History Series 1: Dennis McNally / Grateful Dead Former Publicist / San Francisco / Blues and Jazz

0:01 Welcome to another episode of Come Together and we're live. Dennis, I'm so happy to have you here. Welcome. Thanks so much for joining today. To be here. So I came across your work a couple of years ago. I've started getting into the Grateful Dead. I actually found them by way of Joe Russo's Almost Dead, if you're familiar with them, and they covered a song called Atlantic City, but that Springsteen row and the band covered it too.

0:47 And that kind of, you know, so I heard the jammed out version of that song and then I, you know, started listening to more of the music and then I came across this whole world and culture that I was that I was just absolutely blown away by. And it's kind of really had a huge influence on my life ever since then. And your book about the Grateful Dead, A Long Strange Trip was like my road map and biography to like really understanding or starting to understand the culture and get a feel for the main characters, the environment. And it was like, I mean, I felt like I was reading a textbook about the coolest stuff that I love to you know, I love to read and love to learn about.

1:30 And and then and then you said, and then, and then when I sent you an e-mail, you mentioned that you just wrote another book, which I have over here also The Last Great Dream. And that that blew me away. You know, that blew me away just as much. So thank you first of all for the amazing work. I would love to talk about all this stuff with you. How did this, how did you come across writing the and I know you have two more books, but how did you come across writing these epics and what are the other books about? It starts, I was in Graduate School and I was looking for a dissertation topic and I was, I had let me start all over again. So I was in Graduate School and I, there was, I was, I had spent the summer in France to try and fake my way through a language examination, which I managed to do. So as a result, I stayed in a dormitory. And let me advise all people who, who might not be in that situation.

2:27 You don't want to live in a in a dormitory in Graduate School. And the kind of people that want to live in dormitories in Graduate School after four years of college are not the kind of people you mostly want to hang out with. But never mind. So there was this one guy. He was the only dope smoker in the building and he was very kind and he shared his weed with me, 'cause I had zero money and nothing else. And one night I was, I, we were talking and I said something about, yeah, I'm thinking about a dissertation topic and, you know, maybe I'll do the beats. That would be interesting. And he said you should do Kerouac. His papers are at Columbia.

3:09 And you can stay with my friends in the Bronx. Now, having a place to stay in New York City on the subway is right away, you know, incredible. You know, I was truly broke, like most graduate students. And they, the people who were in that apartment that I stayed with, as a matter of fact, are still some of my closest friends. And that's this was 1972, so. Goodyear. More than 5050. That's the year you were born, right? Yeah, sure. It's the year of all the the the, the, the year that my music case was born. So anyway, I started working on Kerouac and of course he was a raving deadhead. And as I went along, I realized the connections most obviously that Dean Moriarty of On the Road was was Neil Cassidy of the famous Grateful Dead song cowboy kneel at the wheel of the best. They never ever land.

4:12 And so I said, OK, I want to do these two books and I event. Long story short, I eventually finished the Kerouac book, sent it to Jerry and Hunter at the at the Grateful Dead post, you know, fan club post office box. I had absolutely no idea how to get a hold of them. And I also intuitively knew that if I marched up to the Grateful Dead and said hi, I'd like to write a book about you. They tell me to take a number. So I, I just sort of kept my mouth shut. Eventually I met Jerry and mentioned the Caraway book. Yeah, we'll, we'll, I'll take it from there.

4:55 So as I say, I I wanted to write a book about the Grateful Dead and I sent a copy to Jerry at the Grateful Dead fan club address, which was all I knew. And eventually I met Jerry and mentioned the Kerouac book. And it turned out that in fact, Kerouac and on the road in particular, where where his Bible it was, it was just one of the the building blocks of his entire persona He had, this is a story that's actually in the last great dream because it's kind of pivotal. And that is the transmission of culture. So you have the beats in the 50s, and one of them was a guy named Wally Hedrick, who taught art at the Art Institute and taught classes on Saturdays to high school kids.

5:47 And Jerry was one of them. And among other things, he played acoustic Blues while they painted. And this resulted that summer. And when Jerry got up accordion for his birthday, he pissed and moaned and cried and and told his mother he had to be a guitar. And eventually it was a guitar, which kind of settled his life. You know, that was it for the next 40 years or whatever it was. And it was also about the beats they asked him about. He was a Wally Hedrick was a very well known beat painter. And they said what what is this beat thing? And while they said you guys are beat, go down a City Hall, it's a City Lights bookstore and get this book on the road, which was, you know, of course, a best seller at the moment. And he did, Jerry did.

6:44 It was the one question I never asked him was did you buy it or did you take it? I suspect the latter. But I didn't ask, it was my my my old mission. So anyway, Long story short, I began working on a Grateful Dead book and I researched that for about 3 years. It was hugely fun. I, I love research and the publicist needed to go away for his health and did. And the receptionist at a meeting, company meeting said what are we going to do about publicity? And Jerry said, give me now to do what? He knows that shit. So I did and I became the dead's publicist for umpires. And then just, you know, eventually Jerry died. I wrote the book, finished the book. It took 20 years 'cause I had to put it aside while I was the publicist and wrote another book called On Hwy. 61, which is the the sort of the deeper background of all this and was basically the relationship of white people to black music really since the middle of the 19th century and going up to Dylan.

7:58 So that, you know, and then I sort of stopped for any number of reasons. And then in 2016, which was of course a year before 2017, which is to say the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, which was in 1967, so-called, I was asked to curate a photo show about that. And I started with the, I found pictures and started with the beats up to the Summer of Love. And the end result was after about a month or two, I suddenly went, this is a book, you know, it takes me a while sometimes I'm not the sharpest blade.

8:52 And I started and that became the last great dream, which is basically the origins of where the people who were in the hate in 1966, really before it became famous, you know, where they came from and where their values came from. And that basically involved the art, the avant-garde art community of San Francisco, the Art Institute, Wally, certainly a fundamental part of it. And then, you know, electronic composers, theater people, poets, painters, you name it, and they all contributed something.

