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- [00:05]
Rich Mahan
The Good Old Grateful Dead Cast the official Podcast of the Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarno exploring the music and legacy of the Grateful Dead for the committed and the curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome to season 10 of the Good Old Grateful Dead cast. I'm your co host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of the Good Old Grateful Dead Cast, we continue our exploration of the new manuscript from Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, the Silver Snarling Trumpet and dive further into its incredible tales of the early pre Grateful Dead scene down in Palo Alto, California. Hey now. The 2025 season of Dave's Picks is on sale now. Dave's Picks is the quarterly vault releases of classic Grateful Dead concerts now heading into its 14th season. Subscriptions to the Dave's Picks series are Open now@dead.net and subscribing is a great way to ensure you'll be well stocked with killer sounding, professionally remastered Dead shows to help celebrate the dead 60th anniversary year. Check out the benefits of being a Dave's Picks subscriber. You get four limited edition numbered releases. You get the highly collectible bonus disc with each release, which you can't get if you aren't a subscriber and you get free domestic shipping with the releases delivered throughout the year. Only 25,000 copies of each show are printed and once they're gone, they're gone. The only way to ensure you get a copy is to subscribe, so head over to dead.net and subscribe to the 2025 Dave's Picks series. Today. Head on over to dead.netdeadcast and check out all of our past episodes, including the complete seasons one through nine. And you can link from there to your favorite podcasting platform so you can listen how, where and when you like to listen. Please help this podcast by subscribing. Share us with your friends on social media. Hit that like button and leave us a review. Thank you very much. Hey, do you have a great tour story you'd like to share with us? Well, do it over at stories.dead.net Record yourself telling about that epic road trip. Best show you ever saw. You just may hear yourself on a future episode of the Dead Cast. Do it. We have transcripts from many of your favorite Dead Cast episodes available for your reading pleasure. Head over to dead.netdeadcast index and check them out. Ever want to learn what Jerry did leading up to the formation of the Grateful Dead? The Silver Snarling Trumpet, the new recently released manuscript written by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter is a great place to start. And it's loaded with tales of the pre Grateful Dead scene down the peninsula from San Francisco in Palo Alto. Get ready to hear tales about the key players in their group, find out what they were up to and how their early experiences led them from the beat scene down the path to hippie and ultimately to form the greatest band in the world. Here's part two of our look into this amazing manuscript and here's Jesse Jarno.
- [03:42]
Jesse Jarno
Today on this 101st episode of the good old Grateful Dead cast, we continue to hang out in the long and beautiful frozen moment captured in Robert Hunter's extraordinary book, the Silver Snarling the Birth of the Grateful Dead, written in 1962 and published this fall by Hachette. We'll be picking up roughly where we left off last time. That's Jerry Garcia in 1961 performing at the Boar's Head, a performance space opened by Rodney Albin in San Carlos, just north of Palo Alto. A story we talked about in more detail with David Nelson in our Jerry Garcia American Folkie episode.
- [04:40]
Robert Hunter
Cause the gal that I'm going with tells everything that I know My Lord tells.
- [04:49]
Jesse Jarno
And this is something to stress again about the silver snarling trumpet. Its action takes place in a very small window of time from early 1961 through early 1962. It's before the Grateful Dead, before the Warlocks, before LSD, before Mother McCree's Uptown Jug champions, before Jerry Garcia even played banjo.
- [05:19]
Robert Hunter
That's like an old piano.
- [05:23]
Jesse Jarno
Garcia's playing a 12 string acoustic guitar on these recordings, the story of which we'll hear in this episode. In the summer of 1961, Jerry Garcia had only been playing acoustic guitar seriously for about a year, having picked up the fundamentals of finger picking from a ne'er do well friend during his stint in the army in 1960. He was making up for lost time or finding new time, however you want to describe it. Here's one way Robert Hunter captured 18 year old Jerry Garcia. Just as most people are never seen without their clothes on, Jerry was never seen without a guitar. He was marvelously uninhibited about playing it and singing in his husky semi tenor whenever the occasion presented itself, or even if the occasion did not present itself, he was too immersed in his art to worry seriously about occasions.
- [06:25]
Robert Hunter
My race is run beneath the sun oh hell is waiting for me.
- [06:34]
Jesse Jarno
For.
- [06:34]
Robert Hunter
I have murdered that dear little girl by the name of Rose Tonaline.
- [06:41]
Jesse Jarno
One of the things that blew me away about the Dead When I discovered them and still blows me away is how they could move into a new musical identity each year. And when I heard the before the Dead box set, I was shocked to discover that this constant change was Jerry Garcia's creative mode from the very start. It can be seen even in the tiny window of the silver snarling trumpet. Last episode, we heard some about the fledgling folk duo Bob and Jerry.
- [07:08]
Robert Hunter
Well, I got a home in that rock, don't you see, don't you see? Well, I got a home in that rock, don't you see? Well, between the earth and sky, Lord, I heard my savior cry. You better get home in that rock, don't you.
- [07:24]
Jesse Jarno
Also in the silver snarling trumpet. Spoiler. If you want to jump ahead a minute or two is the moment that Jerry Garcia breaks up Bob and Jerry. He tells Hunter, I feel like I'm being held back. Not that we don't hit it off pretty well as a duet, but that's established now. In fact, stagnating. I want to move ahead. Welcome back, Grateful that historian Dennis McNally.
- [07:48]
Dennis McNally
Presumably a lessening of his status. And yet it's the truth. Garcia, as he puts it, was playing anywhere from 24 to 48 hours a day in a way that was going to result in the guitarist we knew. And although Hunter would play a little mandolin and some of the bluegrass bands and whatnot. But it was clear that Hunter was words and Jerry was music. And it took them a while to recognize that they were full partners. But Jerry could make the hard decision that this was the right thing to do and yet not make it so that he lost his friendship and his relationship with Hunter. And that's rare and exceptional and for which we are all very grateful.
