Grateful Dead Biographer Dennis McNally

by Corey O'Flanagan

On the show today I get another chance to speak with someone who has been a part of the story of my favorite band, the Grateful Dead. Dennis McNally, author of A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead, tells us about his first Dead show in 1972, gives us some truly amazing Songfacts (you'll want to hear the story of "Terrapin Station"), and recounts his time with the band as their biographer and publicist.

If you love the Dead like I do, stick around for this one as we hear some great stories from someone who lived within the wonderful world that is the Grateful Dead.


How He Got Involved With The Grateful Dead

I was in graduate school and I was hanging out with a guy who was a Deadhead. This is like 1972, quite a ways back. I was talking about a dissertation topic, and I was talking vaguely about the Beats, and he said, "No, no, no, you should do Kerouac. His letters are at Columbia and you can stay with my friends in the Bronx." When you're broke graduate students, a free place to stay in Manhattan, a subway ride from Columbia is very attractive. So that happened. As a matter of fact, the guys that were in that apartment are still some of my best friends - and then that fall, so that was February '72...so in October, he took me to my first show and gave me my first psychedelic, and I had a wonderful time. So I became a Deadhead.

Then, I wanted to write a second book - the first [Desolate Angel] was about Jack Kerouac, and eventually came out in '79. I wanted to write a second book because I saw all these connections between the Beats and the Grateful Dead, and I had no idea how to approach the Grateful Dead, so I mailed a copy of the book - one to Jerry, one to Hunter at the Grateful Dead fan mailbox, post office box 1065, San Rafael, California. And long story short, I met Jerry and slid into the conversation that I had written this book and I'd sent it to him, and did he get it? Kerouac was a fundamental role model for him, so I mean, I think I did an okay job on the book. Kerouac was really important to him and he liked my approach. So eventually he said, "Why don't you do us? Why don't you write a book about us?" To which I said, "Gee that might be a good idea." And it was downhill from there.

Three years later, the receptionist was complaining that nobody was returning media phone calls because the manager was overworked and didn't like media anyway. And the guy had theoretically gone off for rehab. And Garcia said, "Get McNally to do it, he knows that stuff." I had at least done a book tour for the Kerouac book, so I became the publicist.


Memories Of His First Dead Show

I remember, among other things, that it was not remotely sold out in a 7,000-seat arena. So it was relatively small, not NBA size, and it was maybe two-thirds sold out, two thirds sold. I discovered that while I really enjoyed LSD, it did make me want to sit down. I didn't really like standing all that much, and there were all these empty seats to the side of the stage, so I went over there and plunked myself down and put my feet up and the sound was great. And, had this wonderful show, which included a morning do at the end. When Dick [Latvala] became the archivist, I said, "You have to make me a copy of my first show," and he did. So I have that around. And it was a classic '72 show, which is to say they didn't seem to know how to end the show - it went on and on. I mean, second sets could... it was amazing how long they could go. And they were younger. As they got older, they maybe wanted to shorten it down a little. I also particularly remember vividly going back and re-joining my friends at the end of the show. One of them would perspire so much in shows that his clothing and his hair - it looked like he just stepped out of the shower. I was like, wow. But it was a wonderful experience.


One of the things I remember once talking with Jerry about was when they would jam from one song to the next. You might know the two different songs, but you don't know what they're doing in the middle. So that suddenly you sort of look up and go, "Oh, they're playing X. I wonder when they stopped playing Y and started playing X." You don't hear that. After you've gone to 100 shows, you do. You know the new song two notes in, you can hear it coming. You've listened to those transitions so that you see how they do it. It's not sleight of hand. But, at the beginning, you don't, and it's just marvelous, because you just suddenly realize, wow, what does that band got up its sleeve? There was a certain sleight-of-hand, magic act thing to it, the transitions, and I remember that specifically from that first night where I'd be sitting there going, "What the hell just happened?"

