Deeper Digs in Rock: Grateful Dead Historian Dennis McNally
This week Christian has the distinct pleasure of sitting down with Grateful Dead historian, Dennis McNally. This one is special for the Rock N Roll Archaeologist because Dennis is an actual historian with a PhD in U.S. History and because one of the inspirations for the entire rock n roll archaeology project was the 2002 McNally book, “A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead”. He is a real life rock n roll archaeologist!
Dennis McNally received his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1977 for a biography of Jack Kerouac which was published by Random House in 1979 under the title Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. He became the Grateful Dead’s authorized biographer in 1980 and the band’s publicist in 1984. In 2002, he published A Long Strange Trip/The Inside History of the Grateful Dead with Broadway Books, a division of Random House. It made the New York Times best seller list.