Taking a walk.

The peace movement in general.

Challenging is the cultural stereotypes, like the whole idea of the gentle male hippie.

Just the first time anybody had ever gone out of their way to suggest that you guys could didn't have to be punching each other up.

Walk with me for a moment.

Imagine the San Francisco fog rolling in, mingling with the scent of fresh paint and Petruly, the sidewalks pulse with poetry, music, rebellion, and dreams just crazy enough to change the world.

I'm buzznight, and on today's episode had taken a walk.

We're not just retracing the roots of a counter culture.

We're diving into the wild, unwritten corners of history with one of its most insightful storytellers.

I first know him from his work as publicists with this little band called The Grateful Dead.

Dennis McNally joins us to illuminate the secret pathways behind and his new book, The Last Great Dream, a sweeping chronicle of how bohemians, beats and hippies cracked open American culture and invited us all to step inside.

So lace up your shoes and get ready.

This isn't just a walk down memory lane.

It's a journey into the heart of the last great American dream.

Coming up next, taking a walk, Dennis McNally, Welcome to taking a walk.

It is so great to be with.

You right now, my pleasure.

Boss.

We're almost together.

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

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 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, you.

Know, I don't mind it, although you know clearly face to face is preferable.

It always is preferable.

I think of how Jeffrey Tuban still has a job after being on Zoom, but we don't have to go there.

We can 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 taken 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 him?

Well, you know that I haven't gotten that question before.

He usually you know, I can hit auto reply.

Well, one impulse is my mother, who died when I was eleven, 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'm a practicing Buddhist.

And the man who brought Zen to Japan Dogan Zenji.

You know, if we could have an instantaneous translator somehow for a medieval Japanese into modern English.

He is one of the most creative, spiritual poets in world history, and he made for an interesting walk, say around downtown Kyoto, which by the way, you know, it's the place I really want to go.

And everything I read now is how tourists have completely overrun Japan.

So may be a little too late on that one.

This seems to happen a lot.

The tourists ruin everything, don't they.

I mean, really, I.

Live in San Francisco.

What can I say?

That's right, 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?

Well, as you know, you know, I did a book about Jack CARROLLAC 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 it usually it takes me about ten years to write a book.

In this case, it took twenty 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 sixty one.

So anyway, in twenty sixteen, the very nice woman at the California Historical Society who's now at the Smithsonian, Anthea asked me.

They were anticipating the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love in twenty seventeen.

All the museums in the library and whatnot, We're going to do some event.

So she asked me to curate a photo show about the Summer of Love, and I said sure, and oh, I don't know.

A month two months into the research projects, which was hilarious, good fun.

It was basically a treasure hunt.

I had to track down photographers and then track down their airs 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 Stewart, rod Stewart himself, but whoever created the phrase every picture tells the 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 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 dance on some level, Uh, 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 Two in particular.

So the Last Great Dream is the biggest surprise I got in researching it was simply that nobody done it before, because there's all kinds of books about the Summer of Low, but they all start in like the mid sixties.

And I was sort of curious as to, well, where did this come from?

And I decided that it started with poets in the nineteen forties, kind of a combination of anarchism and mysticism.

And then there were students 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 in post War two.

World War two, it had almost closed because you know, the war had taken away all the students and thankfully.

The GI bill.

Not everybody wanted to use it to buy a house or you know, 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 in conventional society, and they became really one of the primary sources for what we would later come to call beats.

The beat next.

But in the forties there were just bohemians.

There were just people 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.

I 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, a 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, and in nineteen fifty eight, one of his students was a young man from the Mission District of San Francisco named Jerry Garcia.

And Wally played Big Bill Brunsi and other African American blues acoustic music while they painted, and the end result of that was that when Garcia's mother gave him 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, Remember this is nineteen fifty eight, he's sixteen.

This is this is a time when Beat is on the front pages and in the on the bestseller list.

And they said to Wally, you know, what is this beat?

Then?

You know?

And Wally said, you guys are beat good down the 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 then 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 gret bul Dead, which I said, good idea.

Yea, I love it.

Thank you for sharing that.

It's amazing.

Yeah, 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 hysteric historical research until now.

Well, the problem with hippie they you know, maybe a thousand people, all of them were well into their twenties, and we're working in the arts in some fashion, whether it was as 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 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 it was once called, with challenge you know, anti materialism and challenging the standard where you're supposed to act 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 Being.