What Makes The Grateful Dead Unique

The paradigm is just completely different from all other bands, literally all other bands because they had an experience that was truly unique. Other musicians obviously did LSD and played - Jimi Hendrix being an obvious example. But what's a Grateful Dead experience early on when they were still figuring out who they were, what they were doing was this two-month period of the acid test. In which they were not the show - everybody in the room was the show… they were merely the soundtrack. So they related to the audience and really did, at least down deep, for the next 30 years. Not as "I'm the artist, you are the audience," or, "I will make my art and you will applaud and give me money" or anything like that. What they concluded was that the audience was in fact, their partners, partners in a quest, and nobody quite knew what the quest was, but, you know, they were willing to try. And that's a really fundamentally different approach.


"Terrapin Station"

I have never heard a songwriting story this good, actually - it's not just Grateful Dead. This is a really kind of a remarkable story, at least in terms of partnership.

As a preliminary explanation for those of you not familiar with the San Francisco Bay Area, it's a meteorological fact that we almost never get lightning. It just does not happen in the Bay Area. Some fact about being near the ocean, whatever, I don't know. I mean, I've been here 40 years, and if I've seen serious lightning more than five times, I'd be surprised. Jerry lived in Marin, which is to the west. He had been in the East Bay and he's driving home on the Richmond San Rafael Bridge, and there's a wild storm out to his right on the Northern end of the bay - lightning and just a great, wonderful storm and suddenly he hears a tune in his head, and it's the basic riff of "Terrapin." He hears the whole tune in his head.

"Terrapin" is, not just because they added a string orchestra in the record, really a small symphony and it's very complex, and he's like, "This is something." He jams on the gas and he gets home as fast as he can to turn on a tape recorder to start to get the essential facts of the tune down. He probably fiddled with it for a day, I'm not sure, and after a day or two, he went over to see Hunter. As it happened, Hunter lived on the shore of that Bay and had been sitting, watching the same storm and when he was watching the same storm, he was inspired to start writing. He started with an old English folk tune called "The Lady of Carlisle" and wrote eight solid typewritten pages of lyrics. Jerry came over and said, "Wow, I got a good tune," and Hunter said, "Yeah, I got some good lyrics." And Jerry looks at him and he takes page 1, page 2 and half of page 8. So, he took the lyrics, virtually unchanged, and taught the band. They opened like a week or two later - very quickly thereafter - they played a show in the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino (which was a very odd place because it had this strange stuff on the ceiling, I've never understood it, but that's neither here nor there). And they opened the show with "Terrapin."

At Jerry's funeral, Hunter said that when they played "Terrapin" that first time, it was the closest he had ever got to absolute certitude that he had been put on Earth to write words for Jerry to sing, and that the universe came together. It's a magnificent song, and one I endlessly love to hear.

Robert Hunter's Songwriting

He wrote some that he recorded himself too, when he was going into the studio. But he was always more prolific than Jerry. Jerry always had a stack of Hunter lyrics that he could go to when he got a tune that he thought was worth paying attention to.

Hunter's first effort where he was consciously writing for the Grateful Dead was the first verse of "Dark Star." That was in the fall of '67. He had already written what turned out to be the lyrics to "China Cat Sunflower," and I think he'd also contributed a few lines to "Alligator," but that's his debut, really.

Eventually they did other things, not all of which came out the way they wanted them to. "Cosmic Charlie" never made Jerry happy - there was just something about it that just didn't work. So eventually, Hunter and his lover Christine moved in with Jerry and Mountain Girl [Carolyn Adams] in Larkspur, California. Hunter told me the story of one time coming downstairs with some lyrics, and Jerry is sitting in front of the television, where he always was - which was in front of the television with the sound off, playing guitar, and Hunter showed him the lyrics and Jerry said, "Oh great, I'll get to this this afternoon." And Hunter looked at him and said, "Garcia, if you think I live in this house for the dubious pleasure of your company, try again. I'm here for us to write songs." And Jerry went, "Oh, right. Got it," and they got to writing the song. I never did ask Hunter how long that lasted, but basically it was like all of '69.

