Steve Silberman’s vocation as a Grateful Dead scholar and writer began organically, on a blanket on the grass at a concert in the sun. He happened to sit next to Blair Jackson and Regan McMahon, publishers of “The Golden Road,” an essential fan magazine.
“Steve wasn’t just a fan who ran off at the mouth about how many shows he had seen,” recalled McMahon of that chance meeting. “He had all these layers of spiritual and countercultural depth.
Everything he said about the Grateful Dead was intellectual and perceptive and poetic.”
By the end of that afternoon, Silberman had been invited to contribute an article to “The Golden Road” and that led to the high honor of writing liner notes for albums and box sets, and ultimately co-authoring the episodic glossary, “Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads.”
Silberman was known for wearing a custom T-shirt to a Halloween show bearing the message “Your Hallucinations Are My Costume,” and for his skill at putting cultural, scientific and medical complexity into common language, which he did during decades as a science journalist and in his 500-page treatise, “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity” published in 2015.
He spent four years on that project, followed by six years becoming an expert on cystic fibrosis. An upcoming book titled “The Taste of Salt,” was scheduled for publication in 2026. Silberman was to Silberman Chronicle obit.rtf the point of submitting chapters to his editor when he died suddenly at his home in San Francisco on Aug. 29. Cause of death was an apparent heart attack, said his husband Keith Karraker.
“Steve lived an exciting life and wrote a book that changed the world,” said Karraker. “He could walk into a grocery store and make a friend for life with the counter guy, just from commenting on the music playing on the stereo.”
Silberman also made friends for life by starting and maintaining a Facebook group titled “Cole Valley, a Not-So-Secret SF Neighborhood.” It has 8,000 members, including his sister Hillary Shawaf and mother Leslie, both of whom moved here from the East Coast based on Silberman’s recommendation.
“He just loved this beautiful small-town neighborhood on the N Judah line,” said Karraker, a high school chemistry teacher. “Steve created a town square for the neighborhood,” added his sister. “One of the greatest talents he had was keeping it civil.”
Silberman spent many years as an editor and writer for Wired magazine, but perhaps his greatest creative outlet was the Dead, having seen his first Dead show in 1973 at Watkins Glen, N.Y. He also developed an expertise on Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and became a close friend and confidante of the often-difficult David Crosby. He wrote the liner notes for the Crosby-Nash live album “Another Stoney Evening,” released in 1998, and the 50th anniversary edition of Crosby’s solo debut “If I Could Only Remember My Name,” from 1971.
“He understood people,” Shawaf said of her brother. “Making human connections was his life blood. When he walked down the street people approached him constantly.”
After the death of Jerry Garcia, in 1995, Silberman wrote an essay called “The Only Song of God,” that was originally published in Dupree’s Diamond News. In it, Silberman described walking by the Henry J. Kaiser Auditorium in Oakland after Garcia’s death, where he estimated he had seen 40 of the 56 shows the Dead played there, often on weeknights when only the cognoscenti came.
Silberman in an undated photo at the Oakland home of Regan McMahon and Blair Jackson, publishers of “The Golden Road,” an essential Grateful Dead fan magazine. He met them at a concert and soon became a contributor.
“If you weren’t from the Bay Area, after three or four shows at Kaiser, eventually, you’d move here,” wrote
Silberman, who had followed that migration himself, though he had the extra incentive of earning a master’s degree in English literature at UC Berkeley.
His tryout with “The Golden Road” explored the connection between the Beat anti-hero Neal Cassady and the Grateful Dead, a connection that the band’s historian and publicist, Dennis McNally also visited in his biography of Jack Kerouac.
“Steve was always willing to chat about some angle of the 60s music scene in general and was a very reliable source,” said McNally. “What he said was trustworthy.”
Stephen Louis Silberman was born Dec. 23, 1957 in Ithaca, N.Y. His father, Donald, was an English professor at Queensborough Community College and an anti-war activist, as was his wife, Leslie Hantman.
“We saw my parents get arrested and be led away in handcuffs,” said Shawaf. “My dad did 11 days at the Queens Detention Center.”
Silberman’s first literary goal was to be a poet and he had success in sixth grade with a poem called “the
Math Battle.” It began, “Cubes are swirling through my head, π’s attack me in my bed,” and built enough momentum to win a poetry competition sponsored by Fordham University. That became his first published work. Silberman attended John P. Stevens High School in Edison, NJ., and gave a graduation speech in 1975, declining to cut his shoulder-length hair for the ceremony.
Seen here in an undated photo, Silberman helped author David Gans write a collection of reminiscences about Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead co-founder and guitarist.
“He was a magnificent human being,” Gans says of Silberman.
By then he was already a Deadhead, having attended his first show and begun a live concert tape collection that was to include “tons and tons and tons of tapes,” said his sister, “and some very obscure ones.” He had also come out as gay, which was not immediately accepted.
“My parents reacted very badly. It took some years for them to come around,” Shawaf said.
He attended Oberlin College in Ohio, and his slow migration west began with a position as a teaching assistant for Beat poet Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo. Silberman planned to continue as a poet himself until his father, the English professor, advised him that “he was better at prose and would reach more people that way,” said his sister.
He also reached people by helping them with their own writing. After Garcia’s death, David Gans, who has published five books about the Grateful Dead, was having trouble putting together a collection of reminiscences. When he told Silberman of his struggles over the phone, Silberman immediately drove from San Francisco to Gans’s home in Oakland, read through Gans’s essay, tore it apart and restructured it for him.
“That was one of dozens of times Steve improved my work with his generosity of spirit and his wisdom,” said Gans. “I know dozens of other people who were similarly blessed with Steve’s generosity. He was a magnificent human being.”
Later, Silberman, Gans and Blair Jackson co-produced. “So Many Roads 1965-1995,” a five-CD box for which Silberman wrote an essay. He also appeared on camera in the 2017 documentary “Long Strange Trip.”
Silberman on vacation in Europe in 2023. “He really brought empathy and compassion to a topic that had only been covered negatively in the press,” says Shannon Rosa, whose son Leo was featured in Silberman’s book about autism.
“There are Deadheads who are extreme but Steve had a historic overview that made his observations sensible and a little more grounded than some,” said McNally.
Silberman’s expertise on autism began when he was working at Wired and got a tip that there was a spike in diagnoses of the developmental disorder in Silicon Valley. This became an article called “The Geek Syndrome,” published in 2001, and greatly expanded in “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.”
“Steve’s book gave hope to a lot of families like ours that had only had messages that our lives would be one of doom and gloom,” said Shannon Rosa of Redwood City, whose son Leo is featured in the book.
“He really brought empathy and compassion to a topic that had only been covered negatively in the press. I
can’t tell you how many families I’ve heard from whose lives have been changed for the better because Steve showed us with compassion, not pity.”
That came through in everything Silberman wrote, especially the essay on seeing the Dead at Kaiser Auditorium.
“At shows in those years, up at the front on ‘the rail’ where you could observe the musicians at work, the crowds could get so dense on a Saturday night that you would lose your footing,” Silberman wrote in Dupree’s Diamond News. “But if you relaxed, you could nearly float, like a cell in a bath of nutrient, the rhythms coming to you as a gentle push in one direction, then another...”
“It was one of the safest places in the world.”

