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Dennis McNally (3:16)

We're getting back to all of it, and the best way to start is together.

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Buzz Knight (4:37)

Taking a walk Dennis McNally welcome to taking a Walk. It is so great to be with you right now.

Dennis McNally (4:43)

My pleasure.

Buzz Knight (4:44)

Buzz we're almost together. We're not really in person together, which we, we love that.

Dennis McNally (4:49)

But well, you know, I just, just yesterday in a Zoom meeting had a friend started, you know, pondering the difference between knowing people by Zoom and, and, or the experience of relating to people on Zoom rather than face to face. And there are things about Zoom that are almost, you know, preferable. So I and given, you know, all that's happened in the last five years, just in terms of COVID and then everything else, it's just very, it's, it's amazing how this digital connection has become such an essential part of our lives. And I don't mind it. Although clearly face to face is preferable.

Buzz Knight (5:38)

It always is preferable. I think of how Jeffrey Toobin still has a job after being on Zoom, but we don't have to go there to see any. We could leave that alone. So anyway, since the podcast, Dennis, is called Taking a Walk. Before we get to talking about the Last Great Dream, which I'm so excited for you to have created this and released this. Since we call the podcast Taking a Walk, is there somebody that you would like to take a walk with, living or dead? And who would that be? And where might you want to go with them?

Dennis McNally (6:14)

Wow, I haven't gotten that question before. Usually I can hit auto reply. Well, one impulse is my mother, who died when I was 11, and I sure would like to, you know, have a nice chat with her. I have so many questions that, you know, only an adult could think of. But also, I. I'm a practicing Buddhist, and the man who brought Zen to Japan, Dogen Zenji. You know, if we could have an instantaneous translator somehow, for medieval Japanese into modern English, he is one of the most creative spiritual poets in world history. And he'd make for an interesting walk, say, around downtown Kyoto, which, by the way, it's the place I really want to go. And everything I read now is how tourists have completely overrun Japan. I may be a little too late on that one.

Buzz Knight (7:24)

This seems to happen a lot. The tourists ruin everything, don't they? I mean, really.

Dennis McNally (7:29)

I live in San Francisco. What can I say? That's right.

Buzz Knight (7:32)

Well, congratulations on the last great dream. I think it's marvelous, and it's particularly, I think, resonating at the times that we're in. That's just my opinion, but we'll get into it. What was your, you know, just the initial light bulb moment that was the inspiration that told you it was the time for this book. Book.

Dennis McNally (7:55)

