The silver snarling trum.., p.2
The Silver Snarling Trumpet, page 2
The book’s title is a quotation from John Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” a celebration of romantic love that begins with a man about to die. It gave Hunter his identity as a writer, and in the years to come, he would fully earn the label.
Though he had a reputation for contrarianism—and it was definitely inadvisable to ask him about the meaning of his songs—Hunter’s treatment of me as the band’s historian was kindness in itself, including lending me his copy of The Silver Snarling Trumpet early in the 1980s as I began research. It was a gold mine of information, capturing not only events but attitudes and atmospheres. His gift for deep understanding and expression, something he later called his ability to describe hallucinations, is already on display in the novel, as is his ear for speech and his sharp wit.
There’s a scene in which they sit in Saint Michael’s Alley and discuss a play they’re writing together. “The dialogue’s beginning to drag a little,” Trist said, “so we’ve decided to write in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius for act twelve.” Then he described how amid decadence and enough action for ten normal plays, a small black beetle at center stage would contemplate the eternal truths until, about to utter them, it would be flattened by an elephant.
“We expect to run through several beetles in rehearsals,” Garcia admitted.
“The essential strategy will be to charge no admission but lock the doors and charge a fee to get out,” concluded Alan.
They could be wonderfully silly, taking alliterative wordplay into the stratosphere, “fertile feliciousness of your prehensile predilection.” Or, when stoned, they decided that the typewriter in the room had legs, which elicited Alan’s comment, “Nothing but run-on sentences, horrible… horrible.” Humor was at the core of their love for one another.
Hunter also makes an honest historian, describing his brief career of singing with Garcia (“Bob and Jerry”) before Garcia moved on, reminding Robert, “You’ve got your writing… singing is a pastime for you.”
Late in 1961, Trist returned to England. None of them were great correspondents, but nine years later, he would return to California to join the Dead. Before he left, they gathered again to walk around San Francisco. On that walk, “the love scene had seen fit to reappear for a few moments, that was all. Only this time, there was no talk, no heralds, no sense of tingling anticipation surrounding her visit. On a morning in San Francisco, after a small party, traveling down an unfamiliar street at early dawn, she had found us, and she looked the same as always.”
Hunter and Garcia and the rest of the Grateful Dead would spend the succeeding decades creating a love scene that would flourish beyond all expectations. The Silver Snarling Trumpet is the first blossom of the many flowers that were to come.
The silver, snarling trumpets ’gan to chide:
…
The music, yearning like a God in pain.
—John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes”
I’VE JUST READ THE MANUSCRIPT OF THIS BOOK FOR THE FIRST time, twenty years, or nearly so, after writing it. The events detailed occurred in my nineteenth and twentieth years, and it was written immediately after the last scene occurred and was my major occupation for the following year.
Although the last chapter speaks of the breakup of the scene, many of the “hard core” herein described are still functioning together, so it was not as easy to dismiss as all that, prophet of melancholy as I was.
Some of the characterizations are shallow, and I gave myself the last word on subjects several times, which I may not have had. Jerry Garcia once said that I got everyone down with some degree of accuracy in the book, except myself. Some of the characters, notably Rudolph Jackson, the sad trumpet player who wanders in and out of the story, are accurate to a T; others, such as David X., are given short shrift with a couple of lines not indicating their actual bearing on the scene.
I made one bad error in composition, in that I felt the first draft was too short to make a respectable book, so I rewrote it, waxing eloquent whenever possible, which explains a lot of the extraneous and repetitive philosophizing that mar the book, much of it being downright trite. However, to change it or delete it would be a disservice to the twenty-year-old mind that conceived it, and whose book it is, scarcely mine.
Not to write my own review (and then he does), but I think there is a value in the book I scarcely dreamed of when writing it. It occurs to me that it is a representative artifact of the dawn of the sixties and that the attitudes and experiences we had were being more or less duplicated here and there about the country in an era best designated post-Beat and pre-hippie. Pot was extremely scarce, and LSD had not yet appeared. Bennies were rare, but sometimes we scored thirty or forty and abused them mightily till we ran out. Coffee and wine made do. It gives me a certain pride to note that our “scene” did not evolve from getting stoned: that came somewhat later, with mixed blessings.
We were the first front of “war babies” hitting the streets for the first time. Roy Kepler and the staff at his bookstore in Menlo Park allowed us to exist in an intellectual atmosphere with a built-in library. People heard there was a scene and fell by; the periphery of our social life extended to hundreds of bright, interesting folks from Stanford, the surrounding community, and the flowering local electronics industry.
I don’t plead the book as a piece of good writing, that is as may be, and my ego is pretty disinvolved after two decades, but as a singular curiosity whose value is wholly unintentional on the part of the writer.
I feel apologetic to those I failed to mention, especially Karl Moore, who was angry at not being included, but figured it made no difference since it was the worst book ever written anyway.