- [08:36]
Robert Hunter
Rich man dies, he lives so well, don't you see? Rich man dies, he lives so well, don't you see? Rich man dies, lives so well. When he died at home and hill he had alone in that rock, don't you see.
- [08:50]
Jesse Jarno
The cast of the silver snarling trumpet is made out of seekers. And there was a lot to be sought by teenagers. In 1961, Northern California was already peppered with slightly older cohorts of bohemians. Alan Trist was spending a gap year in the area while his father was on a Stanford fellowship.
- [09:07]
Alan Trist
We were youngsters, 17 and 18. This is another generation. We didn't meet them until later, but we certainly were hunting around for characters that might be that way. For instance, I remember we went down once, Garcia and others, to Monterey, looking for Henry Miller. We just said, well, if we go To Monterey. Maybe we can find Henry Miller. We have that kind of an inquisitive curiosity. When people are too good in this.
- [09:40]
Robert Hunter
World, they have to be put under lock and key.
- [09:44]
Alan Trist
There's something wrong with people who are too good. I remember going on some walking trip around some hills in Palo Alto. Is that the foothills or something? Looking for some American poet. I forget who he was. We actually found his and then and sort of knocked on the door and he was very gracious and we had a spend an afternoon.
- [10:05]
Jesse Jarno
That would be the poet Kenneth Patchen.
- [10:07]
Robert Hunter
The evening slowly turns to black stone.
- [10:11]
Dennis McNally
And the hammer of God chips at the sky making stars.
- [10:18]
Robert Hunter
A child stands on the road watching us upon her forehead is the yellow brand of this plague summer.
- [10:28]
Jesse Jarno
Please welcome back Brigid Meyer.
- [10:30]
Brigid Meyer
One of the books I got for my birthday at that birthday party. The City Lights Pocket edition of the Poems of Kenneth Passion. He was our local literary luminary. He had Parkinson's. He was not well, but he was irascible and opinionated and interesting. And he excused to go hang out.
- [10:52]
Jesse Jarno
The Chateau was the party house in Menlo park that we talked about last time. It was a central hangout.
- [10:58]
Brigid Meyer
It was party central. Yeah. I don't know where the money came from. I can remember riding my bike to the dam Chateau uphill.
- [11:10]
Alan Trist
Danville Road is where I lived, beautiful little street. And then the Chateau was just up the hill from there, you know, so it was all very close.
- [11:19]
Jesse Jarno
Immediately off Sand Hill Road, behind Allen's house as it were, was Perry Lane. Perry Lane was a small enclave often rented out by members of Stanford's graduate writing program.
- [11:30]
Brigid Meyer
My parents had friends on Perry Lane. I mean, I remember going there as a child and hanging out with different people who were in the writing program, the Stanford program. And so it was so interesting that this next iteration was sort of my cohort, maybe a little bit older that then took over from that.
- [11:55]
Jesse Jarno
Sand Hill road where Alan Trist lived for a year is now known for being Silicon Valley's most notorious corridor of venture capital and private equity firms. A strip that begins just two blocks from where this story takes place.
- [12:08]
Alan Trist
My father was on a sabbatical institute as JV with Stanford at the time. And I had a place where I could go the night, although I didn't often always go there. And Jerry would often come back and crash at my place too, you know. And that was actually the only other occasion when we had a connection with the pranksters. The house that my parents had, the backyard was very small, backed onto the backyard of the House in Perry Lane where Keezy lived.
- [12:42]
Jesse Jarno
Born in 1935, the novelist Ken Kesey was seven years older than Jerry Garcia and Alan Trist. As a Stanford grad student, Kesey took up with the other writers on Perry Lane. Though Trist and Garcia were comfortable making older friends, it didn't always work out as planned.
- [12:59]
Alan Trist
We heard a party going on there one night, A jury was staying with me and I said, let's go and gate crash that one, you know. So we walked around the Perry Lane and we knocked on the door and Kesey and Babs answered the door and it was quite a party going on, but we weren't allowed in. We were thrown out unceremoniously as a bunch of young bums, you know. That was the first connection I think anyone ever had with Keezy and Babs was teenagers. We figured it out later.
- [13:30]
Jesse Jarno
This story had to have taken place in 1961, just months before Ken Kesey published his best selling debut novel, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to wide acclaim. It would be a few years before Garcia and Kesey reconnected in the early days of the acid tests. They did make one important connection in Kesey's scene, though.
- [13:48]
Alan Trist
I don't know that we had any relationship to the energies that created Cuckoo's Nest, but I do remember that if you're talking about what connection the Pranksters might we have had? The one I remember most was Paige Browning, who was kind of like the den mother at the chateau. He was like a little older than us. He was a prankster generation. At all those times of the chateau, he was very much present and a guide, actually. He'd been in that bohemian world for some time. We hooked up with the Chateau and with Paige. I think Page Browning might have been the one who introduced Jerry to Kesey and so on later down the line.
- [14:38]
Jesse Jarno
It was in 1961 as well, even before the publication of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, that Neil Cassidy began to connect to the scene around town. He was already well known for being the inspiration for Dean Moriarty in On the Road and was living in nearby Mountain View, now known as the home of first and Foremost Shoreline Amphitheater and also another locally grown organization called Google. This encounter may have taken place slightly later, but Brigid Meyer encountered Cassidy during her years in Palo Alto, introduced by Joan Avakovich, the slightly older friend we discussed last episode, who also gave Pigpen his first harmonica.
- [15:14]
Brigid Meyer
Somebody said, oh, you've got to meet Neil Cassidy. And of course from age 13 on, I had Been in love with Dean Moriarity, right? It's like, oh, wow. So he said, well, he's here. We get in the car with him and he starts driving literally 100 miles an hour down El Camino. And I'm not sure I've ever been that frightened in my life, you know. And he seemed to be totally hopped up on one thing or another. And I thought, this guy's nuts. He's crazy. I'm getting out of here. So I at a stoplight, which I can't believe he actually saw, I said, I gotta go, I'll see you later. Bye, and jumped out of the car and literally walked all the way home. My middle class conservativism, I suppose, shone through in a moment of potential near death. I felt he was a complete lunatic.
