The Deadcast concludes its dive into Robert Hunter’s 1962 book, The Silver Snarling Trumpet (and its 10th season), exploring teenage Jerry Garcia’s adventures with his friends Alan Trist and Brigid Meier in Palo Alto, and how this early scene gave way to the Grateful Dead.
by Jesse Jarnow
Robert Hunter’s The Silver Snarling Trumpet is a startling piece of lost Grateful Dead (and countercultural) history, written in 1962 and stashed away for research purposes. Documenting Hunter’s teenage friendships with Jerry Garcia, Alan Trist, Brigid Meier, and others, the book’s meticulous channeling of 1961-1962 shows how that period set the stage for the Grateful Dead. This episode picks up from Part 1, and complements our Jerry Garcia: American Folkie episode from our first season.
Not mentioned in The Silver Snarling Trumpet is San Francisco’s Cadillac Hotel, where Jerry Garcia spent part of summer 1961, and where Andy Leonard took the back cover photograph of From the Mars Hotel.
We call on a range of archival audio sources in this episode, including the wonderful Before the Dead box set, and the audiobooks for Dannis McNally’s Jerry On Jerry: The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews, and Phil Lesh’s Searching For the Sound: My Life With the Grateful Dead. Thanks as always to David Gans, too. His 1977 interview with Robert Hunter can be read in the crucial book, Conversations With the Dead.