Where the Wind Don’t Blow So Strange: The Journey Begun
The Grateful Dead were a cultural and commercial phenomenon. Indeed, one can argue they still are. Even the band’s detractors would agree with that statement. I never celebrated their commercial success even though that has helped maintain the group’s cultural status. I was into the culture they evolved from, created and informed in important and numerous ways. Most researchers, scholars and regular old fans of the Grateful Dead (deadheads) agree that the band, together with Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, sprang from a moment defined by the Beat culture of the 1950s, were instrumental in shaping the “hippie” culture of the 1960s, nurtured that culture through its early years before it became the counterculture, watched that culture mutate into something the establishment profited from as it tried to make (and keep) it illegal, and ultimately became the last band standing. This latter reality meant that the Dead and their deadhead followers came to define a subculture of their own rooted in the counterculture yet living in the present of the Reagan backlash and all that came afterward.
Jerry Garcia played guitar, wrote music and sang for the Dead. He was also a presence that was not quite spiritual advisor, not quite bandleader. Yet, it was his presence that provided a focus that immediately dispersed like white light through a prism. His death in 1995 ended the band called the Grateful Dead, but did not end the music or the subculture. Instead, like the multiple variations in the Dead’s iconography on the image of roses growing from the skeleton, numerous bands grew in the vacancy left by Garcia’s departure. So did the number of fans/deadheads.
Let’s get back to the beginning. A bunch of young people in their teens and early twenties are hanging out in Palo Alto just south of San Francisco and near Stanford University. Their model for living is the Beat lifestyle. Their incomes are minimal, often by choice. Who wants to hold down a regular job when one can get by just on getting by, especially if one has friends? Who needs to? There’s music to be made, poetry to be written, theater to be performed. Love to be explored and coffee houses to hang out in. And bookstores.
Robert Hunter was a friend of Garcia’s. He became the Grateful Dead’s primary lyricist, creating a world that was part PreRapahelite fantasy, part American desert outlaw, occasional card shark, and oftentimes renegade loser. His catalog of work is a labyrinthine journey through Scottish highlands, cosmic galaxies, china cats, and Cumberland mines. Lyrically, his poetry/songs are crafted as well as any of those ancients that inspired him. His stories come from the darkness of folklore and the light of fairy gardens. They also tell hard luck stories of winos, miners, sailors and hustlers. The world his lyrics describe is a place I would like to live and have at times actually lived in some of its corners. The music Jerry Garcia put to those lyrics makes that world even more inviting.
Recently, a book written by Hunter years before the Grateful Dead became a band and decades before Jerry Garcia would be eulogized by mainstream television news as an American icon was published. Titled Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead, this text takes the reader back to before the beginning. If it were a Hollywood film, it would be called a prequel. Instead, it’s a sweetly written novel about a bunch of societal misfits on the cusp of a new age. Unknown to the novelist and his protagonists, most of the characters involved will be part of this new age. Some will be its pioneers, some its point of departure and some will define it. As readers today we have the luxury of knowing how the story turned out up to now. When Hunter was writing it, no one had any idea. Some may have had an intuition, but none knew the actual tale.
We are brought into a circle of friends. Their interactions and interpersonal relationships are revealed through the novelist’s keen eye. Jerry is the headlight on the engine of the train and the train is going somewhere, but those on the crew really have no idea where. Methedrine enhances the trip, wine makes it enjoyable for some and coffee is the substance that creates conversation and consumes the trickle of cash the characters drip through their fingers. Love comes and goes, but is mostly a topic for an idle mind and occasional conversation. Jerry’s guitar is his constant companion while Hunter’s notebook seems to be his. A friendly (and perhaps prescient) bookstore owner allows the friends to hang out. Everyone seems to want to do something more while they are already doing something and nothing. The world is wide open, old rules are being broken or just ignored, and there are no new rules yet designed.
While I read this novel, I was reminded of certain novels from the Beats. Novels describing events, emotions, people and relationships. John Clellon Holmes’ 1948 novel Go or Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur and Dr. Sax. Novels that not only describe the situations of youth then and perhaps now, but also evoke how that moment of life feels. Although I doubt this book will find an audience beyond a subset of Grateful Dead fans and students of the 60s counterculture, that in itself is reason enough to publish it in 2024. It is quite an enjoyable ride that resides in a time fifty years ago, but speaks to the present. Part morning maniacism and part gentle rain, The Silver Snarling Trumpet is like a “dream-night wind,….a ripple where there is no pebble tossed.” (Hunter/Garcia)
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