Well, as you know, I, you know, I did a book about Jack Kerouac and in the process became a deadhead and, long story short, became the biographer for the Grateful Dead. And then eventually, because of. It took me. It took me double time because usually it takes me about 10 years to write a book. In this case, it took 20 because I became the publicist, and you can't do both at the same time. So that came out. And then I did this book about this sort of deeper background called on Highway 61. So anyway, in 2016, the very nice woman at the California Historical Society who's now at the Smithsonian, Anthea, asked me. They were anticipating the 20. The 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love in 2017. All the. All the museums and, you know, in the library, the whatnot, were going to do some event. So she asked me to curate a photo show about the. The, you know, the. The Summer of Love. And I said, sure. And oh, I don't know. I. A month, two months into the, the research project process, which was hilarious, good fun. It was basically a treasure hunt. I had to track down photographers and then track down their heirs and you know, but it was, you know, I had an idea in the, in the immortal words of. I don't know if it was Rod Store, Rod Stewart himself, but whoever created the phrase every picture tells a story. I went, you know, that's easy. I mean, I know the story I want to tell and so let's get the illustrations. And did. And after a couple, three months, I suddenly went, bozo, it's a book. And I sort of went, yeah, right, this is. And then much later, still contrary to some people who went, oh, you knew this all along? I went, no. You know, I'm like kind of dense on some level. It occurred to me that really it's, it's the, you know, the last chapter of a four chapter project that sort of rounds out my self appointed role, I guess as the historian of the American counterculture since World War II in particular. So the last great dream is the, the biggest surprise I got in researching it was simply that, that nobody done it before because there's all kinds of books about the summer of love, but they all start in like the mid-60s. And I was sort of curious as to, well, where did this come from? And I, I decided that it started with poets in the 1940s, kind of a combination of anarchism and mysticism. And then there were student. The San Francisco, what became known as the San Francisco Art Institute, which at that time was called the California School of Fine Arts in North beach in San Francisco was in a really interesting period post World War II. It had almost closed because the war had taken away all its students. And thankfully the GI Bill, not everybody wanted to use it to buy a house or go to some conventional college. A lot of people wanted to study art and it worked for them. And these people tended to be the kind of adventurous people who were ready to leave behind conventional values and conventional society. And they became really one of the primary sources for what we would later come to call beats the beatniks. But in the 40s there were just bohemians. They were just people who, who, as I say, you know, stepped aside from conventional roles and mostly pursued art and love, which is, you know, the practical effect of Bohemia. The story starts there. Actually, I'm going to jump ahead and tell one specific story because in some ways it really sums up the whole book. Which is one of those people at the Art Institute was a guy named Wally Hedrick, very well known beat assemblage artist and big deal in that world. He taught at the Institute. He taught Saturday art to high school kids. In 1958, one of his students was a young man from the Mission District of San Francisco named Jerry Garcia. Wally played Big Bill, Brunzy and other, you know, African American blues, acoustic music while they painted. And the end result of that was that when Garcia's mother gave him a. An accordion for his birthday, he pissed and moaned and screamed and cried and eventually got himself a guitar, which really is the end of his biography. The rest is just more guitar. But in addition, he and his buddy said to Wally, what is the. You know, this is 1958, this, he's 16. This is, this is a time when beat is on the front pages and in the book, on the bestseller list. And they said to. To Wally, you know, what is this Beat thing? You know, And Wally said, you guys are beat. Go down to City Lights and get this book on the road and you'll find out. And Jerry did, and it was his bible for the rest of his life. And that is why I, you know, I'd written a book about Kerouac. And when he saw it, he liked, you know, he happened to like it. Thank you. And eventually said, why don't you do us. Why don't you write a book about the Grateful Dead? Which I said, good idea.

Buzz Knight (13:52)

I love it. Thank you for sharing that. It's amazing.

Dennis McNally (13:55)

Yeah.

Buzz Knight (13:56)

So why do you think the story, though, of how you made reference to this, of how hippie came to be, kind of eluded serious historical research until now?

Dennis McNally (14:09)

