Tracing the Roots of Rebellion: Dennis McNally on the Legacy of the ’60s Counterculture | The Sharp Notes Interview

In The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties, author and cultural historian Dennis McNally traces the roots of the 1960s counterculture through a wide lens—beginning with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance and culminating in the Monterey Pop Festival. Known for his earlier work with the Grateful Dead and his bestseller A Long Strange Trip, McNally draws together threads of beat poetry, experimental art, radical theater, and psychedelic music to examine how long-simmering tensions with mainstream American values coalesced into a movement grounded in creativity, nonconformity, and social experimentation.

In this interview, McNally reflects on the continuing relevance of that era’s ideals - environmentalism, spiritual searching, alternative lifestyles - and considers what still resonates in today’s more fragmented cultural landscape. He contrasts competing ideas of American freedom: one tied to profit, the other to expression and connection. His perspective is rooted in a lifetime of studying the bohemian tradition, and he views the 1960s not as an isolated explosion, but as part of a much longer arc of dissent and cultural reinvention.

Rather than focusing solely on well-known figures like Ginsberg or Ken Kesey, McNally’s work highlights lesser-known participants who helped shape the era. For him, telling the story of the counterculture means foregrounding the lived experience of those who stepped outside the mainstream - and asking what lessons their experiments still hold today.

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ezt: What drew you to tell this particular story now, why is The Last Great Dream especially urgent or resonant in our current moment?

dm: Every cultural (not so much political) issue that achieved significance after the ‘60s – diet, spiritual paths, a flowering of openness to sexual orientation, the relationship to the natural order – is just as relevant in 2025 as in 1967. The issues remain just as important. This book covers such a wide swath of art, music, and culture. 

ezt: Was there a central thread or emotional truth that held it all together for you as a storyteller?

dm: In America, there are two kinds of freedom (lots more, but let’s keep it simple): there is the openness to intellectual search (anti-slavery, nature as home rather than source of income) represented by Thoreau, or there is the freedom to make as much money as possible (see current resident of the White House). “The Last Great Dream” traces the blossoming of the ‘60s version of Thoreau’s path.

ezt: As someone who worked with the Grateful Dead and chronicled their history, how does this book expand or deepen your relationship with the 1960s counterculture? Did it deepen your understanding of the band, too?

dm: “TLGD” certainly puts the Haight Ashbury in some kind of context and deepens our understanding of where it all came from. And that includes the Grateful Dead, since they were a significant part of the Haight. The story of Beat painter Wally Hedrick teaching a 16 year old Jerry Garcia is sort of the archetype.

McNally with Jerry

ezt: You’ve been called a historian of the American bohemian tradition, but how do you define “bohemian,” and what qualities have remained constant across generations?

dm: Generally, Americans have supported the Protestant ethic – work hard, make money, save, invest – as a primary life guide. The bohemian ethic, by contrast, emphasizes love, creativity, “soul” as the best goals rather than material ones.

ezt: From the San Francisco Renaissance to the Monterey Pop Festival, your book spans

transformative decades. What surprised you most in revisiting these eras with fresh eyes?

dm: What surprised me was that somehow all the values of the anarchistic Rexroth, the mystical Robert Duncan, and the newly liberated veterans at the S.F. Art Institute (then the California School of the Arts) came together over the end of the 1950s and early 1960s) and attached themselves to the new music of the Airplane, Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and so forth. At peak, at Monterey, it was pretty close to magical.

McNally Lectures in California

ezt: Many of the figures in your book were young when they helped change history. Do you think it’s possible for the youth today to tap into that same sense of creative rebellion? Or, has the landscape fragmented too much?

dm: Our culture is indeed fragmented, to the point that people’s information sources are, to use a current phrase, silo-ed. And much of the information in which we seemingly drown every day is false. And there’s simply too much to digest.

ezt: The book includes not just famous figures like Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey, but lesser-known trailblazers. Why was it important to highlight these “unsung heroes” of the counterculture? How do you approach writing history that balances the big-picture narrative with the vivid, messy humanity of individual characters?

dm: Great question. It goes to one’s sense of reality; we have all sorts of famous names doing various things in Washington, and to describe this time without making note of those actions would be oblivious. But day to day life has a very different focus, and without examples of individual lives, you might as well write history with AI. Without humanity, the story is pointless.

ezt: You write about people rejecting American myths in favor of creativity, love, and peace. What parallels do you see between then and now?

dm: The environmental movement battles on, as does Black Lives Matter. David Hogg, the young activist who survived a massacre at Douglas H.S. in Florida, is engaged in resistance to the worship of guns. As time went on, many of the values of the Haight found expression in things like Erewhon, a legitimate business that sold organic food. Those parallels remain.

ezt: The title of your book - and the themes - inspire me to recall Hunter S. Thompson’s famous quote from Fear and Loathing:

“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.” 

How does that quote resonate with you today? Has the high water mark been bettered since then, or are we still grappling to reach a moment in time that will never quite return?

dm: Hunter generated great quotes, but he had a fairly short-term viewpoint. Things, as I hope my other answers have made clear, don’t just stop. They generate more or less activity in the stew of human life, but the human desire for “love, peace” and so forth….that does not go away. I speak especially as a grandparent to two smart, sensitive college students, Julian and Elias.