9:42 And it's, you know, it's a wonderful story. And then eventually it all sort of combines into a community in the Hate and Shazam. And then if you you those people included a whole bunch of folk musicians, folk music was an essential part of all this. And so you have all these folk musicians like Garcia, but also like Paul Cantner and, and David Freiburg, all of the bands that that would be, you know, all the guys in Big Brother. And what would happen was that they encountered 2 things. So you have all, all these people and they've got these unusual, that unusual in the American context values whether they even consciously think about it or not. And they're all involved with a community and with basically a peaceful, the idea of a peaceful gentle community. And then they encounter 2 things that are very important. They encounter LSD and The Beatles. And after a while, a very little while, they are playing rock'n'roll instead of instead of folk music. And that's the hate.

11:07 Yeah, yeah, it's it's what I thought was really cool about the about your new about the latest book was all the references that you made to the Eastern cultures impact on San Francisco. And I've only in the last couple of months, actually, ever since really reading your book, I've only noticed the impact of geography on culture, you know, and I've only recently been aware of that. And it's and, and then now everywhere I look, I can't not see it. I mean, all the conflicts in the world and everywhere you look, everything has to do with just where everyone's situated and the and the conflicting cultures that you know, that everyone that the fight seems to happen in these little meeting points where everyone seems to, you know, seems to, I guess convert, converge together, you know, and yes. It's called place.

12:07 Usually when when scholars study this, they refer to it as place. And it's true place, not to get too mystical, because for starters, I'm not really, but you think a certain way to some extent from where you come from. Now, there's lots of variations in all this. You know, I have a taste for Southern food because my mother cooked it a lot. She was from Chicago. It's a whole long story. But the fact is that, so it isn't just one to one. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, but the fact is that the place has an impact on how you live, how you speak, how you think, what you think. San Francisco is a particularly distinct version of all that for the simple reason that most cities, most places that, you know, have a lot of people, which is to say cities don't the, the, pardon me, they, they, they arise for really basic economic reasons.

13:21 Denver is where it is because the railroads cross there, etcetera. You know, Chicago, I mean New York City, you know, had a harbor and it's usually the, the values are tended to be bourgeois, middle class, you know, business values, capitalism. San Francisco did not get established that way. San Francisco was created by failures, by people who did not fit in on the East Coast. A lot of second sons where the first son would take over the business and the second son was like, what about me? And a lot of them, along with people from Chile and and China, took off for San Francisco to hunt for gold. Their values were not bourgeois values. It was crazy time and and the city eventually became a fair, moderately conventional American city, but it always had a certain amount of room for craziness, for tolerance, for craziness that most American cities simply didn't have. And it's literally on the, to quote Robert Duncan, one of the poets that I talk about, the Western edge of dreams. It is literally, you know, if you envision Western culture starting in Greece and Rome and expanding through Europe, and then everybody getting on boats

14:55 and going to America, and that, OK, expands across America, and then it gets to San Francisco and it stops a there's an ocean. And the people in San Francisco were a long way from New York. And in many ways, the artists did not look back to New York. If you were a painter, well, if you were a painter, you looked to New York because that was Jackson, you know, where the the Impressionists were. But the fact is that that that in addition to the fact that literally we were just here on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean toward China and Japan, we also had a significant population from China, you know, so you didn't have to go very far.

15:45 And any number of of these artists will will tell you that, particularly the composers. A guy named Lou Harrison grew up near Chinatown and he would hear Chinese music, which is based on completely different own scale from Western music. And he integrated them and started sort of integrated gamelan, which is what he ended up loving the most, gamelan with Western music. So there's this mush, you know, mushing together going on. And San Francisco had institutions by the by the after World War 2 that that you know, preserve that The most obvious was one called the Academy for Academy for Asian Studies AAS. And it, it was remarkable and it brought together all kinds of again, poets, Mystics, artists, you name it. And they studied they studied Asian culture and they, among other things, Alan Watts was the was the chancellor and eventually he would have a show about Zen on KPFA, another uniquely San Francisco plug in into a world culture, into an activist culture.

17:09 And at a time when in the 50s when, you know, people just didn't they didn't stray from the straight and narrow. It was a a very conformist era. San Francisco wasn't and particularly the AAA S. So you have Alan Watts on the radio once a week telling people about Zen and you know, you weren't getting that in New York and and these this is, you know, this is where San Francisco's culture diverged among them. You know, as I said, going all the way back to their founding, but in particular as as far as Asia goes and Asian thought you you could start with Watts and with with the the Academy evasion studies. Yeah, certainly.

17:59 I thought it's so cool and it's so funny because when I grew up and I, you know, I say this, I've noticed a lot recently, You know, my education was primarily I thought America was the only country in the, you know, on the map. And I thought that the only history was just American history for 250 years. You know, I never, I never expected that anything else existed. And now I'm learning about all this other stuff and it's in and it almost feels criminal that, that we're not being taught about all this other stuff because there's, because all our roots, all our, the more you learn, the more you see that where our roots came from and where are the, you know, the foundations of being an American, you know, in a lot of different contexts, where they, they come from somewhere, you know, and, and these philosophies are not, you know, born overnight. And, you know, and I thought it was, I thought it was just so wonderful that like education is like part of what the culture is, taking your education into your own hands and as opposed to just describing to subscribing to someone else's education. I thought that was so remarkable and so influential. I think that's why the movement is still so strong, you know, because it speaks so strong.

19:07 Exactly what the people in the hate did, the basic, the fundamentals of the mainstream American culture are American exceptionalism, which is to say that, you know, really only America counts, which is it's gotten that bad. And in fact, our current administration, that is exactly what they think and they say it out loud, which is. America First is the is the same, right? There you go. American exceptionalism implicit, which it leads to an implicit racism, starting with the Constitution in which black people got 3/5 of a vote. They couldn't use it, but but this their southern overseers were able to to use it to maintain power.

19:54 Consumerism, the basic the basic principle of freedom in America. There's two kinds of that. There's one that is the freedom to make as much money as possible, which the current administration waves the flag for, and the freedom of thought to. Evaluate anything, make jokes about it or, or simply challenge it. Thoreau being the most wonderful example. I mean, he, he, he, he started and just change it challenged everything that, that, you know, Christianity, you know, a vague Christianity, though in fact, you know, at this point that's only a tiny fraction of the country and on and on and on and on. And all these things sort of got left behind by the 1960s in in San Francisco.