Well, the problem with hippie, they, you know, maybe a thousand people, all of whom were well into their 20s and were working in the arts in some fashion, whether it was as poets or as painters or. Or a lot, of course, a lot of music, too, took refuge in the hate. It was a very inexpensive neighborhood, which is the virtue of all neighborhoods where, where people want to, you know, practice art because, you know, it's not usually financially successful. And it went very well. They, they, you know, it was a psychedelic neighborhood. They all, almost all did psychedelic drugs and experimented with social freedom, with, with, you know, free love, as. As it was once called, with challenge, you know, anti materialism and challenging the standard way you're supposed to act as, as an American. So it went extremely well. So well, in fact, that they planned a party to celebrate it. And that was called the Be in and unfortunately, the be in attracted 50,000 people. And suddenly what was going on in the hate, which had been very under, under the radar, just, you know, nobody paid any particular attention to it. San Francisco has a tradition of tolerance for crazy. And there was, there just wasn't much of a problem. And in fact, on the day of the bn, the total security allotment for the San Francisco Police Department were two cops on horseback who were like watching the, you know, watching this. And to illustrate their attitude, I might add, a lady walked up to them and begged them for help in finding she'd lost her child. And the cop replied, go down to the stage, ask them to make an announcement. They'll help you. That's, you know, you won't have any problems. He said, but lady, we can't go down there. They're smoking pot. And you know, so obviously they were not what you call confrontational. That of course, blew their cover. And really everything that happened after that was sort of a holding action because the general assumption was that somewhere between one and a quarter, 100,000 and a quarter million people, kids, kids, high school kids, college kids, people without a lot of resources, whether financial or just life, you know, flexibility, people who would need to be taken care of. And they, they spent the spring, you know, anticipating that. And nobody really knows how many people came in the summer, but it was too many and it kind of ruined it as a neighborhood. But in the, in the, in the end, you know, the ideas of what was going on there went out and it involved things like. It probably helped somewhat with anti war efforts, the Vietnam War. But after that it was cultural, not political. And what they did was organic food is now a $40 billion a year business. And it, the. These issues, I mean, these issues had preceded it, but, but the 60s and the hate brought them up, you know, to a much more, you know, brought them to the forefront. So you have things like organic food, you have, well, the peace movement in general, challenges to cultural stereotypes. Like the whole idea of the gentle male hippie, which is the first time anybody had ever like gone out of their way to, to suggest that, you know, guys could. Didn't have to be punching each other out. And, and that I would argue led aided feminism, which was emerging just after. In the. More in the late 60s and into the 70s and gay rights. And, you know, it wasn't an accident that just a few years after the hate, you know, every gay guy in, in Kansas said, I think San Francisco might be more fun to live in. And another example which people don't realize. And I, I. There's a wonderful book which I recommend to you by a man named John Markoff called what the Dormouse Said. And it is about the psychedelic history of Silicon Valley. There's a reason why, why the, the home computer, the, the individual based computer comes from Silicon Valley rather than because all jokes aside, there was a history of people doing LSD which created an interest in things that were more individual than the sort of IBM giant, you know, giant computer. And the two people that are most associated with this, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were part of a homebrew computer cub which was involved, among which all of whom had connections to lsd. So, you know, and there's lots, lots more. But the fact is that a great deal of what we, what we think of as an alternative culture, and I grant you at the moment it's not looking very good considering the current administration. But the fact is that it's not surprising either the current administration to go back. Just a brief history lesson. Ronald Reagan got elected governor in 1966 and then president in 1980 by running on an anti hippie, anti free speech movement and anti Watts rebellion, anti black, frankly, you know, campaign. And there's a through line from Reagan to Donald Trump, Donald Trump's, shall we say, somewhat more nuts, just more overt and pretty, pretty wild than Reagan. But the politics which are to return control of the government to the white male elite, which is in a larger sense what it's about, is exactly in opposition to the 60s. If you read my book, as I hope everybody will, that they can see the values that were generated there and how they're still real. It's just, well, things would be a little different if somebody else had won the election, but that's another story.

Buzz Knight (20:57)

And I think all you described is one of the many reasons why your book is really resonating at this time, for sure because of the times that we, that we certainly live in. We'll be back with more of the Taking a Walk podcast in a bit. Now, if you're looking for a rock and roll oriented podcast, we invite you to check out the Imbalanced History of Rock and Roll. The history is fascinating. There's so much to uncover. The Imbalanced History of Rock and Roll explores moments in time, albums, songs, events and people who had an impact on the history of rock and roll that keep Rock and roll fun. The Imbalanced History of Rock and Roll. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of Taking a Walk is brought to you by Chase Sapphire Reserve Whether I'm booking my next vacation or going to a concert, Chase Sapphire Reserve is my gateway to the world's most captivating destinations. Travel is one of the most precious things in my life and the memories of each of the experiences live on forever. Chase Sapphire Reserve allows me to travel with ease with a 300 travel credit and access to a curated collection of hotels through the edit. So no matter where I'm walking, travel is more rewarding with Chase Sapphire Reserve. Discover more with Chase sapphire reserve@chase.com Sapphire Reserve cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank Naomi Member FDIC subject to credit approval terms apply this Labor Day.

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Dennis McNally (24:05)

Good morning, welcome to Today.

Today Show Host (24:07)

From back to school to tackling your to do list, the Today show is your best start to the day. It's a new season and every morning we're here to help you take it.

Ryan Seacrest (24:16)

All along as the forecast calls for.

Today Show Host (24:19)

Football all across the country, Blockbuster stars Live concerts and so much more. Wake up to where it's all happening.

Dennis McNally (24:26)

We're getting back to all of it and the best way to start is together.

Today Show Host (24:30)

Watch the Today show Weekday mornings at 7am on NBC.

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Today Show Host (25:39)

Welcome back to the Taking a Walk podcast.

Buzz Knight (25:42)

I want to talk about the deep research that I know that you always do and whether you had surprises, certain revelations, overlooked characters, maybe that, that showed up that you hadn't necessarily thought of or realized.

Dennis McNally (26:02)

The, the big surprise. I had two surprises. One, of course, was that nobody had done this before. I, I really, I kept waiting to find a book that was going to, you know, look at some of the origins of all this because everybody, you know, tended to start in like the mid-60s. The other is San Francisco in particular. The book touches a lot on la, New York and London and each of those places were very receptive. But kind of the creator of this impulse was particularly San Francisco. Psychedelics had a lot to do with it. Psychedelics are something that, that really resonate with nature. And San Francisco, you can stand on Haight street and you're looking at Golden Gate park and there's Mount Tam, you know, across the way. It's, it's, it's an appropriate place for that. New York City to me is not, I mean, you know, the, the, the, the biggest nature for the, for the, you know, Greenwich Village area is Tompkins Square park. And that's, you know, that's not too much nature. But at any rate, for me, the surprise was I started without anything particularly in mind and Then I mean, I just started looking and fairly quickly I went on, as I say, the poets and then some art students. And then as time went along into the 50s, there was theater, there was dance. A woman named Anne Halperin. There was this wonderful place called the Tate Music center, which involved electronic music. You know, sort of bleeps and blurps and not something that's generally very popular. But the thing is it invited. They had, they opened up a building for their work and they brought in the dancers and kpfa and it, it created an energy that was way more. I mean, you know, not many people are going to get into heavy duty electronic music, but the energy went way beyond that. And what happened was through the late 50s and into the early 60s, you can't. You constantly get this blending where you'd have an event in which you'd have, you know, painters maybe on the walls, and then you'd have music, you know, local musicians playing strange music. There's a classic example is, is an event that the Mime troupe, which would go on to, to have a lot to do when they got arrested with the development of the rock culture in San Francisco. And the Mime troop sponsored this event. And they had, they had the painters, they had an early progenitor of the light shows they had and you know, people like Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead, later of the Grateful Dead, this is five years before who's, you know, playing a little trumpet and just mostly there. And he's not even sure why he's there, except it was an experiment in consciousness and improvisational music, which at the time he wasn't really an improvisational musician so much. But of course it turned out that he had a talent for that and would go on to a very distinguished career. And that was the surprise. There's this, these wonderful events in which the full span of odd, you know, of oddball avant garde art would come together and instead of being siloed, as the current phrase has it, they would consciously reach out to each other and say, let's do something. And the end result was when you do that and you have all these artists running around and then you stir in some lsd and people came to, to that experience pretty much with the same reaction. And then you throw in, you have all these. One of the elements was rock and roll was always part of all of this in the 50s. And then you've got folk, the folk music, which was overtly political from the beginning. And then you have all these folk musicians and they encounter LSD and the Beatles. And the end result is the San Francisco music scene which carried all those values implicitly or explicitly in either a benign and easy way like Jerry Garcia, or a more aggressive and in your face way like Paul Kantner and the Airplane. They, he loved to provoke the police. Paul, he liked, he liked to provoke people actually. But you have, you know, you have the, the end result is this hippie thing and it's, it's, it lives in the music. And that's why my book ends at Monterey Pop, which is sort of the high point where everything is fresh and new and quite wonderful. I, I wrote in the book and, and I, I think it's true one of the stereotypes and it is a stereotype because know, you know, it all this all came from media who took one look at the, the hippies and went, huh, you know, they, they just, they didn't get it. Literally, they just didn't get what was going on. All they knew, all they could tell was flowers and, you know, dreamy eyed girls in long dresses and whatnot. The end result was all these values got poured into the music. And at Monterey, what, you know, the stereotype was that, you know, the summer of love was beautiful young people with flowers in their hair, very high, listening to wonderful music and wrapped in blissful peacefulness. Well, at Monterey for four days it was, that was reality. It really was. And you know, you have this magical music which is going to change American music for the next 20 years. And I might add, you also had, speaking as someone who's worked with a band that had crowd control problems at times you had a potential crowd control problem where There were maybe 7,000 seats in the arena and there were probably 25,000 people on the grounds and nothing bad happened. And it could have been a spectacular mess. But the ambiance, the spirit of the 60s really held true. And people, if they couldn't get in, they just sat outside and listened. And by literally it was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And by Saturday afternoon the police chief of Monterey was sending his cops home. He had, you know, of course he had called all hands on deck on Friday. You know, with not only you've got hippies, but Hell's Angels coming into Monterey and the they're all. By Saturday it was obvious it wasn't a problem.