51 years ago tonight I saw The Stones for the first time. I can remember wondering if they would be any good - Mick Jagger had just turned 30, and they seemed like a bit of 60's throwback. Perish the thought. I only new about 25% of the songs - I'd never heard either Let It Bleed or Exile on Main Street but it mattered not a jot. It was incredible. I have just been listening to "The Brussels Affair" double album from the same tour, and featuring the same songs. One of the best live albums of all time.

I don't think I've ever seen a hummingbird. In Lowestoft we have great big seagulls - I swear they are getting bigger every year - and during summer, if anyone eats food on the seafront they sometimes swoop down and take it out it out of their hands. It looks great, the surprise on the people's face when it happens. The most rock n' roll bird I have seen.

Stupid bear kept raiding my bird feeder so I had to very begrudgingly get rid of it. In the summer I got birds from as far as S America heading for AK. Now all I can do is have a Hummingbird feeder, which is cool, but I never seem to have more than one regular at a time. Right now he's green with a red head, the second, not sure what happened to the first. Read somewhere that they are the most territorial birds of all, maybe that's why I only get one at a time? Anyway, they are fascinating little guys aren't they

Joan Baez sang Mickey Hart Happy Birthday before the start of 9/11/81 at the Greek. They brought a big birthday cake out on stage. My favorite Grateful Dead years were when Mickey Hart was in the band.

R.I.P. Steve Silberman

Happy B~Day Mickey Hart

Can't wait to bang along with Mick & Bill on that wave drum when it gets here!

Love our Hummingbirds. They are still alive, well and fighting over the food in the three feeders here, but not for long (again except for the stragglers that are migrating).

Don't know any GD references for Hummingbirds, but I bet there is at least one. The closest I can come is the Nuthatch. A tiny bird, wings a mile long? I guess you wouldn't need binoculars looking for the Hunter Nuthatch.

Eyes of the World:
Wondering where the nut-thatch winters
Wings a mile long just carried the bird away

Love that lyric full of whimsical imagery.

Love that song, sometimes it feels like it was written about any one of us. A song with hope for tomorrow. Hope that what we do makes a difference and than any one of us can and does make the world a better place.

Listening to it can completely change my mood and turn a shit day into something meaningful. Come to think of it, a charm of Hummingbirds can do the same. (they call a group of hummingbirds a charm, how apt)

Favorite Eyes of the World, impossible to pick. Louisville 6/18/74 and Winterland 10/19/74 are both standouts, but there are many post hiatus, with Brent and beyond Brent hold their own amongst the giants.

Two weeks until the box? I guess that will have to be ok.

Where do nuthatches winter? It's a trick question, if there's ample cones and food they probably won't migrate at all. (at least here in the mid-Atlantic)

The wife gets the hummingbird close-ups as she is a natural strawberry blonde. Here in W. Colo. they are mostly gone and the few migrators we have are young ones, mostly Black Chinned and Rufous with the occasional Broad Tailed that make the most noise in flight because of that tail. The Rufous are very territorial and come late in the season. This year they stayed for shorter periods. Usually dominate the feeder for weeks at a time but not this year.
Putting out the flag today, a somber remembrance.
Also my deadnet anniversary. Thanks to all.
Can't wait for '78! Two weeks!
Cheers

Less than two weeks to go until we all hopefully receive this box. Surprised it hasn't sold out yet.
Maybe they will give us an unboxing video?

And what is going on with this year's MUATM?

I find that often the hummers do those up face front things to let me know the feeder is low, get to it. Here they will chase each other away from the feeders, even though there's ample real nectar in various flowers around the yard, very territorial about the feeder since it's the pure jazz. Spectacular to have them hover inches away or buzz your head within inches, they also have learned to hover in front of blink cameras, perch a few feet away on a clothesline watching the feeder, preen, just be a hummer. Here, they have tanked up and are heading south.

Hummingbirds buzz by my ears in an extremely close dive bomb while I'm out on the back deck pruning my photo~period pot plants. Then as I am stunned momentarily, the lil arial acrobats proceed to float there a few feet right in front of my face, screeching up to high heaven something fierce!
Oh yeah, their little feeder is right next to my marijuana!