The Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead--The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter

The legendary lost manuscript of Grateful Dead co-founder and primary lyricist Robert Hunter, written in the early 1960s—a wry, richly observed, and enlightening remembrance of "the scene" in Palo Alto that gave rise to incredible partnership of Hunter and Jerry Garcia, and to the Grateful Dead, with a Foreword by John Mayer, an Introduction by Dennis McNally, and an Afterword by Brigid Meier.
 
"Strange to think back on those days when it was perfectly natural that we all slept on the floor in one small room.... These were the days before practical considerations, matters of ‘importance,’ began to eat our minds. We were all poets and philosophers then, until we began to wonder why we had so few concrete worries and went out to look for some."
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So writes Robert Hunter in The Silver Snarling Trumpet, both a singular work of art and the missing piece of the Grateful Dead origin story. In these pages, readers are privy to the early days of Hunter, Garcia, and their cohorts, who sit at the coffee shop passing around a single cup of bottomless coffee because they lacked the funds for more than one. Follow these truth-seeking souls into the stacks at Kepler’s Books, renting instruments at Swain’s House of Music, and through the countryside on road trips. Witness impromptu jams, inspired intellectual pranks, and a dialogue that is, by turns, amusing and brilliant and outrageous. Hunter shares his impressions of his first gig with Garcia for a college audience, along with descriptions of his most intense dreams and psychedelic explorations. All of it, enlivened by Hunter’s visionary existentialism and profound ideas about creativity and collaboration.

The lost manuscript is augmented with a Foreword by John Mayer, an Introduction by Dennis McNally, and an Afterword by Brigid Meier, who was part of the scene in the San Francisco Bay Area that served as a bridge from the beatniks to the hippies. Also included is Hunter’s own 1982 assessment of his work—about how he shared it with close confidants but then decided to leave it unpublished. Now that the text has been found, readers and fans of Hunter’s indelible poetry and song will see the origin of his genius and his craft.