Robert Hunter’s The Silver Snarling Trumpet, part 1

Rich Mahan (0:05)

The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, the official podcast of The Grateful Dead. I'm Rich Mahan with Jesse Jarnow, exploring the music and legacy of The Grateful Dead for The Committed And The Curious. Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Deadheads, welcome not only to season 10 of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, but the 100th episode of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. Can you believe it? I'm your co-host, Rich Mahan. Thank you so much for tuning in and supporting us. It makes us happy to know you all are enjoying the ride. In this episode of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, we open the new manuscript from Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, The Silver Snarling Trumpet, and dive into its incredible tales of the early pre-Grateful Dead scene down in Palo Alto, California. There's so much to cover. This episode will be part one of a two-parter. The 2025 season of Dave's Picks is on sale now, and the early bird subscription period is ending soon. Dave's Picks, the quarterly vault releases of classic Grateful Dead concerts, is now heading into its 14th season. Subscriptions to Dave's Picks are open now at dead.net. Subscribing is a great way to ensure you'll be well-stocked with killer sounding, professionally mastered dead shows to help celebrate the Dead's 60th anniversary year. Check out the benefits of being a subscriber. You get four limited edition numbered releases, the highly collectible bonus disc, which you can't get if you aren't a subscriber, free domestic shipping, they're delivered throughout the year, and right now you can get early bird pricing of $99.98, which saves you $39 versus purchasing a la carte. There are only 25,000 copies of each show printed, and once they're gone, they're gone. The only way to ensure you get a copy of each is to subscribe now. And early bird pricing does end this Friday, November 22nd at 9pm Pacific Time, so head on over to dead.net and subscribe to the 2025 Dave's Pick Series now.

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Head on over there and check them out. The Silver Snarling Trumpet is the new recently released manuscript written by Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter. 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 people in their group, find out what they were up to and how their early experiences shaped them and led them from the beat scene down the path to hippie-dom and ultimately to form the greatest band in the world. Can you dig it? We knew you could. Here's Jesse Jarnow.

Jesse Jarnow (4:20)

The Days Between was the final, original Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter song debuted by The Grateful Dead, performed between February 1993 and the band's last shows in 1995 This is the rehearsal from the So Many Roads box. Hunter's lyrics channeled youth.

For this 100th episode of the Deadcast, we're going back to the very earliest spark of what became The Grateful Dead, the extended moment channeled in Hunter's lyrics for The Days Between. This fall, Hachette Books published a remarkable work of non-fiction by late lyricist Robert Hunter called The Silver Snarling Trumpet about his and Jerry Garcia's very earliest days as friends in Palo Alto. It's got a subtitle added more recently, The Birth Of The Grateful Dead. And though the book ends several years before The Dead started, it's still an accurate subtitle. Please welcome back to The Deadcast, the band's longtime publicist and official historian, Dennis McNally.

Dennis McNally (5:47)

He once said to me something like, you know, The Grateful Dead started a long time before they got instruments. And what I think he was referring to this year in particular, 1961, where he had just arrived in Palo Alto and Jerry had beaten them by about two months. They fell together with this click that's reverberating to this day.