Buzz Knight (33:16)

The book is full of stories that captured the spirit of the artistic and social experimentation of the era. Is there one story in particular you can share that really sticks out, that captures what was going on there?

Dennis McNally (33:34)

Kinda one of them. And going back to you Know, getting surprised. So I read, okay, there's a guy named Hendrik Hertzberg. He, at least up until recently, I'm not sure if it's just this minute, but was the lead writer for the New. He would write the opening sentence in the article in the New Yorker for years, very, you know, important guy in American literary and political culture. In 1966, he was a cub reporter for Newsweek. And he went to the hate and poked around and for whatever reason, maybe it was his age, he completely got them. He understood what was going on. He didn't ever go, the boy, these people weird that every other reporter did. He was simpatico and. And if the new Newsweek had like, been smart enough to publish his notes, they would have had the best article about the, about the hippies ever. And, you know, I don't know whether it would have mattered much because, you know, the other. It's not as though the other writers were going to get enlightened, but the fact is that it's amazing. Now, the article that came out, as you know, I'm sure at Newsweek and Time magazine in those days, one person did the reporting or multiple persons, and one did the writing. And the right, the, you know, the writing was as. As not get it, you know, it was as though they barely read what his notes were because what they published was something that included things like that wearing a necklace meant you had taken lsd, things like that, silly things, a complete failure to understand, which is, you know, nor was normal for the media. And to me, that, that, that complete inability to understand that what the hippies were about as the beats before them was about a spiritual reawakening in America. And this isn't original. This goes all the way back to Thoreau, but the fact is, you got a depression, you've got a war, you've got a cold war. And because of the Cold War, you've got all this anxiety about Russian infiltration. Does that sound familiar? The price for the Prosperity of the 50s was conformity and keeping your mouth shut. Again, sound familiar? Don't criticize capitalism and, and what's going on because, you know, we're all making more money now, which was true. The money part. Suddenly you've got this group of people who are saying, you know, again, it's the same. The message ultimately is the same as, as the Beats, which is simply, there's more to life than just, you know, making money, buying a house, you know, being good little robots. The, the media could only see the. In general, except for Hendrik, I Swear could only see the obvious, which is they dress funny and they talk funny and you know, they're not behaving and so forth and so on. That's what got translated to, to the, the mass audience and it's a pity but having now in 2025 and particularly for my generation, which saw politically its high watermark at driving a corrupt and unconstitutional president out of office with the media, thanks to the media in 1974, we've been on a downhill slide since because we've got a media that's explicitly political, I. E. Fox News and, and instead of the media that sort of, you know, was the traditional guardians of liberty and, and you know, keeping people honest, you know, it's, it's you know, overtly cheerleaders and, and now it's because of news site, you know, the 24 hour news cycle 20 that, that's so out of date now. I don't know what is the instantaneous news cycle that we're living in in this case, you know, right now it's Epstein. I mean it's Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. And, and a president who's basically saying don't listen to them, don't listen to them. Which is interesting. This is kind of new and kind of over intense and you know, all of us are staring at our screens going what the heck is going on?

Buzz Knight (38:40)

We sure are. As you reflect, I want to close on this and have you think of the work you put into the last great dream and as you reflected on it, thinking of your life as well because you've lived through so many experiences that you write about. Is there anything you would say to younger Dennis McNally that you think would have been a key statement that would have done something significant for you?

Dennis McNally (39:19)

