THE SILVER SNARLING TRUMPET

Grateful Dead lyricist Hunter recounts the dawning days of 1960s San Francisco, with hippiedom still on the horizon.

In 1958, Hunter moved from the East Coast to San Francisco, where he quickly fell in with “a proto-beatnik” named Jerry Garcia who “played the guitar anywhere from twenty-four to thirty-eight hours a day,” working his way through the folk songbooks and bluegrass standards to a kind of jazz that would, in time, form the underpinnings of the Dead’s eclectic psychedelic sound. That was years off, though, and in the meantime Garcia and Hunter would carve their niches into a Beat community still very much alive, guided along by Kerouac and Ferlinghetti and company. Garcia, writes Hunter, was nothing if not single-minded about his music and his ideals, “and if he trod on toes, it was not from malice but because the concept that there were toes other than his had not fully entered his mind.” Because the Merry Pranksters were yet to come along and drugs hadn’t entered the scene, writes fellow Beatnik Brigid Meier in a lovely afterword, “spontaneous dada zaniness was highly prized as a ‘high,’” with many goofy adventures in North Beach and Golden Gate Park ensuing. In one, a woman could announce that it was time for the gang to load up on cigars. In another, a barely 20-year-old Garcia could reveal what turns out to be a fairly innocent method of seduction: “sing, smile, and nod. Works damned near every time.” Retrieved from a long-forgotten drawer, Hunter’s memoir has a few suitably postadolescent awkwardnesses of its own, but it’s mostly charming, a portrait of young people committed to creativity but not, unlike their later peers (and in many cases later selves), to self-destruction.

An essential document in the Deadhead library, and a pleasure to read.