And what you have is a really remarkable thing going on, which is almost schizophrenic - the band is this off the wall, crazy, jazz-rock fusion, improvisational, monster. They're visiting the heavens. At the same time, Jerry and Robert are writing these, not necessarily country, but Americana songs that are capable of being played and recorded with precision and specifics, in part, because that's where they started. They met in '61 and briefly had a folk duo, and Jerry then took it into a deep folk music scene. I mean, we're not talking about just 'kumbaya' - we're talking about heavy blues, and then bluegrass, which is where Jerry went, and Hunter a little bit too. Then in '69, you've got outside influences, like, for instance, the band Big Pink, which was an album that suddenly sort of tipped all those rockers - because many of the rockers had come out of the folk scene and electrified that post-Beatles. Now they're going, we don't just have to play electric, so you get Sweethearts Of The Rodeo, and there's a whole shift and the Grateful Dead were definitely part of that.


The Rough Road To Workingman's Dead

So in '69, they write all these songs, and then they get to January of 1970 and their punitive manager, a guy named Lenny Hart, Mickey Hart's father, steals the money and runs... they get busted in New Orleans. And they went into the studio, and did what became Workingman's Dead. I said to Jerry, "You guys must've been sort of wobbling at that point… things must've been really crazy." And he said, "Well no, not really. Let's put it this way - the same place was the studio. I mean, we were making good music. That was what was important, the rest, (scoffs) you know?" That was always Jerry's priorities, if the music was good, the other stuff mattered very little. And because of economic reasons, they had signed a contract with Warner Bros. that gave them unlimited - big mistake - unlimited studio time. But they had to pay for it. So they were $250,000 in debt to Warner Bros. at a time when that's a lot of money. Might be a little less, you know the amount now. There was no way that they could get endless studio time, and it wasn't appropriate for the music. As Jerry said, they were thinking in terms of the Buck Owens, Bakersfield sound - keep it simple, keep it pure and keep it spare.

The first album they recorded in three days and they kind of let themselves be pushed around by the pros. So in reaction, they drive out their producer in the second album and have Dan Healy produce it, and go completely maniacal with Anthem Of The Sun, with the attempt at creativity and fusing live and studio. In the third, they took on the challenge of a 16-track, and frankly screwed it up because they were mixing by committee while doing nitrous - a completely bad combination of factors. So, literally, they lost it in the mix. There was marvelous material there, but it doesn't quite come off. Now they get to the fourth and they do another reaction, but the reaction is to go back and keep it simple, stupid, and they did. There's a wonderful story from Joe Smith of Warner Bros. - he got his first cassette and it was "Uncle John's Band." It was the first song he heard from the new album.

He was expecting more of Anthem Of The Sun stuff, and he ran down the corridors of Warner Bros., screaming, "The Grateful Dead have written a song we can put on the radio!" And he was very happy.


"Friend Of The Devil"

"Friend Of The Devil" was an interesting song. They had started New Riders Of The Purple Sage, which was sort of an opening act and it only required one hotel room - they shared rooms in those days. When it first began, they had David Nelson and Marmaduke [John Dawson], they had the room, and then it was Phil [Lesh] on bass, and Mickey on drums and Jerry on pedal steel. So they called that 'An evening with the Grateful Dead,' so no more opening acts and so forth.

Hunter had these lyrics and he showed them to Nelson and they started working on a song. They're fiddling around and getting a sort of a first take of it, and Hunter tells them, "Yeah, this song's called 'Friend Of The Devil.'" Before they started recording, Nelson was checking to see that his guitar was in tune, and he ran this thing, ding, ding, ding, down a scale. And if you listen to the recording, that's how the song opens. When he first did that, he did it simply to check the guitar's tuning and they kept it. It suddenly became part of the song. What happens is, Hunter leaves and goes home where he's living with Garcia, and Hunter says, "Yeah, I just was over at Nelson's and I started a song with him." Of course he says, "Let me see," and so Hunter gives him the tape. The next morning, they woke up and Garcia had written the bridge ("got three reasons why I cry away each lonely night"), and it became a Grateful Dead song. It became a Jerry song - he made other modifications. Nelson got credit, but it wasn't going to be a New Riders song anymore. It was a Grateful Dead song.

What Jerry had done was make the song much, much better. One of the things about the scene around the Grateful Dead was, people tended to defer to Jerry for the right reasons. Let's put it this way, in general he was the most encouraging… also blackmailing and muttering at Weir to write songs. Now, anybody who's paid attention to rock history - you've got the great examples of Bill Wyman and George Harrison, and their eternal complaints about not being able to get their songs on the albums because they weren't Lennon/McCartney and they weren't the Glimmer Twins. Nobody ever said that in the Grateful Dead. I mean, Brent Mydland, the new guy, gets four songs, more songs than anybody on the last album because he had the best songs. Jerry and Nelson and Hunter did the bulk of the material on Workingman's Dead and American Beauty because they had the best by far. There was nobody sitting around saying, oh, put this in. Finally they got Bob Weir to do "Truckin'" and "Sugar Magnolia." So there's two, but in that era, that was the most creative thing happening in the band. There was no tension. Jerry had taken it over out of musical genius and force of personality, and nobody was going to argue about it. That wasn't what was happening at the time.


"Althea"

My reactions to the song are complex because they frequently played it far too slowly and it made me crazy. And also, they overplayed it like crazy in the early '80s. Bob Weir once said, "Well, we kind of got stuck." And they were, they were a bit stuck in the early '80s, musically. The set-list tended to be... all the songs got put in slots. One of the great things about Dead & Company is that songs that were closers, they open with, and they've really loosened up their approach to things and it's much freer.

"Althea" is an interesting song, mostly because there's this line in it that's something like, "nobody's messing with you, but you, but you, but you, your friends are getting most concerned, loose with the truth. It's no lie, baby, I hope you don't get burned." Now, it is very tempting as a biographer, which I was, to read that as a message from Hunter to Garcia, who at that time was slipping into drug addiction. Every druggy starts fibbing... "I've got a cold, and I don't feel good," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, right. So to me, that's one of the buried elements of the song. Whether Hunter had that in mind, I have no idea. I certainly wouldn't ask. One of the rules about working with the Grateful Dead is you never asked Hunter to explain the meaning of the lyrics. I once tread on that. I said to him something about "when the blind man takes your hand" from, I think it was "To Lay Me Down" [it was from "Comes A Time"]. I said, "That's the best metaphor for death maybe ever." And he looks at me and he says, "Really?" And it was like, "Oh." I was talking to myself saying, "Oh, man, you screwed that one up." I shut up quickly and realized, whoops, okay back off. Because all my questions to him were never about the meaning of songs, it was always about context. You know, tell me the story of writing "Terrapin" or whatever. Or the story about him giving him Garcia a hard time for putting something off. He was perfectly happy to talk about that as long as it didn't verge into explicating the lyrics.

So my take on "Althea" is very specifically my take. I don't know what they said. One of the things you have to remember is that Robert was Robert, and Jerry was Jerry. They were not the same person. But Jerry had complete faith and trust that if Robert wrote it, he could sing it, and it would work well. And Jerry could sing, for instance, pop songs. Songs like Smokey Robinson's, that are smooth lover kind of lyrics because that was somebody else's song. But that was not going to work for something that was original to him and Hunter. And Hunter understood that. There was a certain dignity that he brought to it. You know, Hunter wouldn't say "baby" in lyrics. It was about a lady. There was a romanticism actually that suited Jerry. But I also remember Jerry that there were certain songs that felt so personal that if he was really feeling bad, it was kind of raw. If he was feeling really raw on certain nights he wouldn't and he couldn't sing it. Like "Mission In The Rain," which sort of encapsulates his childhood and young adulthood. When I was working with the Grateful Dead, I moved into the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco, and it really tickled him that somebody from the Dead had gone back to the Mission because that was his roots.

January 5, 2022
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