Book review #45: The Silver Snarling Trumpet

Dead origin story related by band lyricist

The Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead by Robert Hunter (Constable, 2024)

The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide:
The level chambers, ready with their pride,
Were glowing to receive a thousand guests:
The carved angels, ever eager-eyed…

– John Keats, 'The Eve of St. Agnes’

By Marc Zegans

In The Long Run, an exploration of durable creative process, Stacy D’Erasmo describes her experience, as a newly ‘out’ college student, traveling with her companions to a lesbian bar in the West Village.

Forty years later, it’s difficult to convey the continual feeling of risk, of being in unknown and possibly dangerous territory, and of the defiance with which we lived…But those of us in the cab…were only together because we were on the same latitude of desire. [1]

Born in 1961, the year Robert Hunter drafted The Silver Snarling Trumpet, his remembrance of the fragile scene he, Jerry Garcia and a small circle of friends formed before there was a Grateful Dead, D’Erasmo eloquently characterizes the conditions that bring cultural outsiders together. In parallel, Brigid Meier notes in the afterword to Hunter’s manuscript, 'We knew we didn't belong to the dominant culture of consumerism and conformity, so we created our own culture simply by being friends and allowing that circle of friendship to expand organically.’ (215)

Sometimes such constellations serve as launchpads into adult creative life. These transformations demand more than a gathering point. They require a medium, an intention, direction and cultivation of discipline. Speaking to this point, Meier observes that Hunter’s work on The Silver Snarling Trumpet was ‘a creative endeavor that became a container from which he evolved his identity as an adult while simultaneously honing his craft as a writer.’ (215)

Dennis McNally, the Dead’s historian, in the book’s introduction, picks up on this as well, characterizing Trumpet’s contribution to Hunter’s writing skills as ‘the two-hundred-page version of the masterpiece lyric Hunter fashioned in the 1990s, “Days Between”.’ (xxx)

There were days
And there were days
And there were days between
Polished like a golden bowl
The finest ever seen
Hearts of Summer held in trust
Still tender, young and green
…
Hoping love would not forsake
The days that lie between lie between [2]

Beyond functioning as a prelude to Hunter’s future work, the manuscript expands and complexifies our understanding of how creative identity takes shape in early adult life. Describing his journey into life as a poet, Kenneth Koch, says,

The first thing I had to find out to be a poet at all was that there was a bigger world…Then I had to find out that there was a bigger language…[3]

Koch’s need to find a larger world and a more expansive language chimes with the ornate banter that peoples Hunter’s narrative. The rarefied language used by Hunter’s friends serves both as a code that binds their fellowship and as a playful self-indulgent sally into outness. The mordantly maladroit speech they favor, particularly in the book’s early pages, also functions as a shield, enabling members of the crew to stand out without having to stand up. The struggle to move beyond this performative play into genuine creative activity was to require coming to terms with, as Hunter puts it, ‘the concept of losing youth’. (11)

This collective process begins in the wake of a deadly auto-accident that kills a young artist and sends Jerry Garcia and his friend Alan Trist, a young Englishman on a gap year before matriculating at Cambridge, into hospital. Hunter’s narrative, which covers the year that follows, explores the rather determined effort by the members of his circle to return to the ‘Child’s Garden’. Garcia observes,

[The accident] made me realize that I could never be sure where I'd be tomorrow, or even if I'd be alive. That's why I'm living like I am now, doing what I want to do instead of working away at some job... (121)

Beyond a retreat from the unpredictability of the larger world, the group’s effort to get back to the garden constituted an intuitive embrace of the creatively formative defenses that James Joyce called ‘silence, exile, cunning’ [4] and a shared belief that the magic in a child’s life must be sustained and extended into adulthood. Says Hunter,

It was us, above all, who realized our consecrated goal, for we knew that Peter Pan would die if no one believed in fairies, and so we believed in fairies…because it was very important that Peter Pan not die. (50)