- [16:20]
Jesse Jarno
More than any other cultural model available to them, Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter identified as young beatniks, though maybe a less manic strain than Cassidy. They're not inaccurately remembered as folkies, but like the young beats they were, they listened to jazz.
- [16:36]
Brigid Meyer
Jazz is very important.
- [16:39]
Jesse Jarno
Brigid Meyer got into jazz through her father. Sorry, the very beginning of this is cut off. The first word is he is a.
- [16:46]
Brigid Meyer
Huge jazz fan and had a really great collection of 78 bunch of blues. And he actually wrote a novel about a black trumpet player called Friend from Harlem. And so this was like my milieu, if you will, growing up hearing all this music. And he gave a bunch of those 78s to Jerry.
- [17:13]
Jesse Jarno
Actually, Miles Davis was hugely popular, of course, like his recent Sketches of Spain, which Hunter references in silver snarling trumpet. It was a pretty stunning period for jazz, which also included the release of Bill Evans Sunday at the Village Vanguard, including the flash in a pan bass playing by Scott Lafaro, who died before the album even came out, almost certainly an influence on Phil Lesh. But there was some local jazz too.
- [18:13]
Alan Trist
Alan Trist, that was mostly centered, at least in the times that I remember, in East Palo Alto house parties. I mean, there was a particular East Palo Alto house where the saxophonist lived. We often would hang out there to.
- [18:31]
Jesse Jarno
Pick up a story. We ended with last time we returned to Phil Lesh, wandering into his first party at the chateau sometime in 1961. From the audiobook for Searching for the Sound, available from Simon and Schuster, Wherever you get your audiobooks.
- [18:45]
Phil Lesh
I had come down for a weekend cruise and was directed as if by an unseen hand, to a party up in the hills. It was a clear, brisk evening. People were milling about on the lawn while the house was radiating energy. Several rooms held musicians and from inside, an alto saxophonist could be heard playing solo over the laughing voices from the front yard.
- [19:06]
Jesse Jarno
The Chateau is where Robert Hunter heard jazz for the first time that year. Thrown into the deep end of Ornette Coleman, maybe from his new album, this Is Our Music.
- [19:23]
Phil Lesh
Later that evening, I was introduced to the singer guitarist. Hey, Phil, this is Jerry. He's a musician too. I responded with some snotty comeback like, yeah, well, I play jazz, man. But Jerry just said something like, cool, you gotta meet Lester and Jackson. And naming local East Palo Alto guys who played jazz in houses and at parties. Even then he was about furthering the music.
- [19:47]
Jesse Jarno
Lester Hellam and Rudy Jackson.
- [19:49]
Brigid Meyer
Jackson. Oh, yeah. He was this black guy from East Palo Alto and there were many parties over there in East Palo Alto, and there was a fairly large black coterie that was adjacent to ours and intersected with it. There were at least two or three black guys who were part of the scene.
- [20:14]
Jesse Jarno
Rudy Jackson is a character in one of the pieces of lore recounted in the Silver Snarling Trumpet. There was a certain night when Jackson approached Miles Davis at the Blackhawk and wanted to jam Dennis McNally.
- [20:26]
Dennis McNally
The most significant thing anybody ever heard about Rudy Jackson. He was the butt of Davis wisecrack. He said, hey, hey, babe, which was the mistake. He said to Miles, hey, babe, you know you want to do something together. And Miles was not appreciative of being so referred to and just said, what do you want to do, babe? Screw.
- [20:51]
Jesse Jarno
A few times in the book, Hunter uses the phrase Jazz America, which he attributes to Willie Legate. Where all the factories were underground and the outer world was a forest where man could be the unicorn he had always wanted to be. Under the shade of the crescent fruited marijuana tree. As we discussed last time, Robert Hunter didn't read Jack Kerouac until much later, but the phrase Jazz America is attributed to him from on the Road. Filtered through Willie Legate, the phrase carried Kerouac's vision further.
- [21:20]
Dennis McNally
It's just a Willy ism. Whether it was jazz or bluegrass or whatever they, to quote is it grill Marcus. They're part of the old weird America. They're part of an America that acknowledges a thicker and more artistic set of roots in a way that pop did not.
- [21:40]
Jesse Jarno
The phrase Jazz America lodged in Hunter as a place, and it resurfaced in 1977 as part of his unreleased Alligator Moon Suite.
- [21:49]
Robert Hunter
Born in an alley of a Jazz America learned to buy blues from a crow on my cradle.
- [21:57]
Jesse Jarno
Bridget Meyer's jazz fan parents took her to Lots of shows.
- [22:00]
Brigid Meyer
If they went somewhere, I would go with them. And we went to the Monterey Jazz Festival every year. Gizzy Gillespie and Lalo Schiffman and all those people.
- [22:37]
Jesse Jarno
Garcia attended the Fall 1961 edition of Monterey Jazz, which included appearances by Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Odetta and John Coltrane, with Eric Dolphy and guitarist Wes Montgomery. Dizzy Gillespie's set from that year has been released as a musical safari. We're listening to the track Kush. And of course, always looming to the north was San Francisco.
- [23:19]
Brigid Meyer
I couldn't go out at night and drive to the sea with my father. However, I remember on a matinee Sunday afternoon, we drove up to the Blackhawk. I dressed up and a lot of makeup to look like I was over 21. And we went to the Blackhawk to see Thelonious Monk, which was pretty amazing.
