The Silver Snarling Trumpet

August 5, 2024
In this hit-or-miss memoir—written in the early 1960s and unearthed 60 years later by Hunter’s widow and literary executor—the late Grateful Dead lyricist recalls his early relationship with future band leader Jerry Garcia. The narrative unfolds in Menlo Park, Calif., where the aimless, college-age Hunter and Garcia soak in “the scene” at the local coffeehouse, go to parties, and regale each other with half-baked philosophizing (“You’re saying that the ultimate goal in life is to find another goal.... What happens when there are no more goals?”). Scattershot attempts are made to harness the scene’s energy: a friend tries to organize a commune called the Co-op, which fizzles before it starts; Garcia and Hunter form a folk-guitar duo that soon founders due to artistic differences. Hunter’s fond snapshot of an embryonic counterculture is richly observed and rife with vibrant character sketches, though retellings of his hallucinatory dreams and meandering prose (“There is waiting; waiting for you know not what... never certain that it will come, but waiting against the day when it might”) can slow the proceedings to a crawl. Deadheads will drink this in, but more casual fans may lack the patience.

August 15, 2024
Grateful Dead lyricist Hunter recounts the dawning days of 1960s San Francisco, with hippiedom still on the horizon. In 1958, Hunter moved from the East Coast to San Francisco, where he quickly fell in with "a proto-beatnik" named Jerry Garcia who "played the guitar anywhere from twenty-four to thirty-eight hours a day," working his way through the folk songbooks and bluegrass standards to a kind of jazz that would, in time, form the underpinnings of the Dead's eclectic psychedelic sound. That was years off, though, and in the meantime Garcia and Hunter would carve their niches into a Beat community still very much alive, guided along by Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and company. Garcia, writes Hunter, was nothing if not single-minded about his music and his ideals, "and if he trod on toes, it was not from malice but because the concept that there were toes other than his had not fully entered his mind." Because the Merry Pranksters were yet to come along and drugs hadn't entered the scene, writes fellow Beatnik Brigid Meier in a lovely afterword, "spontaneous dada zaniness was highly prized as a 'high, '" with many goofy adventures in North Beach and Golden Gate Park ensuing. In one, a woman could announce that it was time for the gang to load up on cigars. In another, a barely 20-year-old Garcia could reveal what turns out to be a fairly innocent method of seduction: "sing, smile, and nod. Works damned near every time." Retrieved from a long-forgotten drawer, Hunter's memoir has a few suitably postadolescent awkwardnesses of its own, but it's mostly charming, a portrait of young people committed to creativity but not, unlike their later peers (and in many cases later selves), to self-destruction. An essential document in the Deadhead library, and a pleasure to read.

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September 20, 2024

This book might not have been published had its author not died, and if it didn't in part concern Jerry Garcia (1942-95). Hunter (1941-2019), the cofounder and longtime primary lyricist for the Grateful Dead, wisely states in a 1982 author's note included in this work that he has "no intentions of publishing this record." Written in the early 1960s when Hunter was 19, in a highly subjective novelistic or memoiristic style full of visions and spiritual ramblings, this book adds little of value to the history of the Grateful Dead. To be fair, it was not intended to, as it was written before the Grateful Dead existed and only written for the eyes of Hunter, Garcia, and their small coterie of friends. VERDICT Hardcore Deadheads or those interested in the cultural transition from Beat to hippie may find something of value here. Those looking for a more focused history of the beginnings of the Grateful Dead should turn to the early chapters of David Browne's excellent So Many Roads: The Life and Times of the Grateful Dead.--Derek Sanderson

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