DENNIS MCNALLY

Dennis McNally, biógrafo y publicista de la banda durante más de veinte años, devuelve a los lectores al pasado valiéndose de la historia de los Grateful Dead. Mediante una narrativa caleidoscópica, no solo hace la cronica de sus experiencias, sino que vira, tomando caminos secundarios hacia el intrincado montaje escenico de la banda, extraidas de las conversaciones entre sus miembros. Desde 1965 hasta 1995, los Grateful Dead crecieron como una de las mas apreciadas, inusuales y complejas entidades musicales que jamas le fuera concedida a la cultura americana.

"A blockbuster of a biography . . . absolutely magnificent."--San Francisco Chronicle Jack Kerouac--"King of the Beats," unwitting catalyst for the 60s counterculture, groundbreaking author--was a complex and compelling man: a star athlete with a literary bent; a spontaneous writer vilified by the New Critics but adored by a large, youthful readership; a devout Catholic but aspiring Buddhist; a lover of freedom plagued by crippling alcoholism.Desolate Angel follows Kerouac from his childhood in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, to his early years at Columbia where he met Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, beginning a four-way friendship that would become a sociointellectual legend. In rich detail and with sensitivity, Dennis McNally recounts Kerouacs frenetic cross-country journeys, his experiments with drugs and sexuality, his travels to Mexico and Tangier, the sudden fame that followed the publication of On the Road, the years of literary triumph, and the final near-decade of frustration and depression. Desolate Angel is a harrowing, compassionate portrait of a man and an artist set in an extraordinary social context. The metamorphosis of America from the Great Depression to the Kennedy administration is not merely the backdrop for Kerouacs life but is revealed to be an essential element of his art . . . for Kerouac was above all a witness to his exceptional times.

"McNally masterfully combines many disparate lineages of political, social, art, and pop history into one singular, sweeping portrait. The result is a stunning vision of a broad and powerful idealism that gripped the world for more than two decades."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) From the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Strange Trip and the publicist of the Grateful Dead, a riveting social history of everything that led up to the 1960s counterculture movement. Few cities represent the countercultural movement of the 1960s more than San Francisco. By that decade, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was home to self-branded freaks (dubbed hippies by the media) who created the worlds first psychedelic neighborhoodan alchemical chamber for social transformation. They rejected a large part of the traditional American identity, passing over American exceptionalism, consumerism, misogyny, and militarism in favor of creativity, mind-body connection, peace, and love of all things.The Last Great Dream is a history of everything that led to the 1960s counterculture, when long-simmering resistance to American mainstream values birthed the hippie. It begins with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, peaks with the Human Be-in in Golden Gate Park, and ends with the Monterey Pop Festival that introduced Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin to the world. It tells of several micro-histories, including beat poetry, visual arts, underground publishing, electronic/contemporary compositional music, experimental theater, psychedelics, and more. Fascinating and definitive, The Last Great Dream is the ultimate guide to a generation-defining countercultural movementan Underground 101 course for newcomers and aficionados alike.

On Highway 61 explores the historical context of the significant social dissent that was central to the cultural genesis of the sixties. The book is going to search for the deeper roots of American cultural and musical evolution for the past 150 years by studying what the Western European culture learned from African American culture in a historical progression that reaches from the minstrel era to Bob Dylan. The book begins with Americas first great social critic, Henry David Thoreau, and his fundamental source of social philosophy:his profound commitment to freedom, to abolitionism and to AfricanAmerican culture. Continuing with Mark Twain, through whom we can observe the rise of minstrelsy, which he embraced, and his subversive satirical masterpiece Huckleberry Finn. While familiar, the book places them into a newly articulated historical reference that shines new light and reveals a progression that is much greater than the sum of its individual parts. As the first postCivil War generation of black Americans came of age, they introduced into the national culture a trio of musical formsragtime, blues, and jazz that would, with their derivations, dominate popular music to this day. Ragtime introduced syncopation and become the cutting edge of the modern 20th century with popular dances. The blues would combine with syncopation and improvisation and create jazz. Maturing at the hands of Louis Armstrong, it would soon attract a cluster of young white musicians who came to be known as the Austin High Gang, who fell in love with black music and were inspired to play it themselves. In the process, they developed a liberating respect for the diversity of their city and country, which they did not see as exotic, but rather as art. It was not long before these young white rebels were the masters of American pop music big band Swing.As Bop succeeded Swing, and Rhythm and Blues followed, each had white followers like the Beat writers and the first young rock and rollers. Even popular white genres like the country music of Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter Family reflected significant black influence. In fact, the theoretical separation of American music by race is not accurate. This biracial fusion achieved an apotheosis in the early work of Bob Dylan, born and raised at the northern end of the same Mississippi River and Highway 61 that had been the birthplace of much of the black music he would study.As the book reveals, the connection that began with Thoreau and continued for over 100 years was a cultural evolution where, at first individuals, and then larger portions of society, absorbed the culture of those at the absolute bottom of the power structure, the slaves and their descendants, and realized that they themselves were not free.

The complete history of one of the most long-lived and legendary bands in rock history, written by its official historian and publicista must-have chronicle for all Dead Heads, and for students of rock and the 1960s counterculture. From 1965 to 1995, the Grateful Dead flourished as one of the most beloved, unusual, and accomplished musical entities to ever grace American culture. The creative synchronicity among Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, and Ron Pigpen McKernan exploded out of the artistic ferment of the early sixties roots and folk scene, providing the soundtrack for the Dionysian revels of the counterculture. To those in the know, the Dead was an ongoing tour de force: a band whose constant commitment to exploring new realms lay at the center of a thirty-year journey through an ever-shifting array of musical, cultural, and mental landscapes. Dennis McNally, the bands historian and publicist for more than twenty years, takes readers back through the Deads history in A Long Strange Trip. In a kaleidoscopic narrative, McNally not only chronicles their experiences in a fascinatingly detailed fashion, but veers off into side trips on the bands intricate stage setup, the magic of the Grateful Dead concert experience, or metaphysical musings excerpted from a conversation among band members. He brings to vivid life the Deads early days in late-sixties San Franciscoan era of astounding creativity and change that reverberates to this day. Here we see the group at its most raw and powerful, playing as the house band at Ken Keseys acid tests, mingling with such legendary psychonauts as Neal Cassady and Owsley Bear Stanley, and performing the alchemical experiments, both live and in the studio, that produced some of their most searing and evocative music. But McNally carries the Deads saga through the seventies and into the more recent years of constant touring and incessant musical exploration, which have cemented a unique bond between performers and audience, and created the business enterprise that is much more a family than a corporation. Written with the same zeal and spirit that the Grateful Dead brought to its music for more than thirty years, the book takes readers on a personal tour through the bands inner circle, highlighting its frenetic and very human faces. A Long Strange Trip is not only a wide-ranging cultural history, it is a definitive musical biography.