Never Before and Never Again: Brigid Meier On Robert Hunter’s ‘The Silver Snarling Trumpet’

“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,” Robert Hunter wrote in 1982, describing the process by which he had drafted The Silver Snarling Trumpet two decades earlier.

The manuscript, which contains elements of both memoir and novel, captures the spirit of events as Hunter, Jerry Garcia, Brigid Meier and Alan Trist (future head of Ice Nine, the Grateful Dead’s publishing company) share ideas and banter at Kepler’s Books, the St. Michael’s Alley coffee shop and elsewhere in Palo Alto, Calif. The narrative also includes an account of Hunter and Garcia’s brief run as an acoustic duo.

Hunter later penned his essay and then placed all the pages into a trunk shortly after he married his wife, Maureen. From there, it went to a storage unit, until Maureen located it a few years after the author’s death in 2019.

In his self-assessment of The Silver Snarling Trumpet, he also noted, “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.”

Meier echoes these sentiments in her afterword, where she writes, “I met Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia and Alan Trist (who were each under 20 years old) in March 1961 when I was 15 and still in high school. They had only recently met, and somehow we four bonded and became inseparable for many months. They would pick me up after class or we would meet at Kepler’s Books nearby, where, fueled by coffee, we would proceed to rave. Despite the Beat movement having already peaked, we might have been mistaken for teenage baby beatniks. We were each voracious readers, precocious budding intellectuals and pretentious artists and poets. And we each had a healthy dose of rabid antiauthoritarianism, combined with a sense of the absurd; 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. If you thought you were one of us, you were welcome to join us.”

Although Phil Lesh doesn’t appear in the book, Meier notes that he was “definitely a presence on the scene back in 1961-62. I remember Phil could be quite funny.”

He signed her 16th birthday card, along with Garcia, Hunter and their other cohorts. In addition, Lesh composed a piece of music in her honor for the occasion and gifted her the score, titled “Theme for Barbara.” (Brigid was known as Barbara back then.)

The ideal soundtrack to The Silver Snarling Trumpet, just published by Hachette, is 2018’s Before The Dead release, which includes a performance by Garcia and Hunter at Meier’s 16th birthday party on May 26, 1961.

What was your initial reaction upon reading the book and how accurately do you think Hunter captured the mood of that era?

I was astounded when Maureen Hunter sent me the manuscript a year ago. I sat down and kind of inhaled it. My first thought was, “Wow, he nailed it.” He really did, especially Jerry, who comes up off the page like a hologram.

Hunter had Jerry completely pitch perfect, although himself, not so much. I also don’t really recognize any of the dialogue that he ascribes to me, but I could have been kind of a composite, a kind of conjured female lead, if you will.

With Jerry though, I could hear his tone of voice. It was uncanny to read. I think that fans are in for a treat.

How did you first meet Robert?

I can’t quite remember but it must have been at Kepler’s. That was our epicenter.

Dennis McNally said in one context that I was the spiritual glue. I don’t know about that, but then in another context, he said that I was their mascot. I think the truth is somewhere in between. I was a lot more than a mascot.

I look back and think it was a hoot. But, beyond that, I look back and ask myself: “How did that happen?”

Hunter portrays you as a full participant in the action even though you were still in high school. What initially drew you to Kepler’s?

My parents were really amazing. They had both gone to Reed College in Portland, and they were pretty hip people. My father was a big jazz fan and he worked in a record store for my first few years, when we lived in Oregon. Then he got accepted to the Wallace Stegner Graduate Creative Writing Program at Stanford based on a novel he was writing. So we moved to Stanford student housing in Menlo Park. The novel didn’t quite get published, although he had some other things published. Then, at a certain point, he segued to being a technical editor, as he needed a livelihood. My mother was working at SRI translating technical Russian on a contract with the Rand Corporation. They were right at the epicenter of all the Cold War shenanigans going on.

Anyhow, the house was always full of music. When I was 7 years old, I did a drawing and it’s a picture of a record player, a chair and the cat. This was all done with ballpoint pen on yellow manuscript paper, and up on the top, it says, “Jazz music is playing.” Well, jazz music was always playing, and they had an interesting, eclectic group of friends. It was a really inclusive, amazing scene.

