Rock ScullyRock 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.
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. ?Rock?s going to be your manager,? he said.
?Hey, good luck, dude,? said the band?s guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir, according to ?Living With the Dead? (1996), the memoir Mr. Scully wrote with David Dalton.
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 ?n? roll history. They sold 35 million albums, many to self-described Deadheads committed to following the band from concert to concert, night after night.
Mr. Scully organized tours, negotiated the group?s 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.
Mr. Scully died at a hospital in Monterey, Calif., on Tuesday. He was 73. His brother, Dicken, said the cause was lung cancer.