I have no intentions of ever publishing this record, being content to preserve it as an “archive item” whose chief value will be to refresh my memory of what I was about every couple of decades, and to serve as source material for those with time and energy to construct a more complete picture of these and subsequent events.
Robert Hunter, June 19, 1982
With reverence adorn thine acts and face,
That he may delight to speed us up the mount;
Think that it dawns but once, this day of grace.
—Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XII
For Darjeeling
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“AND SO?” WELL, THAT SEEMS TO BE THE ULTIMATE QUESTION itself. To the novice weaver, the transition from pattern to tapestry must be fraught with the same uncertainty; will the work, when completed, be worth the money expended for materials, or the time patiently spent over the loom? Each man, it appears, has his Dantean path, replete with his personal leopards, lions, and she-wolves, each dedicated to the lifelong task of chasing him from the road that seems to lead so surely to the all-encompassing light. Consequently, he often loses himself in the forest by the way; the paths and hiding places of which the beasts know so much better than he; or finds himself running to a modern-day Daniel with a PhD to find out why he runs from that which pursues him (or to be convinced, while the beast pants at his heels, that he is not being fazed at all).
There is no time of life so ripe for gathering the fruits of experience as that indecisive time which occurs before turning off the side path of youth onto the highway that parallels it. It is a time when the highway, with its awesome promise, lies just across the way, but the NO TRESPASSING signs keep one from cutting across the ripening meadows that offer an alluring shortcut. Both roads seem to stretch to infinity, winding through forests and beside rivers… some mighty and some insignificant. The test, in the end, is not of being on the more resplendent highway but of the method by which the transition is accomplished, if ever.
Some never complete the transition, and you can see many of them hopping off the freight trains outside Los Angeles in order to escape the clutches of the “Bulls” who lie in wait for them, clubs poised, in the railroad yards… that eternal haunt of the uncertain path, the man who is waiting to trip you up when you’re not doing nobody no harm, just living your life.
Some make the cross too quickly and uneventfully to ever completely appreciate that which lies around the turns and in the ditches that run beside the highway; too quickly to ever savor the lingering shadows with which it can tint the memory. Memory, after all, is what endures when all the beautiful groves along the road have been enjoyed and all the enticing caves explored.
We exist not in the future, nor in the past, but in that precise, unmeasurable point of time that rushes headlong into the next point and is called the present. Memory is that intangible concept that fits these “instants” into a continuum. A motion picture may be stopped in the middle of an action, and that which is occurring on the film will be captured, immobile, upon the screen. The picture thus held contains an infinity of the aforementioned “instants” (not even considering the rest of the reel, since infinity can be added to and subtracted from and still remain infinity, by its very nature; or so I was informed by a mathematically inclined acquaintance). What has already been projected upon the screen is memory, what is to come is future; what is retained upon the screen is a mixture of past and future, except for one infinitely minute point, which is present.
It goes against the venerable spirit of “Zen” to try to stop the picture in our lives. ’Tis not only “un-Zen” but impossible… this way dwells madness or, at least, mild frustration.
Somewhere along the road is the point at which one must cross over or continue forever kicking up dust along the primary path. For some, it is a painful crossing, for others an exuberant sort of sad joy. It is a youth that has suddenly been brought face-to-face with the concept of losing youth (a cognition that one must assimilate before transition is possible). Frightening, but altogether necessary.
There is no end to the journey short of senility (which has stopped at a convenient spot… sometimes a warm, shaded grove; sometimes a granite rock exposed to the merciless beating of the sun) or death, an end to all roads, or perhaps the beginning of another.
The ending of this tale is only the finis of a “stage.” “Stages!”… the ever-recurrent bends in the road that must eventually lead to where the road builder paused in the inviting shade of a roadside nook to look back upon what he had done. Impressed with the Herculean task he had taken on, he paused longer than he expected, so inviting was the rest, and there may still be found, lost in reflection.
Even the Methuselah must eventually find his nook.
Look up and down that long lonesome road,
Where all your friends have gone, my lord,
Where you and I must go.
Look up and down that long lonesome road,
Hang down your head and cry, poor boy,
Hang down your head and cry.
—Trad. Folk
MENLO PARK, 1961. IT IS ON SUMMER DAYS WITH TIME on my hands and little or nothing to do that I remember other summer days with time on my hands. It was a different sort of time; the sort of time over which the years hang gaudy veils, making them appear much brighter than perhaps they were. But that’s a good thing really. A man’s now is often such an overpowering collection of effects from causes but dimly remembered that bygone days must occasionally fan the forge… if only to convince him that his blade was ever truly tempered to do the sizable job of carving set before him. What is a man’s mind, after all is said and done, but a collection of memories… and what is his present but a collection of infinitely tiny points of now whose value, in the end, must be measured in terms of what memory, the eventual edifice of which is his character?