I was very interested in art and literature, and there were always books around, so I started reading them. Maybe in a stricter household, I would’ve been encouraged to lay off some of this stuff, but I read On the Road at age 13.

I used to go to Kepler’s with my father a lot. I also did things like go to the Blackhawk to see Thelonious Monk and, every year, we would go to the Monterey Jazz Festival.

What I’m trying to say is the stage was set. I remember when I graduated from junior high school, I insisted that I get my room redecorated. The walls had been painted pink five years earlier, but I painted the place white and I got an Indian bedspread, a Toulouse Lautrec poster and a bullfight poster to put up on my wall. I also managed to get one of those bottles of wine with straw wrapped around it and put a candle in it. So there I was, I had a beatnik pad. [Laughs.]

I was a pretty smart, inquisitive kid. After reading all this stuff and kind of segueing from my parents’ sensibility, I could not resonate with my classmates, I’m sorry to say. I felt kind of like a freak and I was. But that’s OK.

In your afterword, you describe the book as a memoir, a novella and creative nonfiction. Do you think any one of those forms predominates?

It’s reportage, primarily. He didn’t make anything up. It is all true. I mean, he added his philosophical flourishes 20 years later and then put it away for 40 years.

I know, on some level, he considered it a novel. That’s what he used to say, “I am working on a novel,” but it’s not a novel. It’s true. It’s what happened. So that’s why I say memoir or creative nonfiction.

I feel like if he had published The Silver Snarling Trumpet shortly after he wrote it, then the book would have become something of a cult classic, resonating with other people who were having similar ideas and interactions in their own local communities.

I don’t think he had the confidence or thought that it would be relevant. I think he was practicing the craft and just getting his feet wet. It was like woodshedding, that thing in music where you go out back and play by yourself until you get good.

How do you write? You get words on paper. You get a lot of words on paper. He probably edited out a lot, which was a real valuable skill to learn. But he dove into this and set himself up for a career of expressing himself through words. It was brilliant that he did that. He took so many notes and it was fantastic.

You were not quite beats and not quite hippies. Did you feel a little lost in certain respects?

No, I wouldn’t say we were lost. We weren’t beats because we weren’t depressed. We thought they had gotten a little morose. On the other hand, we were really silly. So much of that was Garcia.

We just wanted to have fun, and nothing was going to get in our way. At the same time, though, we felt that we owed the beats a tremendous debt. They were such a brilliant reference point.

I think we enjoyed our status as moving forward with that project. We owed them a debt, and we certainly referenced their poems all the time. Then, if something new would come out, that was cause for great celebration. I think we really honored our elders but we didn’t want to repeat them.

We also didn’t have any aspirations to join the dominant culture and segue into some kind of cubicle office job, bean counter kind of thing. That was definitely off the table.

So I think we were, in a lot of ways, living for the moment. That was important—to be present to the moment and experience fully what it felt like to be in that moment. It felt really magical and it was a lot of fun. In my little amateur poem [which appears in the afterword] I say, “Never before and perhaps again.” Well, definitely never before and definitely never again. That was it. And boy was it great. I’m so grateful.

In reading the book, I get the sense that Hunter was longing for something that’s elusive and just out of reach at that moment in time. Do you think that’s a fair take?

I think he had the prescience to realize that he was, in fact, waiting because something was coming and we didn’t know what it was. Shortly thereafter, I think it must’ve been ‘63, he started doing the LSD experiments at the VA Hospital. I think that’s something he was waiting for that really did arrive. But by and large, he was pretty introspective and somewhat of an introvert, although he could really let it rip when he was on stage.

So I think he was waiting, it did arrive and he was right. He had some kind of prescience. He felt it in the zeitgeist, in the culture.

It’s pretty cool, isn’t it? He wasn’t a jerk about it. There was no ego in any of this. That’s why I keep saying it’s reportage. He’s actually laying down what happened, and that was brilliant. I think it’s much more valuable than if he had fictionalized it. I think it’s much more interesting. It’s also a memoir. It’s him; it’s his psyche. He’s the one going through the changes and he’s trying to document them for us. I think he is incredibly humble.