Unfortunately, the Being attracted fifty thousand people, and suddenly what was going on in the Hay, which had been very under the radar and just you know, nobody.

Paid any particular attention to it.

San Francisco has a tradition of tolerance for crazy, and there was just there just wasn't much of a problem.

And in fact, on the day of the b in 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 lost her child.

And the copper 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 problem, he said, But lady, we can't go down there at the smoking pot.

And you know, so obviously they were not what do 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 one hundred thousand 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 there was in the in the end, you know, the ideas of what was going on there, you know, went out and it involved things like it didn't 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 forty billion dollar year business.

And these issues, I mean, these issues had preceded it, but the sixties and the hay brought them up, you know, to a much more.

It brought them to the forefront.

So you have things like organic food, you have well, the peace movement in general.

Challenging is the cultural stereotypes, like the whole idea of the gentle male hippie.

Just the first time.

Anybody had ever gone out of their way to suggest that you know, guys could didn't have to be punching each other out, and that, I would argue, led aided feminism, which was emerging just after in the more in the late sixties of the seventies 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 Kansas said, I think San Francisco might be more fun to live in.

And another example which people don't realize.

And 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 the home computer, the individual based computer comes from Silicon Valley rather than say near Mit because noja 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, which all of whom had connections to LSD.

So you know, and there's lots more.

But the fact is that a great deal of 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 nineteen sixty six and then president in nineteen eighty by running on an anti Hipnie, anti free speech movement, in an anti Watts rebellion, anti Black Frankly.

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 and and pretty pretty wild, h Van Reagan.

But the the the politics which are to you know, return control of the government to the white male elite, which is in a large larger sense what it's about is exactly in opposition to the Six Days.

If you read my book, as I hope every you know, everybody will, that they they can see the values that were generated there and how they're they're they're still real.

It's just.

Well, things would be a little different if somebody else has won the election.

But that's another story.

And I think all you described is one of the many reasons why your book is really resonating at this at this time for sure, because of the times that that we.

Certainly live in We'll be back with more of the Taken 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.

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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.

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Welcome back to the Taking a Walk Podcast.

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 showed up that you hadn't necessarily thought of or realized.

The big surprise I had two surprises.

One of course, was that nobody had done this before.

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 sixties.

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 really resonates with nature, and San Francisco.

You can stand on H Street and you're looking at Golden Gate Park.

There's Mount tam you know, across the way.

It's an appropriate place for that.

New York City to me is not.

I mean, you know, 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 the as I say, the poets, and and then some art students.

And then as time went along and into the fifties, there was theater, there was dance woman in Ann Halpern.

There was this wonderful place called the Tate Music Center, which involved electronic music, you know, sort of leaps and blour ups and not something that's generally very popular.

But the thing is, uh, it invited.

They had they opened up a building for their work, and they brought in the dancers and and KPFA, and it creates did an energy that was way more than 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 fifties and into the early sixties 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 an event that.

The Mime Troop, which would go on to have a lot to do when they got arrested with the development of the rock culture in San Francisco, and the Mime Troops 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 was, you know, playing a little trumpet and just mostly there and he's not even sure why is there except it was an experiment in consciousness and uh and and improvisational music, which at the time he wasn't really an improvisational music 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 that was the surprise.

You know, 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 so in you have all these One of the elements was rock and roll was always part of all of this in the fifties.

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 LST 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 an easy way like Jerry Garcia, or a more aggressive and in your face way like Paul Kantner and the airplane.

He loved to provoke the police.

Paul, he liked he liked to provoke people.

Actually, but you have, you know, you have.

The end result is this hippie thing, and it's it's 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 wrote in the book, and I think it's true one of the stereotypes.

And it is a stereotype because you know, this all came from media who took one look at the hippies and went, huh.

You know, 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, 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, apped 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 America music for the next twenty years.

And I might add you also had a 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 seven thousand seats in the arena and there were probably twenty five thousand people on the grounds and nothing bad happened.

And you know, it could have been a spectacular mess, but the ambiance, the spirit of the sixties really held true, and people if they couldn't get in, they just sat outside and listened.

And it by literally it was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and by Saturday afternoon, the police chief of Monterey was sending us cops.