- [24:11]
Jesse Jarno
That was from Thelonious Monk's Live at the Blackhawk, recorded in 1960. Probably not the run that Bridges saw and which we'll be hearing from occasionally, is punctuation. But there was far more than jazz and folk in San Francisco.
- [24:25]
Alan Trist
Garcia and other people around Hepler's Keplers were all feeling that energy. And we'd be making trips up to north beach and so on for the remnants of the beat culture that was still up there. And to me, it was like a marriage. Well, here's the European bohemianism, and here's American bohemian. They have different aspects to them. You know, in Europe, we're talking about the symbolist poet, about Mallamy, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rambo. And in the north beach, we're talking about the Beats, American beats.
- [25:04]
Jesse Jarno
City Light's books in north beach was an inevitable destination.
- [25:08]
Alan Trist
Mohawk, whose mind is pure machinery.
- [25:13]
Robert Hunter
Mohawk, whose blood is running money. Morocc, whose fingers are ten armies.
- [25:22]
Alan Trist
Morlock, whose breast is a cannibal dynamo. But we found our own ways into doing things. I called them adventures. One thing I remember in particular was the Vatican organist came to Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and gave nine concerts, free concerts, the complete organ works of Bach. I went to several of those with Jerry. You know, he really loved to go to music. And so we. We took in half a dozen, or not that many, but three or four.
- [26:10]
Jesse Jarno
Of those concerts, very likely those were the concerts given by the renowned Fernando Germinai, the organist of St. Peter's.
- [26:35]
Alan Trist
As I said, we. We went looking for Henry Miller in Monterey, and we went to north beach quite often to. There was a North Beach Cinema, which was an independent cinema that showed all kinds of the avant garde movies coming out of France and England.
- [26:52]
Jesse Jarno
Films were a form of culture that were easily accessible to the teens. Here's Garcia speaking with Denis McNally in the 1980s from the Jerry on Jerry audiobook available from Hachette, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. There was a kind of a. Not a foreign theater in Palo Alto that you could, you know, because of Stanford and all that, you could go and see Fellini movie, you know, which didn't enjoy general release really when it came out. But the city loomed large at all times with train tracks that ran right downtown and in walking distance from virtually every location we've discussed. We'll be listening now to some of Miles Davis in person at the Blackhawk, recorded in San Francisco in March 1961, the same month Hunter and Garcia met and released later that year. Brigid Meyer.
- [28:03]
Brigid Meyer
We went up there every chance we had. I would tell my parents that I was going to go shopping at the Hillsborough Shopping center and I was going to take the Southern Pacific train up and I would just stay and go up to the city, right, and cruise around, go to City Lights, Grant Avenue. And I had to play it kind of cool because I was still living at home, right?
- [28:47]
Jesse Jarno
In high school, Jerry Garcia had taken classes at the San Francisco Art Institute with the assemblage artist Wally Hedrick.
- [28:54]
Brigid Meyer
He insisted that I check out the San Francisco Art Institute. They had a pre college program. So I just turned 16 and I might get my parents to take. Great, okay, this sounds fabulous. This is where I want to be. I walk in those huge doors of the Art Institute and fell in love and say, oh, this is my place. I'm home. I moved to the city and lived with my aunt for that summer. She was a very high powered fashion executive with Joseph Magnan and sort of ran all these stores all around California. And she got a call, Fred Lyon, actually a wonderful photographer, and he said, I need to round up some teenage girls to do a spread for Life magazine on miniskirts. And she said, oh God, I've got one running around the house. Take her. And I went and it was amazing. I mean, I had no pretensions or even aspirations to do any modeling, but it just kind of fell in my lap and then suddenly there's some money and I'm doing Runway shows and photographs and stuff. Ridiculous, you know, what a strange thing to be doing. At the same time, I'm going to the Art Institute.
- [30:38]
Jesse Jarno
One of the beneficiaries was Jerry Garcia.
- [30:41]
Brigid Meyer
So I Got Jerry, I gave him my guitar. And then I bought him the 12 string guitar.
- [31:10]
Jesse Jarno
That was Jerry Garcia at the Boar's Head Coffee House in San Carlos, probably in August 1961. Another character who rolls through the silver snarling trumpet is John the Cool. Winter John the Cool.
- [31:22]
Brigid Meyer
I have no idea whatever happened to him, but he was a player. He was a big part of the scene that summer.
- [31:30]
Jesse Jarno
And just to be clear, we're not talking about the fiery blues guitarist Johnny Winter. John the Cool was one of the few members of the scene to have actually gone on the road in the Kerouacian sense. Thumbing rides and hopping on trains.
- [31:43]
Brigid Meyer
Meanwhile, Jerry and John the Cool and this. I don't know whether Laird Grant was part of this. And I can't remember, there was one other person. And they got a hotel room on O'Farrell street in this kind of fleabag hotel, which, interestingly enough, was several blocks up from Joseph Magnum at Stockton and O'Farrell. And when I would go down to the store and work, I would gash up and take them cigarettes and give them gas money or food money, whatever, because, well, they were my people, right?
- [32:27]
Jesse Jarno
The hotel they stayed in was the Cadillac. Still open now, a San Francisco landmark opened in 1907. The first single residence occupancy hotel west of the Mississippi, according to their site. We've posted a link@dead.net deadcast. You might also know it from the back cover of from the Mars Hotel, which we discussed in our Unbroken Chain episode.
- [32:49]
Brigid Meyer
They were racing around doing all kinds of crazy stuff. They were spending a fair amount of time in Berkeley, I believe KPFA was a thing. They used to go and hang out there. Phil Lesh was a big part of the Tape center in Berkeley. And like with Steve Reich and all those people, you know, all those avant garde. I mean, he was. He wasn't a bass player. Not at all. Not even close.
- [33:36]
Jesse Jarno
That was Phil Lesh's Six and Seven eighths for Bernardo Marino, performed a few years later at the San Francisco Mime Troop Loft.
