To celebrate the Deadcast’s 100th episode, we begin a 2-part special joined by the co-stars of Robert Hunter’s newly-published 1962 book, the Silver Snarling Trumpet, a startling in-the-moment account of his and Jerry Garcia’s formative years in Palo Alto.
Robert Hunter’s The Silver Snarling Trumpet, part 1, supplementary notes
by Jesse Jarnow
Written in 1962 and hidden away for more than a half-century, Robert Hunter’s The Silver Snarling Trumpet is an extraordinary piece of lost Grateful Dead history. A document of Hunter’s early friendship with Jerry Garcia, Alan Trist, Brigid Meier, and others, it captures the first spark of energy that transformed into the Grateful Dead a few years later, set down virtually as it happened.
In May, Hachette will publish Dennis McNally’s The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties, his broader cultural history of the beat-to-freak period documented in the Silver Snarling Trumpet.
Along with our interviews with Brigid Meier and Alan Trist, this episode of the Deadcast draws on several archival sources, including two that can be purchased as audiobooks, Dennis McNally’s Jerry on Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews and Phil Lesh’s Searching For the Sound: My Life in the Grateful Dead.