The website praised Mr. Scully’s “central sweetness.” It went on to say that if he conned you, “it was almost always in the service of a higher ideal and for the best of reasons.”

In an interview, Mr. Dalton, Mr. Scully’s co-author, called him “one of the great talkers of all time.” He also called him “a world-champion liar” with the sense of humor of “somebody who had taken a lot of acid.”

Rock Robert Scully was born in Seattle on Aug. 1, 1941, exactly a year before Jerry Garcia, the Dead’s lead guitarist and singer. His parents, Robert and Dorothy Scully, named him Rock after his great-grandfather’s beloved horse. They divorced when he was 6, and that same day his mother married Milton Mayer, whose distinctions included being placed on permanent probation at the University of Chicago for throwing beer bottles out a dormitory window and writing the book “They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45,” which told of a group of ordinary people in Nazi Germany.

As a youth, Mr. Scully shuttled between Carmel, Calif., and Europe, where Mr. Mayer often worked, and graduated from a Swiss boarding school. After graduating from Earlham College in Indiana in 1963, he did graduate work in history at San Francisco State University. In 1964, he participated in protests against local employers who discriminated against blacks. He was arrested for disturbing the peace and spent 30 days in jail.

His brother said that after coming to the conclusion that the civil rights movement needed musical relief, Mr. Scully “joined the circus.” He organized dances at his graduate school and managed the Charlatans, one of the first groups to combine rock, folk, country, jug band and blues influences in what became known as the San Francisco sound. He joined the Family Dog, a gaggle of hippies who promoted concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom.

He also fell in with a crowd, including leather workers, smugglers and musicians like Janis Joplin, that hung out at a clothes shop, Mnasidika, at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury Streets. “We didn’t even know we were hippies,” Peggy Caserta, the proprietor of the store, said in an interview, though it is said to have been the place where the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen first thought to use the word in a column, to apply to devotees of the new counterculture.