- [33:43]
Brigid Meyer
I wanted to go and get a degree at the Art Institute. I loved it there and fell in with the most amazing people. I mean, that was such a renaissance. And it was so interspersed with the Poetics, you know, Robert Duncan and all these other people. I mean, so much was happening. I look back at being. My God, what a. What a second amazing time. Full of all of this. Efflorescence, I guess, isn't the right word.
- [34:56]
Jesse Jarno
Alan Trist had missed much of the summer action, at least in One account. After one too many misadventures with his beatnik friends of ill repute, it was decided that Allen should maybe remove himself from town for a moment.
- [35:08]
Alan Trist
I went on a one month trip down the John Muir Trail on the High Sierras. So I was away for a month. When I came back, the scene had changed a bit and there were different people around. I don't remember quite so much Chateau action in the second half of that year as there was earlier. Before Hunter turned up. There was a lot more going on at the chateau.
- [35:32]
Jesse Jarno
Our friend Mr. Completely tracks when various people have declared the scene to be over. Like Deadheads who stopped listening to the band after Pigpen died or after they started playing arenas or after their road hiatus or whatever. But the silver snarling trumpet contains perhaps the earliest example of somebody declaring the scene over Robert hunter in early 1962.
- [35:53]
Alan Trist
I left in the end of 1961, November or something. After I left, there was a morphing of the scene in various directions. You know.
- [36:08]
Robert Hunter
Me back to the place where I first saw the light to the sweet sunny south Take me home where the mocking birds sing me to rest every night oh, why was I tempted to roll?
- [36:24]
Alan Trist
I just remember Jerry, as a folk guitarist, never experienced any. Any of his. His bluegrass period or anything like that. He and Bob, when they did their duo, it was very much an old folk duo. There was no real sense where it was going to go in 61. The openness to everything was what was a key experience, you know. So nothing surprised me when a few. When a couple of years later in London when I was at Cambridge, I started hearing about the Grateful Dead as a rock band. Oh yeah, of course.
- [37:02]
Brigid Meyer
Naturally we all kind of go back to Menlo park and I don't know precisely when, I can't recall, but at some point in all that, Jerry discovers banjo. And that might not have happened until actually 62. That's entirely possible. It didn't happen until then. I don't remember. But a lot of practice. Oh my God. There's nothing more Listening to someone practice a banjo riff. It was like, oh my God. And I'm still into jazz, right?
- [37:47]
Robert Hunter
Little birdie, little birdie Come sing to me your song I have a short.
- [38:01]
Jesse Jarno
Time.
- [38:03]
Robert Hunter
To stare and a long time to be gone.
- [38:13]
Jesse Jarno
We've been listening to the Sleepy Hollow hog stompers in June 1962, probably not long after Garcia's public debut on banjo, which you can now hear on the before the Dead box, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast I would.
- [38:26]
Brigid Meyer
Have been perfectly happy if Jerry had become a blues guitarist. We had, I don't know, kind of a happy beatnik life together, you know, but that wasn't what was in the cards for him.
- [38:41]
Jesse Jarno
Another person somewhat befuddled by the transition towards bluegrass was Robert Hunter. The Silver Snarling Trumpet features a somewhat comical scene of a bluegrass house party where Garcia is enraptured and Hunter and John the Cool are just bored out of their minds. By the time of the Sleepy Hollow Hog Stompers tape we just heard, Hunter was probably holed away working on the Silver Snarling trumpet.
- [39:04]
Brigid Meyer
We were aware that Hunter was taking notes or writing stuff down. It wasn't exactly clear until sometime in 62. I think the main kernel of energy that brought us all together and created the scene that had started to dissipate by the time he buckled down and started, quote, unquote, working on a novel. That was his frame for what he was doing. But it was all kind of taking these notes together and crafting them and curating them.
- [39:49]
Jesse Jarno
It's not like Robert Hunter had parted ways from the world around them, but something had turned.
- [39:55]
Brigid Meyer
We were in love. And it wasn't like, I suppose, several months later, Jerry and I coupled up and Alan went back to England and other people, you know, things shifted and Bob started buckling down and quote, writing. And so the whole. The whole thing changed. The whole configuration changed. Prior to that, there was something unique that, well, I've never experienced since, you know, with a group of people, not just like one person. There was a real awareness that something really was happening and. And I personally just wanted to favor it as deeply as I could.
- [40:41]
Jesse Jarno
The configuration of their world continued to change as Hunter worked away on what became the Silver Snarling Trumpet. In the fall of 1962, Bridget and Garcia were together as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded in October of 62.
- [40:56]
Brigid Meyer
And I was trying to tell someone the other day, I haven't felt that same level of dread that I felt then until now with the prospect of our country becoming an authoritarian nightmare, a dictatorship. It was so palpable. Anyway, we went up on top of the hills behind the chateau, and there were none of the Stanford like the linear accelerator, none of the tech stuff. There were no houses. It was just beautiful fields and we could see the coast range. And I don't know where we got this notion, but we had this notion that if we got through that day, that was the crucial day, if everybody got through that, if the world got through that we would be okay. So Jerry had his Guitar and we were up there and the sun was setting. And he played Go Down Old Hana over and over, trying to usher the sun down because that meant that we were that much closer to a peaceful resolution. It was amazing, amazing to share that with him like that. And it was on such a raw, emotional level.
- [42:21]
Jesse Jarno
There's no tape of Jerry Garcia doing Go down Old Hannah, so Lead Belly will have to do Go down all.
- [42:28]
Alan Trist
A handle.
- [42:31]
Robert Hunter
Please don't you ride no more. And if you ride anymore bring judgment Day.
- [42:45]
Brigid Meyer
And that was just like yet another thing after the death of Paul Spiegel, yet another kind of verification of why we shouldn't become accountants in cubicles, that we had life to live and we're just going to go out and seize it. And no one adopted that ethos more than Jerry. His whole game plan. And he would vocalize this, he would say, yeah, I'm just living off the fat of the land, meaning the post war prosperity of the parents of the girls I'm hanging out. That was his game plan of, like, how to get by. It worked.
