The Silver Snarling Trumpet

"Strange to think back on those days when it was perfectly natural that we all slept on the floor in one small room.... 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."   So wrote Robert Hunter in The Silver Snarling Trumpet, both a novelistic singular work of art and the missing piece of the Grateful Dead origin story. In these pages, readers are privy to the early days of Hunter, Garcia, and their cohorts, who sit at coffee shops passing around a single cup of bottomless coffee because they lacked the funds for more than one. Follow these truth-seeking souls into the stacks at Kepler's Books, renting instruments at Swain's House of Music, and through the countryside on mind-expanding road trips. Witness impromptu jams, inspired intellectual pranks, and a dialogue that is, by turns, amusing and brilli