There’s this sense of him saying, “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’m waiting for something and I don’t know what it is. Meanwhile, I walk back and forth between Kepler’s and St. Michael’s Alley and the house. I smoke a lot of cigarettes. And once in a while, we perform.” There was a lot of racing around and he really got it down perfectly. I admire him so much for that. It startled me to read it because it was so accurate.

As you were sitting at Kepler’s with Bob, Jerry and Alan, did you have any sense that there were these other folks out there who hadn’t been activated yet, but would come along for the ride?

Not at the scale but, of course, there were enclaves. There was no internet. There was barely anything. Most of us didn’t even have phones. That’s why the bookstore was such a great place. It was kind of the campaign headquarters. How did we find out about things? It was through that sort of network.

It was wonderful, and we could always go and find a reference for what we were thinking or experiencing. I think it was brilliant that it all happened in a bookstore. That was the internet of the time.

Now as it turned out, there was a whole scene up in Berkeley around KPFA. That was happening. There was a lot of interesting stuff happening out at San Francisco State. There was also a lot going on in North Beach with the whole poetry world and the art world. They felt like nodes on the same frequency. It was part of the whole thing, but just a different kind of tribe.

There were a lot of very smart, dedicated people trying to move the needle toward a saner world. It was unprecedented, and there was this huge efflorescence. But, as I think back to those jams at Kepler’s, I feel like something was conjured there in that context. It’s still alive. It’s mutated, it’s gone through a lot of different changes, but I think the core of it really is some kind of joy. What else is there?

When you saw Hunter perform at that time, did he seem like a callow or reluctant musician?

No, he was a full-throated, open hearted, sing-your-heart-out kind of musician. Then, when he was reciting poetry, he morphed into the bard.

Thanks to him, we did a reading together at Wetlands in New York in ‘93, and the highest compliment I’ve ever gotten in my life was him telling me: “I don’t know if I can go on after you.”

He was always forthright, engaged in what he was doing, and when he sang, he really let it rip. He divested himself of anything other than just being present with the music, with the song.

There’s the moment in the book when Jerry tells Hunter that he wants to move on from their duo and explore other musical opportunities. What are your thoughts on his depiction of that event, as well as its aftermath?

I certainly wasn’t present for that conversation, but there was the sense that Jerry had met these bluegrass musicians and he was enamored. That was a little hard for me. I like bluegrass music but I do not like listening to someone practice bluegrass music. [Laughs.] So that got really tiresome. I think it got tiresome for Hunter too, and there wasn’t really a role for him. I believe that he went to England around that time, and that was part of the splintering. Everybody kind of started going off on their own.

I don’t know if there was an actual conversation or if Hunter put that in there to say, “Well, this came down.” It may have happened just like that or it may have been a literary conceit that moves the plot along a little bit. It certainly put everything in context though, in terms of what came next.

I don’t know if it is something that happened in real life or in his literary mindset but it was kind of self-evident and in the air. I don’t think that Hunter felt left out or bummed out in any way, shape or form. By that time, he had his novel he was working on. He had his destiny rolling out in front of him, and it wasn’t to be part of the Grateful Dead in that way. He was not to be a performer in that band, but how fabulous that he went and wrote some songs and entered through that door.

As you were reading the book, were there any moments where you felt like Hunter was speaking directly to you in any way?

Well, it certainly made me feel loved and appreciated. So if that was the message he was sending, that’s very sweet. I think the mere fact that he told the truth was enough. He didn’t have to gild the lily in any way. He didn’t have to put little Easter eggs in there for me. That wasn’t necessary.

When I got the book, I sat down and read it cover to cover because I wanted to get the full flavor of it. I don’t think it’s to anybody or for anybody though. I think he wanted to do what any good writer does, and that’s take really good notes and write about what you know, which is what he did. That’s a kind of self-existing brilliance, don’t you think? Nothing more is required.