- [43:38]
Jesse Jarno
As Robert Hunter observes in the Silver Snarling Trumpet, he was never known in those days to have a dollar in his pocket that could be attributed to work, but had a facility for being taken care of that was better than money and was attested to by the fact that he never had a lean and hungry look about him.
- [43:54]
Brigid Meyer
I did two paintings of Jerry at that time. I think he's wearing the same shirt in each painting and there are photographs of him in those early days with him, and he's wearing the same shirt. He had two shirts. He had that shirt which was kind of like a faded greenish paisley dark shirt, and then a white shirt which by the time, you know, was not all that white for his, you know, gigs at Dana Morgan. And he did that as little as possible, you know, give guitar lessons.
- [44:36]
Jesse Jarno
By some point in 1962 or so, Robert Hunter finished a first draft and made another pass through expanding on some parts of the book. Garcia apparently preferred the earlier version. Dennis McNally believes the book's recurring dream sequences were the product of this second draft.
- [44:53]
Dennis McNally
It's purely my theory, and I should have asked Hunter, but he writes his first draft, the young writer, and it's clean and fairly, I think, simple, if that's quite the right word, but it's a clean narrative. And what I think mostly he then went back and decided this is not significant enough and packed in the dreams and that most of the sort of second draft editions are the dreams. And to give it somebody has already compared it to Proust about that he goes to sleep and he comes out of that dream and then goes through the day's activities and. And perhaps that's a bit of the motivation. It's a theory. I certainly didn't ask him. I forgot to ask him.
- [45:40]
Jesse Jarno
I tend to agree with Dennis's assessment. It's perhaps the only time in the book when Hunter attempts much self reflection.
- [45:46]
Brigid Meyer
He's like an enigma, isn't he? I mean, all you really know about him is that he's bummed out a lot, too much, and unnecessarily so. And that's really the main thing we come away with. I think he alludes to me trying to get him out of that. I don't remember that conversation, but like I say, it must have been a pastiche of many conversations wherein I'm trying to get him to come around and not be so morose. I think it's so interesting. It's like clearly he didn't have a direction. I mean, he was waiting for something to happen. But how extraordinary that while he was waiting, he took notes.
- [46:41]
Jesse Jarno
Really quite a lot of notes, as it turns out. In 1970, Hank Harrison set out to research what became the Dead Book, his 1973 biography focusing on the Dead's early years, which has a somewhat checkered reputation and it's maybe not accurate down to the historical decimal point, but still includes some fascinating firsthand material. When he began work on the project, though, his co writer was going to be Bobby Peterson, Phil Lesh's sometime lyric collaborator. Their 1970 interview tape with Hunter circulates.
- [47:13]
Robert Hunter
I wrote two books about all the bullshit that was going down.
- [47:16]
Jesse Jarno
I considered the bullshit that went down.
- [47:18]
Robert Hunter
Was important and I covered it thoroughly, covered the two years, you know, at the time.
- [47:23]
Jesse Jarno
So I'm pretty sure Robert Hunter just said that he wrote two books about this period. On the tape, he can be heard saying that he's lending Bobby Peterson a manuscript for research purposes, and that is for Bobby's eyes only. Was it the Silver Snarling Trumpet or was it a second book that still hasn't resurfaced? Right now, it's impossible to say, but there was, at least in 1970, probably at least one more vintage Robert Hunter manuscript. The scene around them was changing rapidly. Despite his reservations about bluegrass, Robert Hunter kept on playing on both upright bass and mandolin, singing and yodeling here with the Wildwood Boys in May 1963.
- [48:28]
Brigid Meyer
It was like an interregnum. It was an empty space between the beats and the hippies. I think it was gathering steam, kind of gestating cultural energy and getting ready to boom, really come on the scene. It's just kind of lurching from one gig in one configuration to the next. Nobody had any plans, you know, nobody said, oh, we're going to become a famous rock. No, no, no, no, no. None of that. None of that. Certainly Jerry never had that. You know, somebody else might have had notions that, oh, well, we could really go somewhere. No, it was just literally staying in the present, one day at a time, playing as much music as possible.
- [49:17]
Jesse Jarno
It wasn't just bluegrass that was an influence. There were lots of influences around. That was Troy Weidenheimer and the Zodiacs, the local party band. They came up in our Adventures of Pigpen episode, among other places.
- [49:42]
Brigid Meyer
Troy Weidenheimer, he was a big influence because he had electric equipment and he was like rock and roll, you know, and played school dances. He was out there, and Jerry loved to hang with him. They had a real thing going.
- [50:03]
Jesse Jarno
Garcia sometimes played bass with Troy Weidenheimer, Teenage Billy Kreutzman and Pigpan. Also did time with the Zodiacs, though not all necessarily simultaneously. Here's how Garcia described Weidenheimer's influence to Dennis McNally, which you can hear in the Jerry on Jerry audiobook from his Shet.
- [50:21]
Robert Hunter
Troy taught me the principle of, hey, just stomp your foot and get on it. He was a great one for the.
- [50:27]
Jesse Jarno
Instant arrangement, you know, and he was.
- [50:29]
Robert Hunter
Also fearless for that thing of get your friends to do it, it, if.
- [50:34]
Jesse Jarno
It ain't slick, you know what I mean?
- [50:35]
Robert Hunter
Just. He was good at that. And he was also a very good player, too. And I. I admired him. He was facile.
