Robert Hunter was never actually a member of the Grateful Dead. But as the primary writing partner for their singer/guitarist/guru Jerry Garcia (Hunter with the words, Garcia the music), he had a heavy hand in constructing both the lore and the repertoire of this most Cultish of Cult Bands.
“Dark Star,” “Ripple,” “Truckin’” “Dire Wolf,” “China Cat Sunflower,” “Terrapin Station” and the words of many, many others flowed from his head. He also worked with other members like Bob Weir (“Sugar Magnolia”) and Phil Lesh (“Box of Rain”).
So close was his association with the group that when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994, Hunter was included in the honors—the only non-performer to ever be enshrined with a band to date. He was also a poet and singer/guitarist himself.
By 1962 at the ripe old age of 19-20 he had already met Garcia, their initial encounter at a playhouse where the future Head Dead was a volunteer lighting technician. In real time, Hunter began jotting notes about their daily lives with a rotating cast of characters, weirdos, bohemians, intellectuals and proto-hippies.
The kind of group where everything was crashing at each other’s pads, hanging out (a lot) at Kepler’s Bookstore in Menlo Park, and making grand pronouncements about history and The State of the World.
And lingering over sharing a single cup of coffee at a local place for hours and hours (much to the consternation of the coffeehouse’s owner). No one seemed to have a “real” job and the group was mostly male, but there was something on the horizon.
Part memoir, part philosophical tract, part novel, Hunter’s manuscript, begun in ’61 and finished a year later, laid unlooked at until he discovered it in 1982 and made some revisions. Then it went back into his attic for another 40 years.
And now, five years after his death at the age of 78, Deadheads can finally experience this unique chronicle officially with the publication of The Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead—The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter (256 pp., $32, Hachette Books).
Hunter’s early impressions of Garcia showcase the writer’s inner wit and powers of interpretive observation. “He [Garcia] practiced guitar anywhere from 24 to 38 hours a day” Hunter wrote at the time, noting his friend often indulged in the “act of being Jerry.”
“He had the easygoing self-assurance of a person who is used to being forgiven for any gaucheness he might choose to perpetuate on his contemporaries, so he committed them with an amazing regularity and a completely innocent conscience,” Hunter writes. Casting Garcia as a sort of a white, bearded Urkel noting “Did I do thaaaat?”
Hunter’s writing style in retelling anecdotes is, well, exactly what it is: the sometimes-precocious ruminations of a man in his very early 20s with literary ambitions and the detachment of an observer but also the involvement of a participant. But what sounds like it could be a lot of pretentious poppycock is actually often full of witticisms and social analysis.
One remembrance has Hunter and Garcia offering a friend increasingly ludicrous observations and connections between artists, writers and musicians that didn’t exist in reality. The friend—not wanting to appear “not in the know” or being intellectually one-upped—slowly agrees to the observation as if he had really known it all along. And when he corrects an obvious falsity, the passion of Hunter and Garcia’s denials eventually force him to change his own mind.
Hunter and Garcia would also a few times perform as a folk duo, usually for appreciative college crowds. Hunter marvels at Garcia’s emerging confidence not just as a player and singer, but raconteur to audiences hanging on his every word, ready to sing the chorus of “Down by the Riverside” louder at his urging.
Their circle of friends continues to meet, wax philosophical, drink wine, and try to untangle the mysteries of the universe while listening to Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé (drugs, even pot, weren’t really part of their lives just yet). These scenes often run together, and the reader will alternate between thoughts of “Wow, that makes sense” to “Oh, please…”
Hunter undoubtedly recreates dialogue among himself and his friends throughout, but with the eye of a storyteller. Like when, on a road trip, one friend recognizes the scores of paranoid cigarette butts on the road, musing that millions must exist all over the world. And how, one day, they might all rise up against us.
Eventually, the endless house parties on shoestring or no budgets, manic chattering, and aimlessness of “the Scene” gets to Garcia. He grows disillusioned after getting a job at a music store, perhaps seeing a future path for himself actually involved making a living playing music. Hunter starts to feel the same way about his burgeoning writing.
The Scenesters drift apart, probably knowing even then that the freedom of youth in such a specific and limited time could never come again, nor ever be recreated.
Jerry Garcia is the only member of the Grateful Dead who appears in The Silver Snarling Trumpet, so those looking for an “early days” bio of the band (despite the book’s subtitle) won’t find it here. The group formed in Palo Alto, California under that name wouldn’t emerge until that moniker until 1965.
But for those looking for insight into Garcia’s early young mind, as well as that of Hunter’s and the “scene” that spawned them, it’s a fascinating look at the prototype of what would become an entire culture on its own. With Jerry Garcia as its lodestar and Robert Hunter as its wordsmith.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
