Win Tickets ($40): Dennis McNally @ Bagdad Theater | Grateful Dead Biographer & Publicist
We are giving away a pair of tickets to Dennis McNally @ Bagdad Theater on August 5. To win, comment below on this post why you’d like to attend. Winner will be drawn and emailed August 4.
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From our sponsors:
Dennis McNally
August 5, 2025
6pm doors, 7pm show | $20-25 | All Ages
Purchase Tickets: mcmenamins.com
Bagdad Theater
3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd, Portland, OR 97214
Dennis McNally is the Grateful Dead’s authorized biographer and longtime publicist. He toured with Jerry Garcia and the band from 1984-1995, and in 2002, McNally published the highly anticipated A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead (a New York Times best-seller). In 2016, McNally edited the interview compilation Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews.
McNally’s debut book was Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America, published in 1979. He was the first archivist for Bill Graham Presents in 1983 and an award-winning historian of the San Francisco counterculture and music scene. He is also the author of On Highway 61: Music, Race, and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom published in 2016.
McNally’s newest book, The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties, was published in May 2025. McNally chronicles the 1960s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco and its influence in other cities, the community’s devotion to an alternative culture that rejected war, racism, and consumerism and advocated peace and a new relationship to the planet in pursuit of transcendental consciousness. McNally describes how these values were expressed in music, especially by the Grateful Dead, and how this legendary band and their musical successors still influence the cultural and political landscape today.
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Sounds interesting I hope I win.
I have his first book and would love to get his second one signed along with that first book!
Currently reading ‘The Last Great Dream”. Would love to hear how he did the research for the book. Also some cool Grateful Dead stories also;.
As a longtime Deadhead and devoted reader of Dennis McNally’s work, attending this event would be deeply meaningful to me. I’ve read all of Dennis’ books and have long admired how he weaves the story of the Grateful Dead into the broader tapestry of American cultural and political history. His writing has helped me understand the band not just as musicians, but as voices of a movement — a movement rooted in community, consciousness, and creative resistance.
I’m eager to continue learning from Dennis in person, especially as his new book explores how the spirit of the sixties — and the music that carried it — continues to resonate today. Honestly, I wouldn’t be able to attend this event without support, so winning this spot would be both a gift and a rare opportunity to engage with a piece of history I hold dear.
Thanks for considering me — I’d be honored to be there.
I would love to see Dennis McNally. As a fellow history, major, I greatly respect his work, and there’s not a much more interesting topic than how the 60s changed America.
Seeing Dennis would be a perfect part of the Days Between.
Would love to hear him in person. Very interesting dear to my heart times.