- [50:53]
Jesse Jarno
In 1962, sometime probably just after Hunter finished the Silver Snarling Trumpet, and almost certainly not before, he undertook one of his many freelance jobs, getting paid $140, around $1,400 today, for four weekly sessions as a mental health volunteer at the Menlo Park VA Hospital. He got to take psychedelics, including his first experiences with LSD and mescaline. He brought his typewriter and produced what is likely his first piece of writing after the Silver Snarling Trumpet, Excerpted in Dennis McNally's long, strange sit back. Picture yourself swooping up a shell of purple with foam crests of crystal drops soft nigh they fall into the sea of morning creep very softly mist and then sort of cascade tinkly bell like must I take you by the hand? Ever so slowly type and then conglomerate suddenly into a peel of silver Vibrant, uncomprehendingly blood, singingly, joyously resounding bells.
- [51:55]
Brigid Meyer
And he was also into Scientology. And Jerry, I remember him saying, what a lovely combination. LSD in a lab and scientologies. I remember he had the tin cans with the, you know, the E meter thing. And I remember him trying to audit me. And we're totally weird. Not my cup of tea, you know, I think I told my parents about it. My parents had both gone to Reed College, and they were real intellectual snobs. They said, oh, that's Dianetics just repackaged, and it's just whack jobs. You know, I don't think that was their word, but that was their. The meaning. They thought, oh, just stay as far away from that as you can. I think I was kind of like stepping out the door at that point, and I don't recall very much of it. And I think it all kind of. Well, I think it all kind of frightened me. You know, it was like, oh, my God. What. What's going on here? This is too much. Weren't we already on overload?
- [53:09]
Jesse Jarno
A few members of the extended scene had dalliances with Scientology in this window before backing away swiftly. Here's how Hunter described it to David Brown, author of the Great Dead bio so many. This was a brand new thing at the time. This fellow came down and was telling us fantastic things like you could get out of your body. All of that sounded great, but let's just say Scientology and I were not a very good match. I was pretty independent minded. Jerry came to one of the meetings, and he truly didn't care for it. We did these confronting drills and stared into each other's eyes for long periods of time and tried not to blink. I gave it the good old college try, but then moved into other forms of spiritual endeavors and yoga. I was a seeker at the time, and this was one of the places I sought, and it wasn't a good fit. In the end, the Grateful Dead fit. I thought there was a possible holy perspective to the Grateful Dead, that what we were doing was almost sacred.
- [54:07]
Robert Hunter
I have spent my life seeking all that still.
- [54:25]
Jesse Jarno
I like that perspective a lot, and it encapsulates a lot of the silver snarling trumpet while also reflecting back on our discussion of the Sufi choir earlier this season, and probably feels somewhat familiar that they were collectively and individually seeking something that turned out to be the Grateful Dead. But Rhodes led different directions.
- [54:45]
Brigid Meyer
I left the day after I graduated from high school, May of 1963. I was out of there. Jerry was with Sarah. I got an apartment like literally down the block on Francisco and Columbus for $75 a month, I might add. Amazing. And I moved to San Francisco, which is where I wanted to be. And interestingly enough, my next door neighbor was a cocktail waitress at the Jazz Workshop and she invited me over for dinner. She said, I've got a couple musicians coming for dinner and it'd be nice to have four of us. And I went and it was Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams.
- [55:31]
Jesse Jarno
Both Hancock and Williams had just joined Miles Davis band and Bridget had new friends. Bridget had made it to the big city. Tony Williams even named a song after her.
- [55:55]
Brigid Meyer
It's called Barb's Tune to the Wizard. And I said, tony, Tony, who's the wizard? And he looked at me and smiled and he said, miles, oh wow.
- [56:29]
Jesse Jarno
Brigid sought and sought some more I.
- [56:32]
Brigid Meyer
Did partake But I always had one foot in some other world. And then 1967, it's like, okay, okay, I know what that is. Cool. And then I met Suzuki Roshi San Francisco Zen center. And boom. That catapulted me. I mean, a hard left turn right, hard left turn from hanging out in the hate, all that. To getting up and sitting meditation at five in the morning and then going to Tassajara and all of that. And that kind of set the trajectory for me for the next at least 30 years.
- [57:14]
Jesse Jarno
The other subjects of the Silver Snarling Trumpet pursuing their own lines, eventually intersecting again. Alan Trist studied at Cambridge University, Jerry Garcia studied at Earl Scruggs, and Robert Hunter continued to move through worlds.
- [57:44]
Dennis McNally
Then he also got really heavily into speed for a while. He had his own sort of adventures that we know less about.
- [57:51]
Jesse Jarno
We mentioned one other still unpublished Robert Hunter manuscript written in the 60s. I think there's another one from the 90s as well. In his online journal he published an excerpt from one of his 1995 journals where he mentions another manuscript saying, it's mostly about my life in the early 60s. That crowd I hung around with while I was speed freaking. I don't think I'll publish it. I'm just trying to figure out what happened.
- [58:15]
Dennis McNally
He was still writing, obviously, because he had the lyrics to China Cat Sunflower in his pocket when Jerry and they were from the past. And then Jerry showed him some music and he went, aha, I have something for that.
- [58:31]
Robert Hunter
I rang a silent bell beneath the shower of pearls in the eagle winged palace of the queen Shiny eight sided whispering hallelujah Hat rack Seven faced marble eyed dancing Tory dreamedall Six proud walkers on the jingle bell rainbow Five men Writing in Fingers of Gold.
- [58:58]
Jesse Jarno
That was From David Ganz's 1977 interview, when Hunter demonstrated just how China, Cat, sunflower and the 11 fit together. A piece he'd been working on when Garcia contacted him in 1967, included in conversations with the Dead, which we've linked to@dead.net deadcast. And when Hunter's archives get further excavated, there's certainly other material waiting besides what I've mentioned in his online journal. In 1996, Hunter got onto the topic of diaries. And I've kept one sporadically since the mid-60s. Most interesting one I ever kept. The most dynamic period of change I left in a hotel room in Hamburg, Germany, on tour in 72, and never saw again. In a way, my songs are a diary. They bring back where I was living and where my head was at all sorts of circumstances when I hear them.