Hunter locates the cause of Peter Pan’s death in worry about safeguarding the future, a matter central to the discourse that animates his circle. On the one hand, he and his friends anxiously await the arrival of a ‘security man’ who will provide them safe passage, childlike innocence intact, into the larger world. On the other, they are unsure, should he arrive, that they would embrace him. Says Garcia, questioning whether the group is doing nothing more than hopefully waiting, ‘I’d be inclined to quit if I was sure of that.’ (46)

Catalyzed by Garcia, whose dreams, introspection, and growing musical discipline advance more quickly than those of his companions, the group’s members begin to differentiate between a childish fear of stepping beyond the garden’s walls and the practice of cultivating childlike beauty. This transformation is affectionately illustrated by Hunter’s account of the evolution of Garcia’s intense bond with his beat-up guitar, which he plays constantly, flips over and drums during conversations, and carries with him everywhere.

Needing something more, Garcia determines that he must give his life to music. Taking a job in a music store, he quietly scrimps and saves, then one day, having left the transitional object behind, appears with a beautiful new guitar in hand. He is no longer waiting for the moment. [5]

Having released themselves from fearful concern with future mishap, the childlike wonder that Hunter and friends ardently sought returns and becomes in the popular imagination a hallmark of their creative identities, and a powerful magnet to others.

…Jerry's magical people would often believe him and think that perhaps they really were magical in some way that they had never perceived and would love Jerry for letting them know about it; shielding him and feeding him in a hope that he would allow them to remain magical. (92)

Indeed, the conviction that caring for the band members would reconnect their fans to their own magic was the Grateful Dead’s lodestone. Dead shows and the culture surrounding their tours became a rolling Child’s Garden in which Peter Pan lived, and fairies did exist. Near the book’s end, Alan Trist, as if channeling a future vision, softly trumpets, ‘... there's little side paths all along... scenes, people, parties... the thing is to forget it's a maze except when it comes right up and tells you so; the secret’s in accepting the fact, then forgetting it.’ (207)

Pictured above: Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia. They shared a lifelong friendship.

Snarling Trumpet, I propose, is best seen as life writing by a young author trying to make sense of a year that mattered. Its perceptive account of what Hunter describes as the ‘indecisive time which occurs before turning off the side path of youth onto the highway…’ (9, italics added), renders it more than a simple genre piece profiling divergent youth.

The book vivifies – in ways that accounts emphasizing the boundary breaking aspects of subcultural creative liberation do not – the tension between a young person’s yearning for safe enclosure and emerging desire to be fully expressed, and it lovingly describes how this dissonance comes to be resolved. Despite such merits, the text is somewhat fragmentary and far from a polished work.

Releasing Snarling Trumpet’s magic requires context, embrace, and a bit of heraldry. These are provided by several layers of explicative and exegetical commentary penned by Hunter, his contemporaries, and his interpreters. They include an author’s note composed in 1982, a preface contemporaneous with the original text, acknowledgements by artist and Robert Hunter’s widow Maureen, a heartfelt and engaging foreword by John Mayer who began touring with Dead and Company in 2015, the aforementioned introduction by Dennis McNally and Brigid Meier’s particularly wise afterword. [6] These preliminary commentaries serve as thresholds along the path to the Child’s Garden that Hunter and his friends made for themselves. The afterword opens a return portal to the here and now.

If you listen closely, you can hear…the faint high notes of a silver trumpet that long ago let go of snarling and evolved into a Pied Piper’s clarion call to laugh and live—yes joyfully—in the present moment. (218)

Enhancing the manuscript’s development are illustrations of a black ink rose set amidst clouds under a starry sky. At the book’s opening, the rose is closed in a tight bud. As the chapters progress, it opens to radiant bloom, then drops to senescence as a new bud rises in the background. The succession of images evocatively punctuates the narrative and foreshadows the emergence of the Grateful Dead for whom the red rose – beginning with Alton Kelley and Stanley Mouse’s 1966 Avalon Ballroom poster Skeleton and Roses [7] – featured prominently in its iconography.

While enjoyable and enlightening, these wrappings and markings raise the question what, when they are removed, remains standing? Meier reports Hunter confiding to her that he was working on a novel. The book’s publisher describes the manuscript as novelistic. In a thin sense this is true. Trumpet opens with a pan through its cast of characters, follows a transformational narrative arc, and is loaded with dreams and dream imagery. But the book is neither a novel, nor is it fundamentally novelistic. It is the consequent of a personal sense making process that Hunter characterized in his author’s note as archival in nature.

