Madison BookBeat
Madison BookBeat
Stu Levitan, Andrew Thomas, Sara Batkie, David Ahrens, Lisa Malawski
Dennis McNally, "The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties."
1 hour 21 minutes Posted Jun 30, 2026 at 4:22 am.
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McNally transcript
Stu Levitan welcomes historian, author and music publicist Dennis McNally, whose new book is The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties. And while it’s mainly about San Francisco, with a bit of New York and London thrown in, it does feature several individuals and events pertaining directly to Madison. So that’s why you get to hear about it here. Dennis’s first book was include Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America, an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; then came  A Long Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead, which he wrote after serving many years as the band’s publicist; and in 2015 the award-winning On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom, tracking American music from minstrelsy to Bob Dylan. He also edited Jerry on Jerry, transcripts of conversations he had over the years with Jerry Garcia. Here’s our conversation about The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties.