Take trip with Grateful Dead historian

It goes without saying that Dennis McNally, the Grateful Dead's historian and PR man, has a veritable boatload of DayGlo-colored memories attached to his 20 heady years with the band.

He documented it all, good and bad, in his definitive biography, "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead" (Broadway, 2002).

McNally comes to Weber State University on Tuesday to teach several classes and to present a public multimedia lecture on the band.

He arrives armed with a few Dead stories that took place in Utah, including an experience he counts as a favorite.

The band was flying a charter jet from Telluride, Colo., to Phoenix, when the pilot took a little side trip through the red-rock country.

"Our pilot flew us down into Monument Valley," said McNally, calling from his Bay Area home. "And I do mean into it."

They were flying at a level about halfway up the mesas and formations, the tallest of which soar 1,000 feet above the valley floor. McNally notes that the beauty of Monument Valley is usually appreciated from the ground up -- or for the hardy few, from the top down. But he and the Grateful Dead had the perspective of raptors on that rare day.

"It was sunset, and the rocks were just oozing color," McNally remembered. "It was one of the most transcendent moments I ever had. Just magical. Now we all know Southern Utah is where God did the masterpieces after practicing with the rest of the world. How often does someone end up on a charter plane with a bold pilot like that? I will always remain grateful to the Grateful Dead for that experience."

On the road via Jack

McNally became a Deadhead himself in the early 1970s, when he was working on his doctorate at the University of Massachusetts. He was working on a dissertation about Jack Kerouac, a work that would become his first book.

"A couple of years into that project, I had an epiphany. I realized what I really wanted to do, what I was up to, really, was writing a two-volume history of bohemia since World War II -- volume one is about Jack and the Beats in the '40s and '50s, and volume two, about the Grateful Dead. And that is what I did in the years between 1971, when I started the Kerouac book, and 2002, when I published the Grateful Dead book."

With a vague plan to somehow get in good with the Dead so as to write their story -- as well as see as many of the band's shows as humanly possible -- McNally relocated to San Francisco. He was ensconced there by 1979, when his dissertation became his first biography: "A Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation and America" (Random House).

McNally said that one of the first things he did upon publication was to mail a copy to Jerry Garcia, one of the composers, guitarists and the de facto leader of the Grateful Dead.

The story of how he finally met Garcia is a long, strange trip in and of itself, said McNally. But when it happened, he was ready to let Garcia know he was the man behind the Kerouac work.

Said McNally: "I knew intuitively that if I said, 'I want to write a book about you,' they'd say 'Sure, take a number.' They got that all the time. But there we were, and rather artfully, if I do say so myself, I managed to mention the Kerouac book. Jerry got very excited, and hopped out of his chair and shook my hand, and, long story short, about two months later, he sent some associates who said, 'Jerry says, why don't you write about us?' " He laughed. "To which I replied, 'Good idea!' I had to will it into existence. I made it someone else's idea, and it worked. It was one of those Zen things."

Full-time research

McNally agreed to write the biography in 1980, and spent the next three years working part-time, spending his money and days off researching the Dead book.

But then at roughly the same moment, his money grew short and the band found itself in need of a full-time publicist.

"I realized that, even though there was amazing inside information available, there was no way I could write the book at the same time as doing that job. The job was 70 hours a week, 90 and more during tours. So after a while, I put the book on the back burner, but kept my little Jack Kerouac nickel notebook in my back pocket. When someone would say something funny, I would jot it down."

In 1995, Garcia passed away of a heart attack as he was being treated for long-term substance abuse. McNally had his hands full, propping up a grieving family who had lost their patriarch.

"For about two years, I felt I was obligated to hold things together for any number of people. Then in '97 ... I started my research all over again -- did a review of all I had already, and reinterviewed people, and eventually, sat down and wrote."

PR for millions

The hardest part of being the publicist of the Grateful Dead was not so much the band's antics, but that of the infamous Deadheads. Though other bands' fans have followed in their wake, the Deadheads were the original tribe of camp followers and tape collectors, an extended family like no other.

"Frankly, there is a ding-dong factor when you are also, in a real sense, a publicist for millions. I am dead serious here -- pun intended. Every large group had people who are inconsiderate, selfish and not too bright."

Early on, said McNally, the group, which might seem wild to outsiders, had an established sense of ethics among themselves. Fans generally treated each other with respect.

That changed in 1987 with "Touch of Grey," the Dead's only top 10 single, driven by a hit MTV video.

"I refer to it as their 'damn hit,' frankly," said McNally. "Tens of thousands heard it on the radio, and they jumped on into the Deadhead world, but they didn't get that initiation that most had, through a brother or a friend, on how to act. They just came down to the show and found a wild party going on and forgot the ethics. We had some crazy stuff happen that really hadn't been an issue before that, and being who I was, I had to deal with a lot of it."

Though some of the fans gave him fits at times, McNally has kind words for the band itself, and its inner circle.

"They were a great bunch of people. Really talented, and really special," McNally said. "And some of the brightest weren't anybody that anyone knows if they weren't in the band."

He spoke especially fondly of a man who went by the name Ramrod, whom McNally called the band's moral center.

"Ramrod was a crew member, a farm boy from Eastern Oregon. And yet, he was the one who kept everyone's head on straight, by virtue of just who he was. We lost him two years ago to lung cancer, and it was a tragedy to all of us. Life is a little less for all of us for him not being there anymore.

"I tell about these people in the lecture, people who you might never have heard of, but who were so important to what we were about," McNally said. "And I talk about Jerry, of course. I try to get across how very funny he was. He was so talented, too, everyone could see that. But he was even nicer than people can ever imagine. Jerry was quite simply a remarkable guy."

PREVIEW

l WHO: Dennis McNally

l WHAT: Multimedia presentation by the author of 'A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead'

l WHEN: 7 p.m. Tuesday

l WHERE: Lindquist Lecture Hall, Kimball Visual Arts Center, Weber State University, 3848 Harrison Blvd., Ogden

l ADMISSION: Free, information at (801) 626-8044