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Rock Scully learned his mission in life at an Acid Test, one of the drug-drenched, strobe-lit parties the author Ken Kesey staged in the San Francisco area in the mid-1960s.<\/p>\n
Rock Scully learned his mission in life at an Acid Test, one of the drug-drenched, strobe-lit parties the author Ken Kesey staged in the San Francisco area in the mid-1960s.<\/p>\n
Owsley Stanley, the notoriously prodigious maker of LSD, introduced Mr. Scully in 1965 to the scraggly, zonked-out members of a band that had just changed its name from the Warlocks to the Grateful Dead. \u201cRock\u2019s going to be your manager,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cHey, good luck, dude,\u201d said the band\u2019s guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir, according to \u201cLiving With the Dead\u201d (1996), the memoir Mr. Scully wrote with David Dalton.<\/p>\n
So began a long, strange trip that saw the Dead go from a makeshift sort-of-bluegrass band that played for nothing in San Francisco parks to one of the biggest, most remarkable acts in rock \u2019n\u2019 roll history. They sold 35 million albums, many to self-described Deadheads committed to following the band from concert to concert, night after night.<\/p>\n
Mr. Scully organized tours, negotiated the group\u2019s first record contracts and successfully demanded that promoters of the Woodstock Music and Art Fair pay the group up front. In 1968, he used a bread truck to smuggle the band onto a Columbia University campus that had been shut down by student strikers. The next year, he may have arranged for Hells Angels to provide what turned out to be grossly inadequate security at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, where a man was stabbed to death as the Rolling Stones played.<\/p>\n
Mr. Scully died at a hospital in Monterey, Calif., on Tuesday. He was 73. His brother, Dicken, said the cause was lung cancer.<\/p>\n
Managing the rambunctious Grateful Dead was probably even more of a challenge than herding cats, but Mr. Scully at least had help. At its peak, Dicken Scully, who worked as the Dead\u2019s merchandise manager, said the band\u2019s management staff numbered 30. But from 1965 to 1985, Mr. Scully was always among the top five managers, his brother said, even as he sank into opiate addiction at the end of his tenure.<\/p>\n
\u201cRock was a big part of it all,\u201d Mr. Weir said in a statement. \u201cHe put in the miles with us. He knew the words to all the songs. He knew the right things to say, to tell people, to let them know what we were all about without ever actually explaining anything, because he knew it couldn\u2019t be explained.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Scully worked particularly closely with the group\u2019s other early manager, Danny Rifkin, sometimes using the old good cop-bad cop routine. \u201cI\u2019d be the hippie and sweet and nice to everybody,\u201d Mr. Scully was quoted as saying on the Dead\u2019s website after his death. \u201cBut I don\u2019t know what my partner, Danny, will say.\u201d<\/p>\n
The website praised Mr. Scully\u2019s \u201ccentral sweetness.\u201d It went on to say that if he conned you, \u201cit was almost always in the service of a higher ideal and for the best of reasons.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an interview, Mr. Dalton, Mr. Scully\u2019s co-author, called him \u201cone of the great talkers of all time.\u201d He also called him \u201ca world-champion liar\u201d with the sense of humor of \u201csomebody who had taken a lot of acid.\u201d<\/p>\n