20:55 Yeah, and I think it's I think it's good. I think that lit a flame that hasn't really gone out, you know, and I think that, you know, even till today, you know, you see just your the rise of an individual like Billy Strings, you know, like, you know, where he takes, where, you know, he takes these grass roots and you know, these, I'm sorry, bluegrass roots, you know, and, and combines it with acoustic music, you know, and is, I think that I know that, you know, Jerry Garcia did a bunch of albums with David Grisman that was kind of similar, but Billy Strings playing is so unique. And I and there's like a whole audience that's just they're just chasing after it, you know, and there's a whole group of there's a whole world of just people that that, that, that, that really live and breathe this kind of stuff.

21:42 And it's, it's, it's, I think it's beautiful. Bluegrass is a is a fascinating phenomenon and Billy Strings is one of the more fascinating aspects of it. His his chops are simply I was talking with your Macalkinen once and I this was some years back and I had just heard about Billy Strings and was listening to him like, wow, kids good. And and I was talking with Yorma and Yorma has a very dry and wonderful sense of humor. And I said, we're talking about something completely different than I said. By the way, have you heard about this kid? You, you knowing you, you've heard about this kid, Billy Strings. And he went Yep, Yep. He said don't like really talking about him.

22:25 And he sort of looks me in the eye and gives me the almost the wink and says hate talking about people who can do things I can't. And and he was, of course joking. But you know, no, Billy is he's got chops from God and and that's all I can say. But all all that. Well, bluegrass is very interesting, among other things, because it is not folk music. It is a it is a professional. It was created by professional musicians. It's really challenging. It is really engaging so that, you know, the best thing about bluegrass. One of the best things is, is that at a bluegrass concert, the action in the parking lot before and after the show are, you know, with every, I mean, half the audience play some, you know, to some extent and they're all sitting out in the in the parking lot or, you know, wherever picking before they come in, they'll hear, you know, the star. And so that's, there's an engagement there in a community there that's, that's really quite wonderful. Yeah, I think it, I think it's cool. I'm curious what you think of this. I think that we're seeing a lot of explosion of, of, of alternative, we'll call it thought in today's world. And I think that a lot of the I think, and I was talking to a couple of friends about why that might be, you know, and you know, and one of the things that

23:57 someone pointed out to me was whenever people feel oppressed or squished or like suffocated, it lights something incredibly creative inside ourselves, you know, and that's why I like the best poetry I ever wrote was after a heartbreak when I felt lost and I didn't know which direction I was going to go on my life or something like that. You know, he said we have and he goes, you know what? Say what you will about anything with COVID, it was three years of of people being miserable, essentially, right? It was, it was really, it was really, you know, and justified, not justified regardless, It was years of people felt isolated, lost, unsure what to do. And everywhere that you look felt on, you know, you everything felt insecure. And I think that since then there's been like, you know, I mean, John Mayer's joined again, you know, joined dead and Co and, you know, in the way that the that the sphere allows this kind of creative level or the amount of music festivals. I don't know whether I haven't been following the scene enough to really know whether it's more than pre COVID or not. But it feels like there's more of an embracing of, you know, the same free spirit that was alive in the 60s and 70s that's happening today.

25:08 And I'm wondering if you think it has to do with just, I think that people feel, you know, lost or hurt or broke down a little bit. What do you think? COVID and my. OK, my question is, do you think that the explosion in creativity today is is due to the feeling of people feeling lost and not knowing which direction to turn and a general disenhant disenchantment? You know, I think that's that that's partly true. I think there are a lot of reasons why people feel the way they do. I mean, the more aware of us are aware that our our climate is going belly up and, you know, and we've got an A maniac who's not doing anything about it in the White House. And so, you know, that doesn't help either. But really all of this is part of a, of a, you know, a path that goes back into the 19th century. And it's certainly many of those issues, you know, popped up bigly, sorry, in the 60s.

26:19 And, you know, I occasionally teach a, a class to, to high school kids about the 60s. They're taking a class in the 60s and I go in and talk about stuff and, and I look at them and I say, look, you guys are interested in something that happened 50, more than 50 years before you were born. If if I did that, I'd be looking at the year 1900 and I don't think I'd find anything really great, fantastic to study in 1900 the way you guys are interested in in the 60's. The reason I say that you're interested in the 60s is because it hasn't gone away. All these issues are just as significant as ever. The the, the hippie thing did not affect American politics, unfortunately much.

27:10 Maybe it helped end the war, but it did affect American culture. So that if you eat organic food, if you are concerned about the environment, if you do yoga, if you pay attention to Asian, you know, Asian thought, if you, you know, want, you know, gender nonconformity, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. If if you know all these issues, everything in other words that Donald Trump is against, you know, then you were affected by the 60s. Let me point out one, you know, sort of significant unintended consequence of the 60s, which was in 1966, Ronald Reagan got elected governor of California by running against the Free Speech Movement, the Haight, Ashbury and Watts, the Watts rebellion in others the same.

28:16 And then he got elected president on the same platform. And there's a straight through line between from Reagan to Trump in which basically white males are protecting their long old privileges and, and are terrified of losing them. And, you know, that's what's going on. We, we made progress in with feminism and with, you know, against racism and, and, and with gay marriage, for instance, being really, you know, calm, calmly accepted. And now we got a Supreme Court that might reverse it.

28:56 Who knows? I mean, you know, it's, it's a grim situation, but all of this is a reaction to the 60s. That's what Trump is about, you know, and you, you can just. I think it's been everyone. It almost feels like it's anyone, anyone in the straight world, you know, I mean, if you just look at the trajectory of people that are in positions of authority and then the way that they treat regular people that ask question that, you know, that say anything or that try to mind their own business or do their own thing. And, you know, it almost feels like individualism is, is a threat. You know, that's, it feels like that that's been the case. I don't like, I mean, I'm sure the administration and politics have to do plenty with it.

29:42 And I, I, I think that there is more than a fair, you know, I think that it almost there's been a direct trajectory for the last 30 years of, you know, every, everyone in office just trying to impose authoritarianism on, you know, the American people. It feel but, you know, but but yeah, I, I think your point about the fact that the six, you know, everything is still a response to the 60s is, is correct. And I think that that's because they really tapped into something that was really, really free and beautiful and, you know, really magnificent. And, and I think that's, I think it's threatening to order. It's why LSD is, is, is banned. You know, I mean, it's why, it's why it's considered a dangerous drug to people that don't know anything about it. Yeah, the the irony of course with LSD is that that it's it's use and and spread in the 50s was controlled by the CIA. And I'm glad this, this is not conspiracy theory. This is history.

30:44 They, they, they encountered it and they decided that they might be able to make it use it as a truth serum, which after a whole lot of experimenting, they, they were wrong. But, you know, So what else is new? And. And. But the fact is that that yes, all, all this is true. You know, freedom always scares the this, you know, certain aspects of the social order. In the 60s, things felt really unhinged. Now more than ever, the same. So you know, there you go. Yeah, So tell me about, I have to hear about what it was like living in San Francisco with the dead as their publicist. And I want to hear about and I want to hear about the research and how you go in, how you do research in the book. You know, for your books.

31:38 Your books are encyclopedias. Your books are like, you know, they're like, like it's, it's not even that there's so much information in them. It's so easy to track down the information that you're presenting to. So like, if I don't know anything about jazz music in New York, you give me enough information that it's so easy to just put in a name and a date and a location in Google and get a book about in a minute, you know, And so I appreciate that. First of all, thank you. What's? Like living with it. You know it's not me. Thanks, Sergey Brin, you know, Google, I, I, I am not young and, and, and I and I so I, I get, you know, I grew up in the 60s thinking hope I die before I get old.

32:24 Well, maybe not that, but but you know, God, do I, you know, do I really want to listen sound like my father again. And but, you know, it's just, it's beyond astonishing. Let me give you an example. So I started working on my Kerouac book in 1972. You know, the closest thing to the Internet was the New York City phone book. I mean, there what you know, I you just bump into thing when you research, you bump into things you read, you know, you read the first Oh, I should know about that book. OK, I'll read it. Check the footnotes.

33:05 Maybe it'll send me the other books. Maybe it won't. And you go, you know, and it just, it goes on. It's it's, it's, it's kind of mysterious. And eventually you start building a night, you know, you have an idea of, you know, where you're going. And maybe toward the end, you're actually, OK, I need to know this and I need in 1972, you went to, you know, you got information by going to the library and those lovely librarians, research like librarians would, you know, show you, you know, where to go and and then you track down people. Here's one example of the difference of, of research. There's a very, very important person in Jack Kerouac's life by the name of Gilbert Milstein, who was an editor in 19. In the 50s, he was an editor at the New York Times who review it accidentally got the assignment because the the main guy was on vacation, got the assignment to review on the road and gave it, you know, a, a well, a review that that made it a best seller and also killed Kerouac because fame was not really something he was emotionally ready to handle.

34:30 And I found him by watching television and he in 1974 or five, whenever I was I found him, he was working for ABC News. And I happened to read the the credits one night and there was Gilbert Milstein. And I said it has to be the same guy. So I literally, I just picked up the phone the next day and called ABC News and got to him pretty quickly and then went down and interviewed him. And, you know, I was the first person to really, you know, get to him.

35:12 I was only, I was only the second biographer of Kerouac. So you know this, these are very early days. Now today, 2025, a woman who's a friend of mine named Holly George Warren is doing a new biography of Kerouac where she's got, she's been commissioned by the estate. And, you know, she has access to a million things. I never did. And we were talking and I was teasing her and I was saying, well, you know, you, you can do all your research, virtually all your research from home. You know, even even when you find stuff at a library, half the time, if you write the library and they'll probably copy it and send it to you. I mean it.

35:54 And on and on and on and off. And she went. Yeah. And you got to hang out with all the people that knew him that are now that I talk to. Good point. So the the point is, you know, the evolution of of of well, of research is in our life, in my lifetime, not yours. You know, it's phenomenal. And literally I, I, this, what the, the approach that I took in 72 is I, I joked that my, you know, I read, I read his mail, which is to say I went to every university archives I could find. It wasn't just at Columbia.

36:38 I interviewed everyone that I could find, which was most of the people that were, you know, important in his life. And I also sort of set a baseline of American culture by going through Life magazine during his lifetime, which is a lot of magazines. Because I, I did it on the premise that if it made it into Life magazine of some issues, some personality, some whatever, then almost everybody knew about it, or at least they would. It represented the consensus and, you know, because again, I'm, I'm not from the literary department. I'm, I'm a historian and, and which is why they're so stuffed, because I mean, I'm pretty serious about the, the history of it.

37:31 And I wanted to, to reveal Kerouac, you know, was a diarist. I mean, he, he wrote, he wrote fiction, but he wrote fiction that was based on his life and what he observed, which is true of every novelist. But in his case, it was closer to day-to-day than than others. And he, you know, this, this, this reveals there's a principle that if you can tell the story of one person with enough detail, if you've got enough research, you can tell the story of the times, that what we all experience is what's going on all around us. And it's certain, you know, he lived through World War Two. He served as a merchant seaman.

38:19 You know, clearly he, you know, he hung out with Gary Snyder. Gary Snyder was banned. Gary Snyder was a poet who had been a a labour union member. And he was he, he had had been, you know, earning his living by spending the summer working as a fire watch in the Pacific Northwest. And after a couple of years he was not retained because of security concerns that that is he was, he was banned because he had been a union member. Oh wow. That did you? No. And that's that's the America that Jack Kerouac lived in.

39:03 Now, Jack Kerouac, in fact, was very politically conservative and this did not disturb him as much as it should have. But that's a whole other issue. Right, right, right. And in terms of so, so you, you approach writing like as as a historian, not as a novelist, right. And but you have what what I do notice is you put in a lot of you put in a lot of fun detail like you could tell you put in your own commentary into some of this in some of the stories that that you can tell is is in great humor and spirits. One of my favorite stories that that I remember.

39:45 I even remember when I read this book at this point of the story, I was I was two weeks after I got married and I was in Orlando and my apartment that my wife and I were supposed to move to had fallen through, you know, and we didn't have a place to live. And this was two weeks after we got married. And I'm thinking, you know, I'm going to be this adventurous hippie and my wife has plans for, you know, otherwise. And so I'm reading this book and she keeps me grounded. It's great. And I'm reading about the story of Bob Weir drops the water balloon on the cops head and. And then he, you know, he couldn't help himself but walk out in the street and, you know, while the cop is still looking for the guy that did it and saying and just said innocently, good morning, officer.

40:31 And I just remembered that the, the way that you phrased it, there was so much like I, I, I, I laughed out loud reading it and I tried to convey to my wife, I was so funny at the time. But you know, I obviously, you know, it fails to do justice whenever you try to retell these stories, you know, but we. The point, the point is that being a historian is nothing more or less the biggest storyteller. You're trying to tell a story and you have to make it interesting. One of the problems with much academic history is they don't have that principle. They, you know, they, they, they, they want to expound, they want to, to theorize and frequently they want to connect what's going on to a greater cultural overview, which, you know, that's sort of post Marxist, post feminist post this and that.

41:31 And my argument is, you know, you, you, you, you write history from the facts out, not from a theory in So I'm very old fashioned and, and have no, you know, no particular connection with the academic world because, you know, I, that's why I bailed as soon as I got my doctorate. I, I, I ran to the, you know, I ran screaming from, from the world at the world of academe. As I say, as you say, I, you know, I include a lot of the details are what keep people's interest. As I say, you know, and it's, it's, you know, there's, it's dense. I, I use that in a positive sense that, that my material, you know, there's a lot of stuff stuffed in. As I say, you know, then the job is to make it readable. And on my good days, I do.

42:28 Yeah, and the rereadable is what I've noticed because as I, as I learn more about the that world and then I go revisit the books, you know, names, dates and and events start becoming more familiar, you know, and, you know, and for example, the first time reading it and my favorite songs are China Cat, Sunflower, I know you writer. And then six months, you know, and then six months later, a year later, you know, I've listened to a dozen more concerts and read a little bit more and listened to some interviews. And then I go back and I'm like, Oh my gosh, there's all this, there's all this, there's all these, all these gems over here that I totally missed out on. As you say, you know, it's a, it's a big story both of the books that we're talking about.

43:10 And as a result, remember you have a computer in your hand. So, you know, although I did put a glossary in with the new book because there were so many names and I wanted to identify. So so people could, you know, do it quick before they went and gave up and and went to Google. But, you know, that's, that's the way things are. I mean, they're very dense. We have mental filters to screen news or the stuff that we don't want to know about. You know, I, I, I look at every morning, I look at the, the headlines on my newspaper, I read about one story in 20 and it's not usually the most important story. I mean, why do I want to know more about what rationalizations some political figure has about what they're doing? I, I can pretty well guess what, you know what, what they are. And learning more is, you know, not going to profit me. Besides, I just don't have any room in my brain for it. So, you know, we all, but we all do this. We all screen the information, you know, do I really want to know about a sports team that I don't follow? No.

44:38 So you know, that's that's fair, that's fair for everybody. So I, you know, I pick up my my information from bits and pieces here and there and and the New York Times and and even then, you know, I get the halfway through the article figure I have the gist and move on. But that's what we all need to do in order to just function. We live in a world of, you know, just insane information overload and you, you have to, you have to pay attention in a kind of a self protective way. Yeah, you do. Yeah, you do.

45:20 I think it's, and I think that the other thing is also familiarity. I think that when something becomes familiar, you know, you become a little bit more inclined to pay attention to it, you know, and for example, you know, I, I've just started listening, you know, getting to the jazz world, the jazz history a little bit. And so the details that you mentioned in the beginning of your book, you know, the, of the, OR I guess towards, you know, the middle ish of your, of the, of the newest book, you know, revolves largely around that scene. And I'm looking for names that I'm familiar with. And then sometimes I find them and sometimes I don't. And I have to almost force myself to not just jump ahead and skip, you know, and then I have to make it look familiar, seem familiar, you know, maybe look up, look them up a little bit or look up what people say about it.

46:05 And then when I go back to, I'm like, oh, OK, now, now I have a bigger context that I think that I'm able to kind of piece everything more together, but from. What you, what you're talking about is everybody's education. I mean, you know, that's exactly, you know, what you're going through. I will say that it's much easier now. I mean, I, you know, in 1967, I left high school and went to college and there was a guy with a jazz show. I I had already gotten into jazz. The first album I ever bought was Thelonious Monks live at the five spot in in a tank town in Dexter. It called Dexter, Maine, in which there was a candy store and they had one shelf of records, but they also had the Schwann catalog.

46:58 I don't you probably never heard of that. I don't even know. I doubt it exists anymore. The Schwann catalog was the equivalent of the Internet for music. It it was a like a New York City phone book. It was enormous. And it listed all the records in print in America. So I went to the lady at the candy store and I said I want a book, a record by Thelonious Monk. So she looked up Thelonious Monk and she ordered me one, you know, there. And, you know, even then you could get information. Then I got to college and there was a guy who was really knowledgeable and he, he had the jazz show on Sunday nights on the radio station.

47:40 And I would go and sit and study, listen to him and, you know, hang out and, and, you know, ask him questions because there, there weren't that many books then. And certainly there was no, pardon me, no Internet. So now you have the advantage of Google and you can find out just about, you know, everything this side of of I don't know what I mean, but certainly, you know, jazz. I don't know if it's true that young people these days don't read. Many of them don't read SO.

48:26 Much they do not, and they do not. Reading has fallen out of favour, which is a tragedy. It is. I find it, you know, I find it interesting. I'm, you know, a weird old man who, for instance, you know, Sorry, I'm gonna, I don't mean to insult you. Please. I do all these interviews for podcasts, which I don't I don't listen to because I think that reading is a much faster way of absorbing information than listening to it on a podcast or or audio book. I don't, you know, I don't totally disrespect the way you can learn that way.

49:06 I just, it doesn't suit me. And the fact is that there's this whole span of, of culture, of history of whatever that, that, you know, I, I only learn slowly, as I say, from listening to a guy and then listening to a whole lot of records until now. I have a fair grasp of the history of jazz, but I've been doing it for a whole lot of years. It's a very complex phenomenon. And you know, I'm glad, I'm glad you found it, but you know this, it's just never going to stop.