Measured by Snarling Trumpet’s self-regarding interiority, rough composition, and naïve philosophizing, Hunter’s characterization is sensible but insufficient. The manuscript is more than a simple artefact of descriptive journaling coupled with reflective contemplation, both of which are subject to the halting problem – they can go on forever. It is authentic memoir. The text begins with an ending and ends with a beginning, its action rising in the wake of a calamity and ending with an afterparty stroll. The developments that unfold within this structure infuse the text with what Frank Kermode called ‘the sense of an ending’.

Observes Kermode,

…the interval must be purged of simple chronicity, of the emptiness of tock-tick, humanly uninteresting successiveness. It is required to be a significant season, kairos poised between beginning and end. [8]

The Silver Snarling Trumpet describes just this, a significant season in the lives of Hunter and his friends who came together at the inflection point between the apogee of the Beats’ outsider influence and the countercultural explosion that followed. His book is not the grand history of nations but an intimate account of those crucial moments before the flood. [9] And, like all histories, it advances a kind of fiction, one different from that required of a novel.

Novels construct imaginary worlds whose door is open for a reader to enter. Of necessity, they incorporate facts that correspond with reality as we know it. Without these, the author’s world would be impenetrable, but these elements reside within a comprehensive fabrication. With history it is precisely the reverse. History uses fictional devices to impose an order on a fluid past so that we may make sense of it and draw meaning from it. This application of fictive premise and its devices is particularly pertinent to our capacity to make sense of countercultural shifts. Says Kermode,

History…is a fictive substitute for authority and tradition, a maker of concords between past, present, and future, a provider of significance to mere chronicity. [10]

This is why Hunter’s ‘lost manuscript’ is more than an intriguing curio. It presents us with an history of betweenness – an exploration of what happens in the lives of a group of friends graced briefly by their entry into a ‘love scene’ that would find larger expression in the San Francisco hippie culture and the enduring community that constellated around the Grateful Dead. And in Hunter’s lyrical way, it sings brightly.

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References

[1] Stacy D’Erasmo, The Long Turn, Greywolf Press, 2024, p.14.

[2] Excerpt from the final verse of ‘Days Between’, lyrics, Robert Hunter, music Jerry Garcia, Warner Chappell Music 1993. Rehearsal recording of ‘Days Between’.

[3] Kenneth Koch, The Art of Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 1996, p. 157.

[4] ‘I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence [sic] the only arms I allow myself to use – silence, exile, and cunning.’ James Joyce, A Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man, Wordsworth Classic Editions,1992, p. 191.

[5] This apt phrase is the title to Stanley Cowell’s beautiful 1977 jazz album on Galaxy Records.

[6] Meier appears in the text as Barbara, the budding poet who joined Hunter’s tight knit circle at age fifteen.

[7] The poster’s central figure, a reproduction of Edward Joseph Sullivan’s, ‘A Skeleton Amid the Roses’, was stolen by Kelley from a 1913 edition of Omar Kayyam’s Rubaiyat that he found in a library. See, David R. Browne, ‘See the Original Art that Inspired the Grateful Dead’s Logo’, Rolling Stone, March 4th, 2022, and ‘Skull and Roses/Grateful Dead, Oxford Circle, Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco 1966’, Denver Art Museum curatorial notes.

[8] Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 2^nd ed., Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 46.

[9] Cf. Bob Dylan and The Band, Before the Flood, Asylum, 1974; Avant le Deluge, film, dir. André Cayatte, 1954.

[10] Kermode, p. 56.

Editor’s note: Marc Zegans writes the On the Cutting Edge column for Liberated Words. He has penned seven collections of poems, most recently, Lyon Street (Bamboo Dart Press, 2022) and The Snow Dead (Cervena Barva Press, 2020), two spoken word albums, a variety of immersive theatrical productions, and many poetry films. Ghost Book (Kite String Press), a collaboration with fine art photographer Tsar Fedorsky, was released in 2024. He lives by the coast in Northern California.