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 The Inside History of the Grateful Dead 

Dennis Mcnally's role as a publicist granted him the access he needed to witness the daily happenings in and around the Grateful Dead. It also gave him plenty of opportunities to fully research the history of the band and interview those who were there for the years prior to his involvement. It’s here that his background as a historian — McNally holds a Ph.D. in American history from the University of Massachusetts — fully comes into play. The book offers a twenty-page bibliography and a five-page list of interviewees as proof that McNally did his homework. This wealth of information is synthesized together to form one of the most fact-based and fair-minded biographies in rock history.

The seeds for the project were first planted thirty years ago when McNally decided to make Jack Kerouac the focus of his Ph.D. studies. Said McNally, "The actual choice of Kerouac came about for a couple of reasons: one intellectual and two practical. He was chronologically my immediate forbearer — in the ’50s I read On the Road — and I was consciously resisting the flattening effects of the academic world by looking for something that was outside the conventional culture to sudy. Kerouac seemed appropriate."