49:50 I mean if you keep your mind open and alive, open to curiosity, you will run across things like this till the day you die. Yeah, yeah, I hope to. I hope to, because I find that a lot of this is, is odd and fun and super, super just relatable because I think that there's, you know, there's something that, you know, I'm an Orthodox Jew. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm observant and there's a Jewish writer from the 1800s. And one of the things that he loves to talk about is the fact that, you know, times change, but human nature kind of stays, stays the same, you know, and a lot of, and a lot of the, you know, and a lot, and a lot of these issues that, you know, that I'm, that I'm learning about or these forms of self-expression or, you know, history or, or what caused, you know, what, what caused an emergence of, of, of culture.

50:49 All that is extremely relatable. I'm, I'm reading, I'm reading what's it called book, that book by Danny Sugarman now about being the doors, that doors manager. And I'm reading it now. And I'm like, yes, I think it's called Wonderland. What's called Wonderland, I think. I forget the name I I just I just ran across Daniel. As a matter of fact, he was very he was very kind about my book. Let me tell you that I please don't don't think that I'm talking down, but you really want, you really want to read my set, my the on Hwy. 61 because it will give you the history of black music.

51:31 And I mean, it's the hit. It's not a history of black music. It's a history of white reaction to black music. But it'll give you a good handle on, on, you know, jazz history. If if you know, if, if that's something as you say that that concerns you. It's and the way white people glommed onto it and why. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. OK. I'm going to. Can you can you elaborate on the difference in the in the Blues and jazz culture? Oh well, on the well, again, you know, that's a, that's a six hour lecture.

52:16 Just put it this way. You get to the 1890s. Black people have been freed from slavery for 40 years. One, you know, essentially one large generation, and within a few years, 3 phenomena, musical phenomena emerge all at the same time in not in the same place. One is the Blues, which started coming together in the 1890s. One is jazz, which started then in and combined Blues with with in New Orleans.

53:01 And, and the reason it was New Orleans, among other things, was that the French military, remember it was French. The city had left behind a whole lot of musical instruments so that the people, the black people of of New Orleans were exposed, had access to and were exposed to these instruments and started taking Blues changes and applying them to to popular music and gave birth to jazz. And thirdly, at the same time in New Orleans, a man named Scott Joplin was marrying Blues changes and African American sounds to classical music, Western classical, and that became ragtime and changed and changed. The, the, it's called syncopation, in which you have more than one rhythm going at the same time. And they, they, they, they blend, they measure against each other.

54:09 And these three things each develop over the course of the 20th century. And by the time you get to the 1940's, the Blues has now gone, travelled along with the migration of black people to Chicago where it needs, it's in a situation that literally needs more volume. So they start playing with electric instruments and it becomes what is called our, you know, Chicago Blues, the electric Blues. At the same time it also encounters certain country rhythms and it becomes rhythm, what they call rhythm and Blues. And eventually that becomes rock'n'roll. And then white people go back and look at the the R&B. The same guy, the same producer who produced Louis Jordan, who was the fundamental king of R&B in the 40s. The same guy and guy named Milt Gabler then turned around and produced Oh God, I've forgotten his name. Oh my Lord, I'm pulling a blank.

55:29 As soon as you stop thinking about it, I'll pop back into your head. Yeah, no doubt, no doubt it was. It was the Comet, Bill Haley, Bill Haley and the Comets who were started doing rhythm and Blues songs. But in a country is sort of he had been a country band. It was they were Bill Hilly in the Saddleman first. Then he started listening to R&B and went, hmm, and they became the Comets and you know, and then. That was rock around the clock, right? Rock around the clock exactly which of course, it was originally a black song. So you know, and and all of the all of this is about, you know, and if you really want to take it seriously, you can go back to the 1740s and what was called the great the great not transformation.

56:25 Again, I'm pulling a blank. The Great Awakening, in which there was an enormous series of religious revivals all over the United, you know, what was then colonial United States. United States only had 13 colonies at that point, and maybe a few more. But still it was early days. And but what happened was in the South in particular, the revival allowed for black people, but they had to sit in the balcony. They, they were segregated, but they were part of it. And you could hear them. And what happened was that black choral singing affected church music as early as the 70s.

57:12 And so that you can't talk about black music or white music after that. It's all both. And, and you know, there was a guy named Cecil Sharp who was a very good musicologist in England. The the what they call child ballads, the old sort of classic English folk songs. And then he came to America and he sort of he studied them in America and decided that, well, there were this white music Appalachians that that had, you know, that was pure and that was English.

57:53 And then there was black music using the same material, which was, you know, to him, commercial and not to be trusted. Now the fact is that that the the the prichent St. of folk of Appalachian music was the Carter the Saints with The Carter Family and the elder of The Carter Family went song literally did collect songs and he collected them with a black guy. In other words, they were they were collecting Blues and and folk songs just as much as you know, will the circle be unbroken. And so the fact is that all of this stuff works together, has always worked together.

58:42 The the most important. And again, this is there's a book you should read. There's A, and I forget the the name, but it's a biography of, of Harry Smith and it's a Harry Smith collected, among other things, collected 70 eights and then quite illegally, he and Moe Ash at Folkways. They they never got permissions. I mean, it could never happen today, but they put out a six, one of the first box sets, A6 LP 33 and a third collection of American folk, what he called folk music. It wasn't folk music, it was commercial music. It was music professionally recorded between 1929 when electronic microphones became available against acoustic microphones, which were really crude. And, and he put together this package and they were all recorded between 1929 and 1932 when because of the depression, the record, the recording industry just went completely belly up.

59:56 And for several years they just didn't sell anything. And these songs, he, he, you can't, he does not. And it's, I'm very proud of him. He does not identify people as black or white. And you can't tell. These, these southern, you know, it's a southern accent, so say it could you know, you don't know. And this music, which was called the folk, let's see, the folk music anthology, ended up being the source for that old music that Dylan and all the other folkies in the early 60s.

1:00:43 Right. Didn't drug music have a big impact too? Drug music is part of all this. You know, it had a real it had its biggest impact actually in England, where it was called skiffle. Long story and and too complex to explain that, but trust me. And skiffle, which led to English rock'n'roll. I mean, John, John Lennon and Paul McCartney had a a skiffle band called The Quarryman. There you go. Yeah, who is that? There was yeah, there was So all this OK, I I, I, I love, I love your answers because they take me on a on a whole another trip, you know, every single time, every single time you're. You're bouncing around in subjects, so I'm responding. I'm loving it.

