What the heck is a counterculture, and how can I get one started?

Dennis McNally’s The Last Great Dream (Grand Central Publishing, 2025) won’t help you recreate the 1960s – that ship has sailed. But McNally’s new book provides a clear-eyed, rear-view mirror exploration of the mid-20^th century counterculture in the United States. From poetry to politics to psychedelic music, McNally covers a wide waterfront; The Last Great Dream is a wild ride full of factoids and true folk tales from far and wide. It’s a fun and informative read for anyone intrigued by the era.

In certain circles, Dennis McNally is best known as the Grateful Dead publicist from the mid-1980s until several years after Jerry Garcia died. He’s also a published historian, with books under his belt about Jack Kerouac, the Grateful Dead, and the evolution of American culture.

The Last Great Dream weaves in Kenneth Rexroth, Mark Rothko, On the Road, Waiting for Godot, Howl, The Village Voice, the free speech movement, the Jefferson Airplane, the Avalon Ballroom, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and hundreds more characters, places, events, and creative works. It may seem daunting to explore so many avenues in one book, but McNally does so eloquently, walking a fine line midway between death-by-details and dizzying Dadaism. It’s a worthwhile trip.     

In hindsight, the through line from Duke Ellington to John Cage to Jack Kerouac to Jerry Garcia jamming on “Dark Star” seems obvious and inevitable. (Garcia once said, “I feel like I’m part of a continuous line of a certain thing in American culture, of a root… I can’t imagine myself without that.”) Likewise, there’s a direct lineage from Rexroth to Robert Hunter, and from Jackson Pollock to liquid light shows at The Fillmore. But an observer in the midst of those swirling eddies couldn’t see over the waves; it’s the hindsight from a comfortable perspective decades later that gives McNally an opportunity to tell the tale with a historical perspective. 

The many real-world characters McNally introduces throughout The Last Great Dream range from world famous to unsung, depending on your own level of familiarity with 20th Century intelligentsia, artistry, and politics. Perhaps it’s best to read much of McNally’s book as a Beat poem, living in the moment within each sentence rather than studying the time for a history exam. Especially in the first few chapters, trying to keep up with all the names without running to Wikipedia every few pages might be a fool’s errand. Go with the flow. If you get lost and want help, just turn to the “Glossary of Names” at the end. 

McNally’s research is evident in his writing. His meticulous approach includes numerous quotes from the luminaries and witnesses in The Last Great Dream, interspersed with minutia like specific addresses (Ginsberg once lived at 755 Pine Street) and dates (one of Lenny Bruce’s arrests was on April 3, 1964). The “Bibliography” and “Notes” sections at the end of the book underscore McNally’s devotion to detail and accuracy. There are literally hundreds of documented sources, including over 50 interviews and scores of books, magazine articles, and other citations. I appreciate though that McNally didn’t clutter the main text with endnote numbers, which can make for distracting reading.

It should also be noted that, like any history, the stories in this book are only as reliable as their sources. It’s possible that many of the quotes are themselves colored by the inevitable inaccuracies of recollection. That makes them no less interesting nor worthy of inclusion and gives room for the “poetic license” of assigning connection and causality to various events. McNally owns up to this in his introduction:

Cultural connections and influences are ultimately impossible to prove. Correlation is not causation, but it is often the best available evidence in these matters. I can only promise a scrupulous commitment to fairness. After all, one of the threads in this book is surrealism – which is only one of many rabbit holes that I’ve explored.

McNally’s writing is not encyclopedic or textbooky, nor does Dream read like a Tom Wolfe novel. It’s more of a series of snapshots and Post-It Notes. There is an essence akin to one of those “murder boards” a police detective creates with pieces of string and Sharpie-drawn arrows connecting names and places. It would be fun to read a hyperlinked version where you could bounce around by clicking on names. Likewise, Dream makes for good episodic reading, each chapter standing well on its own as well as in series. 

Perhaps the best thing about McNally’s approach is his penchant for stepping aside and letting his sources speak for themselves. Almost every paragraph has quotes, hundreds of voices in all. We don’t need McNally to reinterpret, for instance, Lawrence Ferlinghetti; the poet’s words stand on their own when he says the West Coast was, “not only the last frontier, but also the place where the Orient begins, where the Far East begins again.” In his role as author, McNally paints an ever-expanding, four-dimensional mural using the colors and shapes given him by those many sung and unsung sources. 

Even so, he does make poignant observations from time to time. For instance, he notes that, “At least initially, drug taking, either in Berkeley or San Francisco, was as much an act of rebellion as of indulgence.“ McNally follows that up with quotes from prominent leaders of the era pretty much saying the same thing (he didn’t pull the notion out of thin air). Later, augmenting that initial conclusion about drug use in the counterculture, McNally writes that Timothy Leary’s Madison Avenue-esque advertising of LSD for mass consumption did “incalculable damage to anything resembling a thoughtful exploration of consciousness.”

Occasionally, the author summarizes his sources succinctly for emphasis; to wit, his comment following a quote from a New York Review of Books commentary on New York City’s Dada folk darlings the Fugs:

In other words, they were funny, but they couldn’t really play.

Stepping back now: just what is this counterculture thing McNally writes about in Dream?