I think that I began to realize this somewhere back in a certain conglomeration that has its existence now only as a pleasant chuckhole somewhere in my brain. Strange to think back on those days when it was perfectly natural that we all slept on the floor in one small room… and woke up wanting cigarettes that none of us had, so we passed around the few decent-sized butts that had collected in the fishbowl, remnants of more plentiful times, then went out on early-morning excursions along mist-dampened streets to find more.
It was an impressive room, half again as big as a closet and generally filled to overflowing with loose papers, trash, smoke, people, and other paraphernalia. Half of it was dominated by a makeshift bed, which would uncomfortably sleep anywhere from one to seven people (except when there were more). Most of the other half was occupied by a desk constructed from boards and orange crates. In the two or three square feet of remaining space was our ballroom… the center of parties and other recreations such as are occasionally good for the mind and spirit.
These were the days before practical considerations, matters of “importance,” began to eat our minds. We were all poets and philosophers then, until we began to wonder why we had so few concrete worries and went out to look for some. We of the small room were fairly sure that we understood the solutions to the problems of the world, so we took a few of those problems on our shoulders only to find out, too late, that it didn’t make any difference if we knew the solutions or not; up close, the problems changed, and we with them, and suddenly we were caught, inextricably, in the midst of things. So we grew up, the way we’d been being urged to all along, and assumed a mature viewpoint.
Most of us had little other than the clothes we somehow happened to have come by, and if they happened to stick to us, it wasn’t a matter for serious worry because really, you know, that’s the way things were, and things like that don’t bother you too much unless you have some sort of strange idea that it should.
It was the people who made the “scene” revolve; wonderful, inexhaustible people we thought… until we began to question things that perhaps we ought not to have questioned, things such as “Can we live this way forever?” Perhaps we could have if we hadn’t asked, but by the very act of becoming conscious that a question existed, an answer became imperative. Part of the answer seemed to lie in the realm of whatever it was that society demanded of us… and what it demanded was our lives. Given impetus by this snatch of what seemed to be an answer, we began to ask the question of one another, and from there, it was only a small step to becoming frightened. And that, of course, was the end of being carefree, for we had begun, if only by the act of questioning, to care.
Others came along, others who would have belonged with us before, except that we began to question them too. Not seeing fit to acknowledge that such a question existed, they took over our philosophy and our guitars, our beards and cigarette butts, and left us with the world.
I remember coffeehouses and empty pockets, the unplanned, unending parties… the bad wine, the music that is inseparable from the impoverished decadence, and wonder sometimes if it was a fair trade.
THE DAY WAS BEAUTIFUL, AS USUAL. THEY HAD BEEN OCCURRING as regularly as clockwork, the kind of days that make you feel generally dissatisfied because you know you should be outside taking advantage of them while they last, instead of sitting in the coffeehouse. As I sat staring out the window, it occurred to me that probably everyone fancies himself a connoisseur of nature, but many are probably secretly pleased when a foul day comes along and they don’t have to frantically run around proving it to themselves.
It seemed to me that there was something essentially hypocritical about staying inside when balmy weather calls, even though it is more comfortable, and perhaps this was one of the secret keys to the paranoia of our day.
Merely realizing this fact did not ease my conscience, so I paid for my coffee (I was a penny short, so I left what I had on the counter) and determinedly stalked out to damn well enjoy the sunshine.
I walked slowly up the avenue trying to decide on a destination. As I threaded my way through midafternoon shoppers, I became conscious of myself as part of a massive bidirectional flow of essentially directionless humanity. It seemed as though it might be pleasant to just drift with them, with no goal in mind. I tried it for a few minutes, but, as interesting and Zen as the idea sounded, it wasn’t really much fun, so I decided to hell with it and started to walk home.
The flow seemed definitely averse to going in my direction and tried to hustle me back toward the coffeehouse. I fought my way wholeheartedly through the river of conglomerated flesh. One trod-upon-toe glowered at me as though I were going the wrong way on a one-way street (which is fundamentally the wrong thing to do, you know, even though it’s often the most direct means to one’s destination). I replied with a faint, all-purpose “Eat it, Charlie” smile and continued unswerving until I reached the highway.
It was a good twenty loose-shoe-sole-flapping-minute walk from downtown, and the sun had begun to tingle at the back of my neck by the time I got to the room. When I opened the door, the accumulated heat rolled over me like a wave. The closed windows successfully warded off any stray breeze that might have been knocking about. I hit two of them sharply with the heel of my hand and felt a faint, unsatisfactory draft wander in uncertainly as they banged open. I knocked open another one, still to no avail, and banged futilely at the two that opened only on whim, their good pleasure, at the moment, being to remain aloof.
The room was deserted except for myself and the Blind Prophet. The Blind Prophet was the lord and protector of the room, entrusted with the spiritual well-being of his easily tempted charges who occupied the room along with myself. He abided in an unframed canvas that always managed to hang slightly askew on the wall.