1:01:34 This is. This is. This is fun. No, no, no. This is what I've this is what I've been wasting my time with for the last 50 years. You know, what can I say? Doing these interviews. No, no, no. Oh, that kind of research. I love it. I love it and I and I have. To say that. It's your recall is incredible. Your recall is incredible. Can you tell me a little bit about spending time with the what is it? What, what was it like being a publicist? What was it like? Can you tell me some stories about working with them and dealing with them with it as difficult as everyone says they were? Was it fun? What was it like? It was mostly fun. It had the only problem. No, it was the ideal situation in many ways, because, for instance, they were the only band in history that didn't give a shit about whether or not they got publicity or not. OK, They lived.

1:02:26 In it was an easy job. And on that level, it was an easy job. It really was when I thought it was worthwhile. Eventually I learned that when I thought it was worthwhile, Jerry, Jerry trusted me. He hired me. He trusted me. And he did most. He was the target of most of the requests and he did most of the interviews. There were band members that just didn't do interviews, which fine with me. You don't want to talk, don't talk. What happened was that when I got I became the publicist in 1984, at which point I was in my mid 30s and the whole general, there was a whole, there were generations of dead heads, right.

1:03:07 So the first generation were the people in San Francisco in the 60s and the second generation with America were college kids on the East Coast between DC, Boston and Chicago in that within that triangle where the Grateful Dead started playing colleges in the late 60s. Well, by the middle 80s, these are people like me in their mid 30s and some of them are newspaper editors and some of them are TV executives and they want to cover the Grateful Dead. They want to cover it positively. But as I pointed out to the band, if that you don't let them in and you can't trust the the venue to do it. This is a job the Grateful Dead always, you know, went for a, a self-contained setup.

1:04:01 So, you know, you, you, you had to use promoters, but you trained them and you, you kept them even when, even when you found out they were stealing from you, we never changed them. Oh yeah, like, OK, bad boy, you know, make sure that the catering's right, etcetera. And, And so I said, look, here's the deal. These TV crews are going to come to the show. Your, your story. Now, you know, suddenly Cincinnati erupts in tie dye. You, you know, that people, it's a story and you, you know, so they're going to want to cover the show if they can. They'll shoot the, they'll shoot the beginning of the show and it's pretty lights and, you know, pretty music.

1:04:44 And they'll, they'll run that. The Grateful Dead are in town. Isn't this nice? If you don't let them in to shoot the music, they will shoot people smoking dope in the parking lot because they had you know, when you send out that camera, it's got to come back with footage. Simple. And everybody and the band went, yeah, you're right. So as far as that goes, mostly, you know, what I did was answer the telephone and and make sure that that reviewers can get in and also deal with the photographer still and and video mostly to make it as invisible as possible. So they'd come in, they'd shoot and they'd leave and they would attract the notice of the band and more importantly the crew, because the the crew was extremely entitled and very indulged.

1:05:38 And if they felt like picking on somebody, they did that included me at times. But anyway, so you know, that's that was the job of being the publicist for the Grateful Dead. Other than that, I was, you know, I was sort of informally put in charge of special outings so that, for instance, we went to the White House and you know, I had to, or we went to visit the vice president and his at his residence. And I'm explaining because of course, you know, the ban and I had gone, you know, give me your social. We need the Social Security number to give to the Secret Service and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1:06:19 And then? Wow, what was that like? They were, you know, the. Senior service was told about. Yeah, they were professional. I mean, you know, and I, I, we worked together. It was no problem. They were so professional that when I, I, we went to, to, to the Naval Observatory, which is the home of the vice president. And I, we get into the van and I discover that Mickey and Carol, Mickey Hart's wife is Carol and Mickey and Carol's nanny, who's a Latina lady. They didn't mention to me that she was coming. Thanks, guys.

1:07:02 So we get out of the, I get out of the van at the door, at the gate, and I say, so here's, you know, that's, that's who that is and blah, blah, blah. And here's the, the Social Security numbers. And that Lady is a nanny. And quite frankly, I don't have a Social Security number. I don't even know if she has 1 and I don't even know if she has papers. I think we can confidently say that she's of no possible danger to the vice president. But that's all I can say. And they just saw, you know, they recognize that famous people do things their own way sometimes. And they didn't give me a hard time, thank God. And, you know, we had an interesting time. And I'll tell you a funny story.

1:07:44 So we're in. Please. And we gather in the dining room and, and, you know, it's just they had things to say to him and he had things to say to them. It was, it was, you know, very charming. And I went to the bathroom and smelled a familiar odor in the bathroom. And later that day, I looked at Jerry. I just sort of raised my eyes. So I was in the bathroom and he said, man, I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to smoke. Oh my. God, you know, I couldn't.

1:08:25 I couldn't and you know the other, you know, there was like one time we were at the White House and no, I'll tell you a better story. So Pat Leahy, who was a senator from Vermont and became our good buddy, He he he looked like a senator distinguishes all get out until he put on a tie dye T-shirt and shorts and he's dancing on stage to the Grateful Dead. Frankly, that I'll tell you 2 stories that that I want to be in a country with senators dance in tie dye T-shirts at at grateful they chose this this is. I agree.

1:09:09 So, so Pat and Barbara Boxer, who was our, you know, she was from Marin County, where the band is from. And we knew her a little bit. And they invite us to lunch at the Senate Dining Room. And we, we go, you know, chore. And we, we sit down. And of course, there's a buzz in the room when Jerry walks in because people recognize him. And far across the room is Strom Thurmond, the senator from the 19th century. I mean, this is a guy who led the Dixiecrats in 1948. And, and, you know, just a barbarian. But you know, senators, politicians love meeting celebrities because there's always a possibility they can get something out of them.

1:09:58 You know, like, oh, well, you do a benefit for me. So, and in fact, the Mickey did with, with Nancy Pelosi, they have still actually good buddies. And and Sean Thurman had been eating first. So and I can see him lean over when we came in, I saw him lean over to one of his younger staffers saying who basically who's that? And the guy explains, So as he comes out, he comes, he comes over to our table and everybody's polite and standing up because, you know, you're polite. And Strom goes to Jerry and sticks out of his hand and says, I understand you're the leader of this, your organization. And Jerry's going, well, I don't know about that senator, but they, you know, he's polite.

1:10:44 And he shakes his hand and they go on. And I'm just sitting there thinking, you know, there's Jerry from the 21st century and, and Strom Thurmond from the 19th century. And they meet in the Senate dining room. It was just utterly bizarre. Here's another one that's that's just as bizarre. So Pat Leahy's dancing on stage and I happen to be standing next to the stage stairs and a runner comes down from the, the, the, the office of the stadium. This is in, in DC and says, you know, is Senator Leahy here? I said, yeah.

1:11:25 He said, well, there's a message for him. I said, fine, you know, I'll take it. And I gave it to him. He says, do you have a phone? And I and I said, oh, sure, by then, no cell phones. But by then, literally we had a phone hardwired onto our stage because we had to have it. And I, so I go up to our stage manager and say, could Senator use your phone? He says sure. So he calls what turns out to be the Secretary of State. And it turns out that this is now President Clinton. President Clinton has just decided to bomb, I think it was Libya, but whatever it was, you know, and he had to tell by, by custom, something Trump doesn't do by custom. You tell, I think they call it the Gang of Eight, which is the, the speaker and the head of the intelligence committee of both or the, you know, of both houses. What you've done.

1:12:31 You don't have to ask for permission, but you have to tell them. So I'm on the I'm standing there and, and what I hear is, is Patrick saying, well, the conversation and he obviously he filled me in on on the other end. And the conversation goes after a while, the Secretary of State says, you know, it's really loud there. And Pat said, yeah, that thing, he's the opening act. I'm, I'm at this concert and, you know, Sting, who, who, who Sting, who's grateful that, you know, the Secretary of State has no clue, but he's finally he says, can you, do you have a minute for the president?

1:13:12 Yes. So the president and tells him, and obviously the president is a little, you know, is a little hipper and a little more knowledgeable about music. Anyway, they hang up and Pat turns to me and tells me all this. And I'm standing there and I'm thinking, you know, right now there's people at the CIA, obviously, and there's people in the Pentagon. And, you know, they know about all this. But, you know, very few. You know, Madam, now in half an hour, everybody's going to know about this. They'll make an announcement. But at the moment, I'm one of 100 people. And it's like, what?

1:13:54 And that was that's working. Now that is an example of what it was like working for the Grateful Dead. We call that a glitch in the matrix. You know, in some. Oh, the Matrix was permanently glitched around the Grateful Dead. We called it synchronicity. Things happened that had no business happening and you know, that was what life was like. What was the fire? The fire in the mountain and the volcano erupting around the same time incident that was in the 78 OR. Around that, it was in 1980, it's true, the Grateful Dead were playing in Portland, OR. They started playing Fire on the Mountain.

1:14:36 And in the middle of God's truth, in the middle of Fire in the Mountain, Mount Saint Helens erupted. And you know. Yeah, it's crazy. There's no explanation for that, and correlation is not, but it was a very strange. No, no, but it's weird. Yeah, it's, oh, it's a weird. You have to understand that weird was a very positive adjective in the world of a dreadful dead. Sure, sure. We were weird. We knew we were weird. Can I, can I ask, and I guess this would be one of our last questions before you wrap up, what in your opinion kind of did Jerry in? I know that you said, I know that you there's a couple of avenues you take in the book.

1:15:26 Maybe it's, you know, stardom. Maybe it was all the pressure. Maybe it was, it was obviously heroin was not great, you know, by any stretch. Well, remember, you know, no, let's let's be clear. Like to be like a superstar. He did not want to be a superstar. He wanted to have fun. The heroin probably kept him going before before you, you know, label that it was a sedative that that kept him coping. The fact is that he died of a heart attack because he didn't take care of himself. I mean, all of the things that every guy over 40 learns you, you, you know, you have to watch away. You have to exercise a little.

1:16:08 You have blah, blah, blah. And he, you know, he never quit smoking cigarettes and, you know, and he was a raging diabetic and, and that led to a heart attack. And, you know, he he didn't want to take responsibility. And you could do a very deep psychoanalysis that I am not qualified to do. I think the obvious, you know, one of the obvious things is, you know, being treated as special when he didn't, you know, really want to be. And I'll tell you once, well, let's close on one story. Please. I was sitting in the lobby of one of the, I think it's the Marriott's, but whatever, it's a hotel with a glass elevator on the inside.

1:16:57 So you can see who's in the elevator. I was on, you know, on the floor of the lobby. And the lobby came up from the basement where the gym was, and it stopped at our level and I could see Jerry and he was alone in the in the elevator. And I could watch him tense as the doors opened because he was assuming that they were going to be a gaggle of dead heads. And they were going. And it turned out to be my wife, who was an old friend of his. And so I could watch him relax. You know, it was, it was quite a transition. She gets in there chit chatting or not it didn't, you know. And they go up to another floor and same, you know, same tents. And he, the door opens and there's three Latina maids who don't know him, don't care.

1:17:50 And, you know, and then, yeah, the point being that that it was hard. He couldn't go to museums. The nicest thing I ever did for the Grateful Dead was I arranged an hour alone with his major Monet exhibit, travelling exhibit in Chicago. And you know, and they, I mean, they Jerry in particular, I mean, he loved his art. And you know, he couldn't, he couldn't go to the Field Museum. I mean, they, the museum, the Art Institute, I mean, you know, he'd be glommed onto it so. Yeah.

1:18:30 That, you know, it's deeper stuff than just fame, but fame certainly didn't help. I bet, I bet, I bet, I bet Dennis, I am so grateful for your time and I'm so grateful that you got back to me and I'm even more grateful for your work. I think your work is I mean, I know that every single time I talk to a dead anyone that knows anything about the Grateful Dead, I mentioned your name, I mentioned your book. It's the it's the Bible for for that community. So you know, aside from the other great and the other great work that you've done and you know, as you dive into, I just want to say I really appreciate everything you've done. This is incredible.

1:19:11 And this is such it's such AI have not been more excited to do a podcast with with any guests more than I was excited for today. And I really, really appreciate your time, Dennis. Thank you so much. You're entirely welcome. I, I hope I I made it worthwhile. You take care. All the best, take care. Bye bye. Bye.