Yeah, you know, of course he called it all you know, all hands on deck on Friday, you know, with not all you've got hippies, but but Hell's angels coming into Monterey and they're.

All by Saturday.

It was obviously it wasn't a problem.

The book is full of stories that captured, you know, 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.

He kind of.

One of them and going back to you know, getting surprised, so I read, Okay, there's a guy named Hendrik Hertzberg.

Uh he at least up until recently.

I'm not sure if it's just this minute, but was the lead writer for 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 nineteen sixty six, he was a cub reporter for Newsweek, and he went to the hate and you know, poked around and for whatever reason, maybe it was his age, they he completely got them.

He understood what was going on.

He didn't ever go the boy that these people weird that every other reporter did.

He was simpatico.

And if the Newsweek had like been smart enough to publish his notes, they would have had the best article about about tapes 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 of Newsweek and Time magazine in those days, one person did the reporting, or multiple persons, and one did the writing, and the right you know, the writing was as as not get it, you know, they 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 normal was normal uh 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 riate reawakening in America.

Go and this isn't original, This goes all the way back to threeaux.

But the fact is you've 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 about you know, Russian infiltration.

Hmm set sound familiar.

The price for the prosperity of the fifties was was uh, you know, uh, conform conformity and you know, keeping your mouth shut.

You know again, sound familiar, don't you know, don't criticize uh, you know, capitalism and 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 and the message ultimately is the same as as as the meats, which is simply there's more to life than just you know, making money, buying a house, you know, being good little robots.

The media could only see the in general, except for Hendrick 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 the mass audience.

And it's a pity.

But having now in twenty twenty five, particularly for my generation which saw politically it's high water mark at driving a corrupt and unconstitutional president out of office with the media thanks to the media in nineteen seventy four, we've been on a downhill slide since because we've got a media that's you know, explicitly political, i e.

Fox News, and instead of the media that sort of you know, was the traditional guardians of liberty and you know, keeping people honest.

You know, it's it's you know, overtly cheerleaders, and now it's because of a news site, you know, the twenty four hour news cycle twenty that that's so out of date.

Now, I don't know what is it the instantaneous news cycle that we're living in in this case, you know right now, I mean it's Epstein, Epstein, Epstein 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?

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 know you've lived through so many experiences that 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.

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 it was I identified it It's a little bold because I am not a woman, but I identified it as postpartum depression, namely that I'd given birth to this seven year project, this book on Krauac, and I didn't know what I was going to do next, and it took a year before I was invited to do a Grateful Dead book, which is what I wanted.

So the point is, 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?

You know I got dumb about drugs when I was working in rock and roll.

That makes me unique.

But you know that only lasted, you know, a couple of years of stupidity.

You know, I've had the work I wanted.

Thanks to the Grateful Dad.

I met the wife I wanted.

She came with a twelve 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 are late teens, early twenties, going to college and you know, they're lovely people.

I've fucked 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 import 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 I needed to do, and what I ended up getting was I couldn't have the idea come from me.

It had to come from them, and eventually it did from Jerry and thanks to the caroc book.

So I lucked out, you know, as I say, I, you know, just keep on doing what you're doing.

And most of it, you know, most of it worked out.

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.

And you know, that was pretty much it, you know, 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 no But the other books are just as satisfying, especially this last one, which is the response to it is, I mean, the Grateful Dead book.

A large part of the response, of course, was the subject.

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 did 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 sixties and seventies, and many of whom I'm sure were at the being or whatnot, you know, certainly sympathetic to the events of the sixties.

And I was a little startled because it was just packed, you know, it was just a little library thing, and I thought, you know, it's not gonna be a big deal, which it didn't matter if it would.

I once did in a library event and competed with the San Francisco Giants twenty fourteen playoff run, and two people showed up and I gave them the full forty five.

You know, it was like there you go, you know, but you have to do the show, and I did the show.

This surprised me at how you know, and granted it's sort of a very appropriate neighborhood, but at any rate, it was packed and the asthmat fact, pretty much all of my events have really gotten this turnout, so you know, thank you, thank you.

Thank you.

It'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, Thank you, buzz.

It's you know, it's nice to talk about it with you.

In particular, thanks.

For listening to this episode of the Taking a Walk podcast.

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