The Last Great Dream
Tracking the Hippie cultural movement beginning with its Bohemia Beats roots…
Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews
The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews, Edited by Dennis McNally, Foreword by Trixie Garcia…
On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom
The very deep roots of rock ‘n’ roll, going all the way back…
A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead
The truth is so often amazingly more interesting than any fiction – at least where the Grateful Dead was concerned…
Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America
The 1950s were not nearly as boring as they are so often portrayed. There was a guy named Jack Kerouac…
The 1960s left a mark on American culture so deep that a large portion of the culture wars of our 2014 present stem from ideas that most obviously surfaced 50 years ago.
Growing up in that decade left me fascinated with it, and I’ve devoted my historical work ever since to the era and what brought it about. In what is now three books I’ve studied those who parted with the mainstream culture and looked for new ways to live.
First was the Beats of the immediately-preceding ‘50s, in Desolate Angel/Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America. Then the classic representatives of the decade itself, the Grateful Dead: A Long Strange Trip/The Inside History of the Grateful Dead.
And now I’m about to release On Highway 61/Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom, which begins in the 1840s and traces the ongoing relationship between white America and African American music from then until Bob Dylan brilliantly brought the two things together.
You could say that all along I’ve been looking at sex, drugs, and (the roots of) rock ‘n’ roll.