about for a dissertation topic and said, offhandedly, “Maybe I’ll do the beats.”
“You should do Kerouac,” his friend replied. “His papers are at Columbia, and you can stay with my friends in the Bronx.”
A free place to stay and a sympathetic thesis adviser were all McNally needed to get started, and by spring 1972 he was interviewing beat luminaries like Lucien Carr, Allen Ginsberg, and John Clellon Holmes. Seven years later, after Neal Cassady’s widow, Carolyn Cassady, put McNally in touch with an editor at Random House, he published Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America.
By then, McNally had gotten his PhD, moved to San Francisco, and embarked on the next installment of what he envisioned as a two-part history of the counterculture, turning from the ’40s and ’50s and Kerouac to the ’60s and ’70s and the Grateful Dead. “The same guy who said ‘why don’t you do Kerouac?’ also took me to my first Dead show and gave me my first psychedelic experience,” he explains. “Oct. 2, 1972, Springfield, Massachusetts.”
Knowing that Kerouac was Garcia’s “spiritual guide,” McNally sent a copy of Desolate Angel to the guitarist via the band’s fan club mailing address. He also interviewed music promoter Bill Graham (“He was in the phone book”), whose assistant put him in touch with “the mother of all Deadheads,” mailing list manager Eileen Law. Through her, he eventually met Garcia, who, it turned out, had not only read Desolate Angel but dug it. Or as he told McNally, “You agreed with my prejudices.”
Two months later, in December 1980, Garcia invited McNally to be the Grateful Dead’s biographer. The agreement “could have blown up anytime,” McNally says. “It was like pledging a fraternity in which everyone in the office and the crew and all the employees had veto rights. It was up to everybody to decide, is he a butthead or not?”
Thankfully, nobody decided McNally was a butthead. Instead, they made him the band’s publicist. Rock Scully, who had “theoretically” been doing the job while struggling with a heroin addiction, “went away for his health” in 1984, McNally remembers, “and they had a band meeting in which the receptionist asked, ‘What are we going to do about the publicity?’ And Jerry said, ‘Get McNally to do it, he knows that shit,’ because I had at least done a book tour for my own book.”
For the next 13 years, the biography went on the back burner while McNally hit the road with the band. He was introduced to his future wife, photographer Susana Millman, by Grateful Dead archivist Dick Latvala; dealt with bad press when a thousand or more ticketless
fans started crashing the group’s legendary parking lot scene in the late ’80s; and made the public announcement about Garcia’s death
in 1995. After “trying to hold everything together” for the next two years, he took a step back from his publicist duties and focused on finishing the book. A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead came out in 2002 and is widely considered the definitive chronicle of the band.
Other projects followed (“The best way to avoid postpartum depression is to stay pregnant,” McNally says), including On Highway 61, a history of the relationship between Black music and white culture, and Jerry on Jerry, a collection of unpublished interviews with Garcia. The Last Great Dream had its genesis in a photo exhibit McNally put together for the California Historical Society’s celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love. “About a month into it,” he says, “I suddenly went, You putz, it’s a book. This is your book.”
Aiming to trace “all the threads that end up being hippie,” McNally begins The Last Great Dream in 1942, with the first meeting between Bay Area poets Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth, and concludes with the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. In between, he provides an encyclopedic survey of the avant-garde theater groups, coffeehouse folk scenes, campus sit-ins, and LSD-fueled house parties that coalesced into the counterculture. Some breakthroughs, like the first public reading of Howl, are well-known. Others, like the 1963 opening of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, an electronic music production studio and concert venue that also hosted radio station KPFA and Anna Halprin’s Dancers’ Workshop Studio, in the Haight-Ashbury, feel like missing pieces of the puzzle to what the ’60s wrought.
“The San Francisco scene did not affect the political structure of America, alas,” McNally says. One doesn’t have to look far for
the evidence—it’s right there on the window behind him, where a campaign poster against the 2022 recall of progressive San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin still hangs. “But it certainly affected American culture. If you eat organic food, you’ve been affected by the hippies. If you do yoga, if you are positive about lesbian, gay, transgender rights—those are issues that bubbled to the top in the ’60s, in the Haight. There’s a reason why home computers developed in Palo Alto and not in Cambridge. They did a lot more LSD in and around Palo Alto than they did in Cambridge.”
And then there’s the Grateful Dead. Not only did the legacy of the Haight’s house band not fade away after Garcia’s death but it somehow, against all known laws of the rock universe, continues to grow. “The community that was the Haight carried over to Grateful Dead audiences, and still does to this day, which is the most amazing part of it all,” McNally says. “Thirty years later, there’s more Deadheads than there were in 1995. They don’t always know who Pigpen is, because that’s a long time ago, but they know that being a Deadhead is not just being a fan but being part, honestly, of an attempt to bring civilization to the planet. I say that with a shrug, because it sounds so ridiculous, but there’s a lot of truth to that.”
