I recently conducted an interview Fred Tackett of Little Feat, and got tickets to their show at the Paramount Theatre in Rutland on May 5th. It all happened because of their publicist Dennis McNally. I didn’t know who Dennis was, but my friend Annie Sullivan questioned if he was the same guy from the Grateful Dead fame?
A Google search confirmed they were one in the same. Dennis started being the Grateful Dead’s biographer in 1980, and publicist in 1984. We had been emailing, and I said to him, “You have had quite the musical experiences in life.” He replied, “I’ve been at it for a while, yes.” In 2002, he published the New York Times best seller “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead”. Last Tuesday (May 13, 2025), his latest book “The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties” was released. He sent me his latest, and I’ll be honest, I haven’t read a book in years but I’m really looking forward to reading this. It’s available in all the better independent bookstores, Amazon, plus information can be found on his website dennismcnally.com.
Dennis has been Little Feat’s publicist for about 10 years. The last manager of the GD, Cameron Sears, and his partner John Scher became LF’s managers. As Dennis put it, “I came along for the ride.” His ride with the Dead lasted until 2004, when GD’s production shut down.
While Dennis was in Graduate School at UMass Amherst in 1977, he wrote a book on Jack Kerouac (Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation & America). He said, “I wrote it for a lot of different reasons. The guy who encouraged that was sort of a big deadhead. In the course of researching that, he took me to my first show, gave me my first hit, and I started becoming a deadhead. There’s obvious connections between Kerouac and the Grateful Dead, not the least of them being Neal Cassady would pose as Dean Moriarty in “On the Road” (a Jack Kerouac novel). Cassady was hanging out with Ken Kesey during the acid tests, the early days of the GD. I wanted this to be my second book. A very long story later, I met Jerry (Garcia). It turned out “On the Road” had been Jerry’s bible, as a young man. Eventually he said, “Why don’t you write a book about us?”. I thought that sounded like a nice idea, which I had wanted to do for 5 years.” That’s how Dennis became involved with the Dead.
After Jerry died, Dennis finished the Grateful Dead book which came out in 2002. His next book “On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom” was a deep background of the relationship between white people and black music, and how it affected white values. Dennis said, “Which is to say, it opened them up and got things going.”
In 2016, the 50th anniversary of “The Summer of Love”, Dennis was invited by the California Historical Society to create a photo exhibit on it. Dennis said, “All the museums in the Bay area were excited about the anniversary. I said sure, that was fun. About halfway into it, I realized that’s a book. That was my usual 10 years ago. I started working on that, and now I’m done! It spread, it’s not just the Bay area, it also involves LA, NY, and London. It ends at the Monterey Pop Festival.”
I grew up on folk music, my Mom ran a Pub in the 70’s that featured that on the weekends. Dennis said, “Folk music, and the folk scene was very much a part of the evolution of what would become hippie. Music became sort of the underlining explanation for everything, amongst youth. The end result was that, plus LSD, and you had what ended up becoming the San Francisco scene.”
Dennis loved that scene, but only until it got commercialized, and publicized. He said, “The Fall of 66 was really the Summer of Love. For starters because SF is really warmer in the Fall, we have our Summer in the Fall. The scene in 66 was marvelous. It’s everything you read out, think about, and imagine. Then what happened is they had a party to celebrate it called the “Be- In” in January of 67. It attracted thousands more people than anyone could’ve imagined. Suddenly there’s the tidal wave of media that are interested in what’s going on. All the word was in May, as soon as school’s out, every college or high school kid in America is coming to SF. As a result it was more of a scuffle than this benign thing. My book ends at the Monterey Pop Festival in June 67 because to me that’s sort of the high water mark, as I described it. The whole idea of people with flowers in their hair, happy, listening to the music, very high, very mild, and very wonderful, and it was really like that for 4 days in Monterey. It was something very exceptional. Then unfortunately the realities of having too many people in one place, at one time, complicated matters.”
Dennis does have some spots he’ll be hitting with his book, so please check out his website for that info. He said he has so much work with Little Feat, they have a new album coming out, he hasn’t had time for his book, lately but that will be something he’ll be focusing on soon.
I’ve always been interested in the music of the sixties and seventies, and really that whole scene. Dennis said, “Let me tell you why you’re interested. The thing that dawns on people after a while, about the sixties, is they never went away. The peace movement didn’t win, in terms of politics, but it helped slow the war down. What did happen is it won culturally. If you eat organic food, do yoga, study zen, worry about the environment, care about gay people having rights, etc. That all derives from the sixties. It’s still real, except of course we have a President who’s against all that so it’s a little more complicated but there it was.”
Dennis’ favorite era of the GD is 1969, and his favorite song is “Dark Star”. He said, “They’d play 45 minutes of it, before they even sang. It’s not like any other rock song. It’s deeply contemplative, in a weird American way.”
Dennis ended with saying, “It’s been long, it’s been strange, and it’s definitely been a trip.”
To submit an article an article or review, or to just say hello hit us at [email protected]
Also- check out the search feature in the upper right hand corner and search for your favorite artist, event, venue or genre. You’ll be surprised at what you find!
Check out the Live Music News and Review.com Facebook page for updates and announcements.
