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.