too.

For what it's worth, when I went to see the glaucoma doctor, just to check the urban myths, when I went to the glaucoma doctor the first time, and she's quite straight, but I said, doctor, is it true? She said, yes, you have glaucoma.

I want you to take these drops.

I said, listen, what about pot? You know, I've heard...

And she said, it's true if you smoke 20 large joints a day.

So it would work for Sam Kuturi, but not

I think you have to get out of bed these

days.

Welcome back Grateful Dead publicist and historian Dennis McNally.

Only one important thing happened at Merriweather.

My father's family is from Baltimore, and a bunch of them came to the show.

And one of them was my uncle, Uncle, uh, Tony.

And Uncle Tony said to me, I was talking about my relationship with Susanna, and he's, he looked at me and he said, "Well, when are you getting married?" And it had never occurred to me at that point, and I said, "Well, my generation, we don't necessarily get married," and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But obviously, he'd planted a seed.

Will you marry me, pretty Mae? Oh.

And later that night, I was at a party in somebody's room, and I went into the back room, uh, to call Susanna, as I did after every show.

1985 was his first summer tour, though.

So I got hired in, uh, June of '84.

They were already on the road for their summer tour.

And then sometime in August, I went to a band meeting and I said, "I think I should go on the road with you guys." And any penny spent not on the crew was, like, torn shrieking from their children's lips.

They said, "What, you know, what do we need you for? We've already sold the tickets." And I said, "Well, it's not about selling tickets.

By now, you're an automatic news story.

There will be TV cameras and, and still cameras at every show.

He'd seen the Dead plenty by then.

What was it about this era that really drove you to wanna explore it in this, in this detail?

Um, uh, you're right that it, it's, it's, it's considerably more expansive, uh, than, um, my first two books.

Um, so, uh, I was in graduate school, and I was looking for a topic, and long story short, I just started working on Jack Kerouac, and that ended up becoming a book called Desolate Angel.

And the guy who gave me a shove in that direction was also a Deadhead, turned me into a Deadhead.

Um, and so by the time I was done with the Kerouac book, I wanted to write the second book.

I, I saw all the c- connections between the Beats and, and the Grateful Dead, mo- you know, most obviously Neil Cassidy, uh, who was Dean Moriarty in On the Road, uh, and certainly an essential part of the, the Beat scene.

Um, and then of course, Cowboy Neil at the wheel of the bus to Never Ever Land for the Grateful Dead.

As you mentioned, this is an area of history that really truly is largely unwritten about, and I'm curious if there's any specific people that, uh, gave you an impetus to, to write these histories out.

And during the conversation with Dennis, you know, he reminded us that in order to understand the band, you have to really understand the band's musical DNA.

There are two truly unique things about the Grateful Dead.

One, uh, is that in, in the world of rock and roll, at least, they weren't a rock band.

They were a jazz band.

They happened to use rock instruments and rock songs and rock forms.

But their commitment to improvisation made them different from all other bands.

And that only got stronger as the audiences started to grow.

The Grateful Dead, even when they were playing to 50,000 people, down deep, certainly Jerry, had the notion that the audience was in fact their peers on a quest, a quest for cosmic...

Please welcome back to the Deadcast, the great Dennis McNally.

They knew it was the 20th anniversary 'cause I told them.

I don't think they ever sort of looked it up.

To them, it was another show.

I started getting a lot of inquiries.

20 years seemed like a terribly long time [laughs] at the time.

So I finally, I went to the band.

[head swivel sound]