- [59:49]
Robert Hunter
In the book of Love's Own dream, where all the Pringles, where all the pages are my days.
- [60:21]
Jesse Jarno
But the Silver Snarling Trumpet is more than a diary, a realized window into the proto Dead's collective psyche and group mind as they began to assemble their limbs. If Hunter's voice as a writer doesn't feel fully developed, it's because it's not yet fully developed, but it's still pretty sharp. Dennis McNally.
- [60:40]
Dennis McNally
You see flashes of his incredible eye and incredible ability to observe and to get it into words that would end up making him Gary's writing partner for life. And for anybody interested in the Dreadful Dead, it's, you know, I don't say required reading, but, you know, almost all gonna want to read it, at least to look at, because it's just this amazing document of their baby lives. And for anybody who's interested in, you know, the origins of the 60s, this will tell you a great deal.
- [61:14]
Jesse Jarno
Many members of the original Palo Alto Explosion featured in the Silver Snarling Trumpet stayed close members of the extended Dead family. Alan Trist ran Ice 9 publishing and worked with the Dead through the 90s. David X, who introduced Jerry Garcia to Pig, Pennsylvania, was around for years, too.
- [61:30]
Alan Trist
David X, right up until he died in Eugene only about eight, 10 years ago or less than that. He became a fixture of the Oregon Country Fair and lived in Eugene for a couple of decades. At the end of his life, it was always great to see him.
- [61:49]
Jesse Jarno
John the cool winter seems to have disappeared entirely into the mists for someone so key in early Dead history. Though any leads are graciously accepted@stories.dead.net well.
- [61:59]
Alan Trist
The last I heard of John was, I think, back in the 70s or the early 80s, I heard that he was up in Washington State and maybe Seattle somewhere, but there was no real connection with him.
- [62:17]
Jesse Jarno
Like Bob Dylan wrote, some are mathematicians.
- [62:20]
Brigid Meyer
In 1980, I was getting married in Boulder. My second husband and apparently Hunter and Jerry had come by the house and they were asking about me and my father said, well, she's getting married. And they went, oh, bummer.
- [62:43]
Jesse Jarno
Bridget Meyer intersected with the Dead's world again in the early 1990s, a story beautifully and achingly told in Amir Barlev's film A Long Strange Trip. But I imagine you know that by now.
- [62:58]
Robert Hunter
Hearts of summer held in trust, still tender, young and green, left on shelves collecting dust, not knowing what they mean.
- [63:25]
Jesse Jarno
Willie Legate, who'd housed Garcia and Hunter at the Peace center and welcomed them to the world of weirdos, remained a close comrade and a part of their day to day lives.
- [63:35]
Dennis McNally
I mean, you know, when Willie needed some help, Jerry got him the job of being the superintendent, as it were, at Front Street.
- [63:47]
Jesse Jarno
Willie Legate remained the keeper of the Blind Prophet, the painting by the late Paul Spiegel that hung in Willie's room at the Peace Center. A recurring character in the Silver Snarling.
- [63:56]
Alan Trist
Trumpet, it appeared at the Grateful Dead studio. Willie was steward of that painting all along. For a long time. It was hung in the Grave and Dead studio in San Rafael. And you know, it's. I think I know where it is. I want to track, see if I could track it down. I've always wanted to do that.
- [64:18]
Jesse Jarno
There's another Paul Spiegel connected person who doesn't come up in the Silver Snarling Trumpet who we'd be remiss to leave out of our discussion of the era. Elaine Pagels, the author of the classic history of Christianity, the Gnostic Gospels.
- [64:31]
Brigid Meyer
She was right there. She was, she was a participant. Not of all the crazy zany stuff because she was such a hardcore student and wanted to get into Stanford, which she did and became just a fabulous success and a brilliant scholar.
- [64:50]
Jesse Jarno
We've discussed how Paul Spiegel's death became a slingshot for Jerry Garcia, and it obviously had an enormous impact on those around him. Elaine Pagels, then attending Evangelical Bible study classes, was told by her then friends that Spiegel, who is Jewish, was damned to hell. A shocking moment that sent her down the path that led to the Gnostic gospels published in 1979 and her career as a historian.
- [65:14]
Brigid Meyer
He held down that sort of scholarly aspect. Here's someone who's actually very serious and actually going to make something of herself. We never doubted that. She and Alan are married now, and I'm very happy for them both. I think it's wonderful.
- [65:33]
Jesse Jarno
That's a more recent development and a place to land today's episode and this season of the Deadcast as well. Thanks, as always, for listening. We're going to end with an audio snippet from 1970, not originally intended for broadcast, as they say, but too good not to use. It's a little muffled, so squint your ears or slow it down or rewind as needed. But here's Robert Hunter himself in conversation with Bobby Peterson in 1970, talking about the silver snarling trumpet and the first drop of the long, strange trip.
- [66:05]
Robert Hunter
It's almost like a diary as far as I'm concerned.
- [66:08]
Jesse Jarno
We started it.
- [66:09]
Robert Hunter
We started the trip and that's where it began. That's all. And we did.
- [66:12]
Jesse Jarno
We just did. You know you were doing it.
- [66:14]
Robert Hunter
We sure as fuck did. Yeah. Valentine's a flesh loving as soft as veg Hoping love would not forsake the days that lie between Lie between.
- [66:52]
Rich Mahan
Thanks very much for tuning in to the good old Grateful Dead cast. We'd like to thank our guests in this episode, Alan Trist, Bridget meyer and Dennis McNally. Extra special thanks to friend of the Dead cast, David Ganz for his ongoing contributions of audio from his interview archive. Executive producer for the good old Grateful Dead cast, Mark Pincus, produced for Rhino Entertainment by Rich Mahan Promotions and Jesse Jarno. Special thanks to David Lemieux, Brian Dodd and Doran Tyson. All Rights reserve.