Yet More McNally Review
(from MZ) NY Times, 8/25/02 – excerpt: 'A Long Strange Trip': Do Not Speak Ill of the (Grateful) Dead By WILL HERMES:
Yet as the band's cosmic Americana came to represent the zenith of hippie idealism, and its fans the nadir of hippie cluelessness, the Dead had almost incidentally become, for a time, perhaps the greatest of American rock bands. It's this sense of cultural context and musical accomplishment that Dennis McNally brings to his exhaustive and occasionally exhausting history, which enters the stacks of a thriving micro genre one might call ''Dead Lit.'' It in ludes biographies (Carol Brightman's ambitious ''Sweet Chaos''), fan catalogs (''The Deadhead's Taping Compendium''), academic studies (''Deadhead Social Science''), even psychic post-mortem dialogues (''In the Spirit'').
But McNally, an American history Ph.D. and author of the wonderful Jack Kerouac biography ''Desolate Angel,'' is distinguished by being the Dead's hired ''historian'' and publicist. This may not make him the most objective biographer, but it does make him a devoted one. In the preface to ''Desolate Angel'' (1979), McNally confessed of Kerouac's Beat posse, ''I do not think it is a breach of my respect for scholastic accuracy to acknowledge that I regard these alienated American prophets as my spiritual and intellectual ancestors.'' While he brings a similar awe to his employers in ''A Long Strange Trip,'' his hagiographic breathlessness doesn't stay his ability as a historian. Mostly, it seems to drive his ambition.
by Christian Crumlish at 8/25/2002 03:20:13 PM
We Are (Disturbingly) Everywhere
From a New
York
Observer article on Ann Coulter:
Ms. Coulter said she was a "good girl" as a teenager and that one
thing she was worried about before her book came out was people
sifting through her past looking for dirt. She and an old friend
tried, but turned up nothing. "You know, no nude pictures, no drugs,
no scandals, no weird associations," she said. She attended Cornell
University, was in the Delta Gamma sorority, founded the right-wing
Cornell Review. Then came the University of Michigan Law School,
where she said she was "infamous"; she started the Federalist Society
chapter and began following the Grateful Dead in earnest-she now
estimates she saw the band 67 times, but never did even half a hit of
LSD.
"No drug has ever tempted me except LSD," she said.
"When I'm in the nursing home some day.... I've never smoked pot
except passively at Dead shows, but I got a lot of it there." Ms.
Coulter can drink, though. "I am a WASP," she said. In 1989, she
clerked for a federal appeals court judge in Kansas City. I told her
I grew up there.
by Christian Crumlish at 8/23/2002 04:20:53 PM
Dead Biographer McNally's Cultural History
Michael Dougan writes in "Bohemian Rhapsody" in today's San Francisco Chronicle:
Maybe nabbing a doctorate in American history doesn't sound like the logical route to life as a professional Dead Head. For Dennis McNally, it did the trick.(more)
Back in 1972, McNally interrupted work on his doctoral thesis—a biography of Beat novelist Jack Kerouac—to attend his first Grateful Dead concert. A few years later, Jerry Garcia—the Dead's lead guitarist and emblematic persona—read McNally's thesis (published as a book called "Desolate Angel") and invited the author to become the band's official biographer.
"What I wanted to do was a two-volume history of, for want of a better term, bohemia in America" using Keroac and the Dead as metaphors, McNally, 52, said last week from his Mission District home. With today's release of "A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead," McNally's project is finally complete.
by Christian Crumlish at 8/6/2002 09:37:00 PM
"Don't Look Back"-Era Dylan Interview in Playboy
Remember how Dylan toyed with those reporters in Don't Look Back? Recall the surreal bordering on stream-of-conscious liner notes to his early albums? Flash back to that limber symbolist mind in his 1996 Playboy Interview.
by Christian Crumlish at 8/6/2002 01:33:49 PM
On the First Day of Jerry Week
Yesterday, Jerry would have turned 60. Now we're in the Days Between. Be sure to listen to something good this week. Today I played a tasty mp3 of It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, as well as That's What Love Will Make You Do from one of the recent Jerry Band albums.
This is a test of the mail-to-blogger link for Uncle John's Blog.
...but it failed. Now it's the third day of Jerry Week, and I'm trying again.
--xian
--
When you don't know where you're going, you have to stick together just in case someone gets there. --Ken Kesey.
by Christian Crumlish at 8/4/2002 06:02:04 PM
Journalist "Gets It"
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal also reviewed some of the music at Alpine:
At various points in the band's extended improvisation, the music literally seemed to be speaking for itself. There was a sensual interweave to their playing that suggested a musical conversation of sorts. The drums, for instance, answered a question that the rhapsodic guitar figures appeared to be asking while the punchy punctuation of the bass started an entirely different conversation altogether. As with so many Dead-related shows, the resulting web of sound became a thing hovering over the crowd, an ever-morphing organic entity that practically solicited you to reach out and touch it. Psychedelic hooha though this all may seem, it doesn't take much to actually experience the sensations in a live setting. An active ear is all that's needed to interlock with the band's sonic constellations.
by Christian Crumlish at 8/4/2002 08:48:58 AM
First Alpine Concert a Peaceful Success
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote a cute (if condescending) review of the crowd at Alpine in JS Online: Grateful for the Deadheads. Congratulations to all of those without tickets who stayed away (like myself, snif). The article refers to ex-bandmembers as "Deads."
Walworth County Sheriff David Graves (no Deadhead despite his name) had predicted that hundreds would be skinny-dipping in nearby Lake Geneva and that the two-lane county roads would be choked with rowdy concert-goers. Instead, he got a mellow crowd of mostly aging hippies - many of them raising kids, not hell. They had crochet halter tops, patchwork skirts, granny dresses and dreadlocks, but also cell phones, jobs, cars and mortgages. ... "We had a very successful concert event here today," Graves said. "I think we have to credit fans as well as all the planning" for avoiding any problems for area residents.
by Christian Crumlish at 8/4/2002 08:04:40 AM
The Bootleg Train Has Left the Station
When will the music biz (and entertainment conglomerates in general) finally "get it" about what has changed with the distribution, selling, and sharing of music (and other digitizable artforms)? How many times does some business writer have to retell the parable of the Grateful Dead? Before I send John Perry Barlow over to your house to lecture you, read Peter Rojas's Bootleg culture in the Technology section of Salon.
by Christian Crumlish at 8/2/2002 12:47:00 PM