I'm not sure what I'd say to me back in the only depression I ever had in my life, serious depression I ever had in my life, was after the care. I identified it. It's a little bold because I am not a woman, but I identified it as postpartum depression. Name that I'd given birth to this seven year project, this, this book on Kerouac and I didn't know what I was going to do next and it took a year before I was invited to do the Grateful Dead book, which is what I wanted. So the point is I, I, I've been incredibly lucky in my life that the thing I wanted to do most was what I've done, which is these books and on the subjects, you know, that I wanted to write about. What would I tell myself I don't, you know, I got dumb about drugs when I was working in rock and roll. Duh. That makes me unique. But I, you know, that only lasted, you know, a couple years of, of stupidity. You know, I've had the work I wanted thanks to the Grateful Dead. I might met the wife I wanted to. She came with a 12 year old daughter, a biological daughter, who eventually we ended up adopting each other. So I got the family that I wanted. She has two sons, I have two grandsons who are in their teens now, our late teens, early 20s, going to college and you know, they're lovely people. I've lucked out. So I don't know what advice I apparently was doing something right. I wasn't very conscious. A lot of it was dumb luck. My intuition, for instance, that I could not, you know, approach the Grateful Dead and say, hi, I'd like to write a book about you. Because they would have said, sure, take a number. Or at least that's my. And then knowing what I know now, that's pretty much accurate. Now how I knew that, I don't know, I just did. And what, what I needed to do and what I ended up getting was I, I couldn't make, have the idea come from me. It had to come from them and eventually it did from Jerry. And thanks to the Kerouac book. So I lucked out. I, you know, as I say, I, I, you know, just keep on doing what you're doing. And most of the, you know, most of it worked out.

Buzz Knight (41:48)

That's a pretty darn good lesson right there when you think of it, you know, stick to it. Pick the people that you'd like to be working with or the subject matter that you'd be, you know, associated with and then pour your heart into your craft.

Dennis McNally (42:04)

And you know, that was pretty much it. You know, I, I committed to what I wanted to do and it was, you know, it wasn't, God knows it wasn't for money because I will be honest and say I got quite a large sum of money for the Grateful Dead book. Not because of me, but because of the subject. The other books have not, you know, have. But the other books are just as satisfying. Especially this last one, which is the response to it is, I mean, the, the Grateful Dead book. A large part of the response, of course, was the subject. And, and so, you know, that's good. It feels that this, the last great dream is much more, the response is much more towards my work rather than the subject per se. Although, you know, I went to a, I I did a, an event at the North Berkeley Public Library. And North Berkeley is a neighborhood that's very much graying. It's, you know, it's people my age in their 60s and 70s, and many of whom I'm sure were at the be in or whatnot, you know, certainly sympathetic to the, to the events of the 60s. And I was a little startled because it was just packed. I, you know, it was just a little library thing. And I thought, you know, it's not going to be a big deal, which it didn't matter if it would. I, I once did a library event and competed with the San Francisco Giants 2014 playoff run and two people showed up and I gave them the full 45. You know, I, it was like, there you go, you know, but you have to do the show. And, and I did the show. This surprised me at how the, you know, and granted it's, it's, it's sort of a very appropriate neighborhood. But at any rate, it was packed. As a matter of fact, all, pretty much all of my events have really gotten this turnout. So, you know, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Buzz Knight (44:06)

That's amazing. The Last Great Dream. A sweeping, wonderful chronicle of how bohemians, beats and hippies cracked open American culture. Thanks for inviting us to step inside of it and it's always a pleasure being with you.

Dennis McNally (44:20)

Dennis McNally thank you, Buzz. It's, you know, it's, it's nice to talk about it with you. In particular, thanks for listening to this episode of the Taking a Walk podcast.

Today Show Host (44:31)

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Dennis McNally (44:33)

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Today Show Host (44:37)

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Dennis McNally (44:39)

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Buzz Knight (45:15)

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Ryan Seacrest (46:09)

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Pharmaceutical Advertiser (46:39)

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Dennis McNally (48:10)

Please welcome aboard the Johnson Family.

Today Show Host (48:13)

The whole fam's here for the Disney Cruise. So you know we came to play and listen. The adults are gonna have a ball. First we're chilling in the infinity pool, onto massages at Sense's Spa, then gliding into Star Wars Hyperspace Lounge for a toast. We're even gonna kick back with Mickey on Disney's private island? That's how we get down? Cause Disney Cruise Line is where we came to play?

Pharmaceutical Advertiser (48:40)

Nourishes like a smoothie? And sizzles like a smash burger? Easy to pick up and hard to put down. Made from plants and grills like beef. See, it's not. Or it's. And. And that's what I love about Impossible. Just this weekend, a couple Impossible burgers. Put them on the grill. Boom. Felt like I was having a cheat meal without the feeling of the guilt of a cheat meal. It's not just burgers. They got hot dogs, chicken. Everything you need for your summer menu. Look for the impossible red packaging at your local grocery store today.

Dennis McNally (49:10)

This is an iHeart podcast.