Former Grateful Dead Manager Rock Scully Dies at 73

Rock Scully has passed on.

The former manager of the Grateful Dead died Tuesday at 73 near his home in Monterey, according to the Monterey Herald. He had been battling lung cancer.

Scully managed the band for 20 years, from when he first heard the band at a Ken Kesey acid test, those infamous happenings in which attendees received a dose of LSD as well as a dose of music, until 1985.

Scully had a "mischievous sense of adventure" and was "full of wonder and curiousity," attributes that served him well as the man in charge of an outfit as weird, wild and woolly as the Dead, according to guitarist Bob Weir.

He also "lived 'the hippie ethos' of peace and love every day of his life, like nobody I've ever met before," said David Bean, a Big Sur-based promoter.

A Carmel native, who met current U.S. Congressman Sam Farr in sixth grade at Sunset School, he had studied German literature before deciding to go into music after a ski trip to Squaw Valley, the newspaper reported.

It was Farr to whom Scully announced that he'd be manager of a new band, with a new name. The Grateful Dead. At the time, Farr thought it was "the nuttiest thing I've heard heard," the congressman told the newspaper.

Copyright FREEL - NBC Local Media
Contact Us