UMass Magazine Online

Winter 2003

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All my best friends are here

One giant molecule

I learnt to dream of Sicily

The Landscape Beautiful

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Marietta Pritchard




	photo by Stephen Long

DENNIS MCNALLY ’78G, SHOWN HERE at Food For Thought Books in Amherst, finished his Ph.D. in American history, left Amherst in 1976, and settled in San Francisco, where he went to as many Grateful Dead concerts as he could. He decided to see what would happen if he sent a copy of his dissertation-turned-book on Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation to the Dead’s lead guitarist, Jerry Garcia. The group responded by inviting him to write a similar book about them, to become their official historian. And so McNally gained extraordinary access to this often outrageous, much-adulated band.

But before he could write the book, which was published in 2002, McNally put in 12 years as the group’s publicist. For McNally it has been, as the book’s title puts it, A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead. The book has been described as a picture not just of the “quintessential psychedelic band,” but of an era. A review in Salon magazine says: “While McNally doesn’t hide his fondness for the band, this is no hagiography – he’s not timid about exposing the Dead’s excesses and calling them on their shortcomings. After all, he says, they’re ‘human beings, not saints.’”

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