Robert Hunter’s The Silver Snarling Trumpet, part 2

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 to season 10 of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast. I'm your co-host Rich Mahan. Thank you very much for tuning in. In this episode of The Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, 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. And 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 at 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's 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 on over to dead.net and subscribe to the 2025 Dave's Picks series today. Head on over to dead.net/deadcast 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 Deadcast.

Jerry Garcia (2:32)

Do it!

Rich Mahan (2:35)

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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 and 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 Jarnow.

Jesse Jarnow (3:42)

And today, on this 101st episode of the Good Ol Grateful Deadcast, we continue to hang out in the long and beautiful frozen moment captured in Robert Hunter's extraordinary book, The Silver Snarling Trumpet, 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 Folky episode.

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. Garcia is 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 guitars seriously for about a year, having picked up the fundamentals of fingerpicking from an Erdoel 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.