In the years following World War II, San Francisco was a nexus that drew everything that was rejected or ostracized everywhere else: Asian religion and anti-religion, surrealism and sexual freedom, communism and libertarianism, intellectualism, and a uniquely American version of antidisestablishmentarianism. 

Why? Perhaps for no other reason than because it was there — a swath of land surrounding a bay hidden from the Pacific by fog and a narrow inlet. (There was a “there” there, despite what Gertrude Stein said about Oakland.) Even in the mid-20th century, San Francisco was a vast “Outside Land” still undefined and untamed. It was still a frontier in nearly every regard. 

Los Angeles meanwhile was home to a beacon of eternal sunshine that likewise drew creative moths to its celluloid flame. An amalgam of health consciousness, an experiential ethos (this was, after all, the birthplace of Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception”), and artistic appreciation that encompassed the still-novel cinema industry simmered in subculture L.A. like hot summer beach sand. 

And don’t forget (who could forget?) New York City! The pre- and postwar influx of jazz was just one of many organisms blooming in the Petri dish of Gotham. It’s no coincidence that Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac swam in the confluence of bebop and bohemia. You could be anything in New York. And that proposition had many takers. 

In these milieus, the arts in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s were stretching beyond experimentation into realms that required new definitions – or eschewed and obliterated definitions completely. John Cage wrote “4’33,” a three-movement piece devoid of any actual instrumentation. (It’s not a “silent” piece though; listen to the room. There is a “there” there.) Jackson Pollock covered canvases with nothing but drips of paint. Joseph Campbell preached against the superiority of one culture over another – and whether from his writing or via their own sources, a generation of poets, artists, and dreamers learned that walls were for tearing down, rules were for suckers and sheeple, and authenticity demanded not just creativity but also destruction. Shiva was ascendant. 

It’s also worth noting that in those days, nobody was moving to The Village because it was “The Village.” Same with North Beach (or later, the Haight) in San Francisco, and also Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Artists, writers and musicians moved to those places in the ‘50s because rents were cheap and conformity held less currency. And unlike today, with an internet that provides avenues of individualism stemming from every iPhone that wants to be in the map, there were only a few “Villages” and “North Beaches” during the mid-century era, places where flying a proverbial freak flag or exhibiting “deviant” sexual/gender identity was not certain to lead to a jail – or death – sentence.  

This is the fertile but rare earth McNally traverses to introduce The Last Great Dream. People gathering in the few places where they could express themselves – and whether that’s what drew them there or not, express themselves they did.

If there is one distinctive, seminal moment in the history McNally recounts that changed the creative world of “culture,” it might be when Ginsberg first recites “Howl” to an audience at Six Gallery on Fillmore Street. “‘Howl,’” McNally writes, “was a large rock dropped into the still pond of American poetry.” Fellow poet Michael McClure said of that evening in 1955 that they had “gone by of a point of no return…none of us wanted to go back to the gray chill, militarist silence, to the intellectual void.” 

How many of us said something similar after our first acid trip, our first Dead show, our first time meeting people with whom we shared a je ne sais quoi that we’d never experienced at home? (Ironically, as McNally notes, Ginsberg had to go to San Francisco to find an audience that would appreciate his dark poem about a bunch of New Yorkers.)

And if the recitation of “Howl” has a musical counterpart that was equally impactful, it was Bob Dylan playing a short set of electric rock ‘n’ roll at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Or maybe it was Bob Dylan turning the Beatles onto marijuana. Or Bob Dylan not playing at Woodstock, but nonetheless, casting his huge shadow over the behemoth festival of delight and disaster that gave its name to a generation. 

The times, they were a changin’. All at once, it seemed. 

And then, almost as soon as things began to bubble, the era crested – well before Woodstock, in fact. In January 1967, McNally notes that San Francisco’s “Great Human Be-In” marked the moment that, “What had been only modestly noticed to that point would now pass into legend via an astonishing media scrum.” The counterculture was no longer exclusively countercultural; for a wide swath of people under 30, it was the culture.  

Ever cynical, Hunter S. Thompson may not have been entirely wrong when he surveyed the scene in the Haight that year and painted a picture of kids flocking to the scene simply because it was a sanctuary where they could (McNally’s words) “withdraw and be stoned.” Perhaps political movements, primarily the anti-war and pro-civil rights, had yet to reach their peak, but the artistic and literary foundations McNally focuses on throughout The Last Great Dream were swiftly becoming mainstream. Or, in the case of poetry, folk music, and explorations of consciousness, were being supplanted by mass consumption of electric guitars and recreational drug use.

It is eerie and frightful being reminded of the rise of the countercultural left in the early 1960s – not because of the left itself, but because the movements that arose were a response to issues that have parallels in today’s presidential administration and Republican party. The late ‘50s and early ‘60s were marked by rightwing attacks on freedom of expression, particularly regarding universities, and by concerted efforts to thwart racial justice and equality. So many decades have passed since, such little progress. 

No wonder then that so many people today long for a revolution. Perhaps we might never again see anything as transformative and impactful as the tidal waves McNally documents in The Last Great Dream. But who can see the future? Dare we dream again?

Coming soon: Gabriel David Barkin interviews Dennis McNally about The Last Great Dream for Grateful Web.