A Long Strange Trip: The History of the Grateful Dead DM Dennis McNally  - Aug. 2002 Dennis has been the Grateful Dead's official historian and publicist since 1980, his long strange path followed naturally from making Jack Kerouac the focus of his Ph.D. history studies and deciding to make  the acquaintance of the Grateful Dead as the next step in his career as an author.  As a practical matter he was the press agent whose job was to filter and spin information. Dennis and his wife Susana Millman have lived in the SF Mission District since 1989   http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column79a.html Desolate Angel , subtitled A Biography, Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation and America , was Dennis's doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Paul Krassner called Desolate Ange , "The Roots of the Hippie Generation."  "The actual choice of Kerouac came about for a couple of reasons: one intellectual and two practical. He was chronologically my immediate forbearer — in the ’50s I read On the Road — and I was consciously resisting the flattening effects of the academic world by looking for something that was outside the conventional culture to study. Kerouac seemed appropriate."  said McNally, "At that time, my parents lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts which is 20 miles from Lowell, where Kerouac was from," he added. Eight months later, McNally attended his first Grateful Dead concert and came to realize that his study of American history was really a two-volume set: the first covering the ’40s and ’50s in relation to Jack Kerouac, the second covering the ’60s and ’70s through the world of the Grateful Dead. "Because I’m slow, I rang in twenty extra years just for fun," he quipped. Dennis McNally: Jerry 'would stay painfully confused about himself and women for all his days' Of course the progression is a natural one, given that On the Road was an extremely influential book to Jerry Garcia’s life. As such, it was McNally’s first volume on Kerouac — Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America, ich will be reissued in early 2003 — that provided the introduction he needed to get close to the band. "As Louis Sullivan [Frank Lloyd Wright's mentor] would have said, form follows function. Originally, I came up with the idea of 64 chapters for the I Ching. But because you don’t force things into a framework, I eliminated some because they didn’t make sense any more. But that basic structure — those things sitting together and evolving — fell out even then." Review at musicbox-online.com by John Metzger was source of above quotes

"Dennis McNally knows the Grateful Dead as intimately as they know themselves. His historian's eye, his immersion as a Dead 'family member,' and his crazed hippie heart have made this the book to read about the life, times, and twisted, double-helix road of the band's evolution. It's a great read." -Peter Coyote

 The Dead stands for something -- it stands for a cosmic sense of humor, for a spirit of adventure, for compassion for our fellow beings, for skepticism, for some honesty...
 An online interview with Dennis McNally 
Sept. 19, 1995, with Geoff Gould

The admitted Deadhead  and a veteran journalist, painstakingly details every musical turn that the Dead took and discusses every side project Garcia embarked on openly offers connections between Garcia's drug use and his music when they prove appropriate.

• "His guitar style was the sum of a million influences, yet it was distinctive enough that his playing was instantly recognizable, no matter what the genre,"
•  "There was nothing he liked more than playing music in a band in front of dancing people. He didn't care if the group was acoustic or electric or if the audience was large or small -- it was all about hearts and souls coming together through music; ecstatic communion and transformative epiphanies."
•  "The hippie counterculture of the Dead came to symbolize the best and worst aspects of the libertine movement, from the communal spirit and healthy disrespect for the capitalist paradigm to the dangerous hedonism and unconscious self-absorption,"
• "Another interesting phenomenon that became much more noticeable in the early '80s was the number of older Deadheads, many of them successful professionals, who went on tour with the Dead,often staying in luxury hotels and eating in fine restaurants along the way. For these white-collar Deadheads, going to shows became a way to get in touch with a freer, looser, some might say more authentic version of themselves. By the late '80s there were thousands of people in this category who found ways to juggle their busy work schedule to periodically take a week's vacation away from the law firm or computer company or hospital to follow a Dead tour to a few cities. They'd go back to their workplaces tired but with their souls enriched and their spirits replenished, and most of them firmly believed it made them better, happier workers." (p. 317)

RS Jerry Garcia interview at 30 years old

"Garcia was just thirty-one years old but already viewed--to his lasting dismay--as a social avatar for the new sensibility sweeping the land, an anarchist streak with a populist undercurrent that had roots in Ken Kesey's pranksters, the writers of the Beat Generation, and the libertine tradition of the American transcendentalists. In this interview, Garcia reveals how he is a combination of these and other influences, a high-school dropout and autodidact blessed with a gift for eloquent turns of phrase and a refreshing directness. He speaks of the saga of the Grateful Dead and his hoodlum youth growing up in San Francisco's Mission district.

Greenfield, who co-wrote rock impresario Bill Graham's oral autobiography, My Life Inside Rock and Out (LJ 9/1/92), gained access to virtually all of the people who knew Garcia intimately except the band members and employees.

"It was not LSD or the sixties that made Jerry Garcia who he was," writes Greenfield. "Jerry was always Jerry. Seemingly, he came into the world not only fully formed, but, as Bruce Springsteen once sang, with 'the diamond-hard look of a cobra.' That never changed. In his beginning may well have been his end. More importantly, both were always cloaked in mystery, perhaps even to him."

"Dark Star I thought was at least pretty accurate, but it was done right after Jerry's death, so sex and drugs were 90% of the topics -- it almost forgets that he played music." Dennis McNally

Dark Star
Richard Gehr reviews "Dark Star: for salon.com

http://www.levity.com/gans/SFFocus.html
David Gans and Robert Greenfield TWO WRITERS - BOTH INSIDERS IN THE GRATEFUL DEAD COMMUNITY - DISCUSS THE TROUBLE BEHIND THE LATE JERRY GARCIA.