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Nov 25, 2024 By Frank Valish

Robert Hunter is best known for being the long time lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He befriended Jerry Garcia in the early ‘60s and the duo continued their partnership throughout the rest of Garcia’s life. The Silver Snarling Trumpet is Hunter’s lost memoir of sorts, an autobiographical, literary tale of he, Garcia, and the early ‘60s Menlo Park, California scene out of which the Grateful Dead was born.

Hunter’s book is subtitled “The Birth of the Grateful Dead,” but as such this is something of a misnomer. Yes, Garcia and Hunter were part of the same circle at the time, and Garcia pops in and out of this manuscript, but really The Silver Snarling Trumpet is more of a snapshot in time, a scene post-Beat and pre-Beatles in which Hunter, Garcia, and a host of other creative types were milling about trying to find their way.

The book often reads like a pseudo-intellectual treatise musing on the trials and tribulations of a group of quasi-beatniks who didn’t fit into the current social climate. At times The Silver Snarling Trumpet is poetic, and at times it’s revelatory, but as often it is mundane and more often it reads like the narration of a fever dream filled with hallucinatory observation.

One must keep in mind that Hunter was 19 when he wrote this manuscript and never pretended for it to be some sort of literary masterwork. And it’s not. But what The Silver Snarling Trumpet does do is most interestingly capture the inchoate pre-birth as it were of the psychedelic era of American music, culture, politics, and youth. In doing so, the book is a valuable document that fills a knowledge gap and in full elucidates the very beginnings of what would become so much of a long strange trip. (www.hachettebookgroup.com)

Author rating: 7/10