GOOD OL' GRATEFUL DEADCAST Celebrates 100th Episode and 10th Season with First of Two-Part Robert Hunter Special
Thursday, November 21st, 2024 - Today, to commemorate the 100th episode and 10th season of Rhino’s Good Ol’ Grateful Deadcast, the show has launched the first installment in a special two-part exploration of primary Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter’s newly published 1962 manuscript, The Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead―The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter (Hachette). A startling in-the-moment account of Hunter and Jerry Garcia’s formative years in the Palo Alto music scene, the book and podcast illuminate how the songwriters’ countercultural origins informed the very soul of what became the Dead.
Deadcast hosts Rich Mahan and Jesse Jarnow time travel back to the band’s earliest roots with the book’s co-stars Brigid Meier and Alan Trist, along with historian Dennis McNally, using archival audio to animate the years when Garcia and Hunter were crashing in the back of the local activism center, and how their long strange trip began before the Dead, before LSD, before the Warlocks, before Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions, before Hunter wrote a lyric or Garcia picked up a banjo.
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As the official Grateful Dead podcast, the Deadcast is a documentary-style exploration of the music and legacy of one of the most enduringly progressive acts in the history of recorded music. With over five million downloads and streams to date, past seasons have featured deep dives on major releases in the Dead canon - Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, Europe ‘72, Wake of the Flood, From the Mars Hotel and more - with a spirit of historical storytelling and high adventure. Over the past five years Deadcast has mixed interviews with members of the band (including Bob Weir, Mickey Hart, Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay and others), extended family (David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby), and road crew (Candace Brightman, Steve Parish), with committed fans like Elvis Costello, Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, Animal Collective’s Avey Tare, Vampire Weekend’s Chris Tomson and more. Combined with archival audio and interviews with Dead Heads, it creates an expansive and immersive portrait of the Grateful Dead. As the podcast’s tagline - “For The Committed And The Curious” - suggests, episodes invite new fans to explore the band’s enormous mythology in digestible chunks while illuminating crevices in the band’s history that even life-long Dead Heads may not have explored. Did you know about the time the Dead crashed a bar mitzvah? Or a future star of Twin Peaks appeared in their concert film? Or the time they almost signed Bob Marley to their label? For more special guests and new episodes released on a weekly basis, subscribe to Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast here: https://www.dead.net/deadcast.
For decades, passionate fans of the Grateful Dead have discussed the existence of a “lost” Hunter manuscript—a sort of holy grail—that tells the band's novelistic origin story. The newly published book features a foreword by John Mayer, an introduction by Dennis McNally, and an afterword by Brigid Meier, a close friend of Hunter's. Throughout, fans can experience the early days of Hunter, Garcia, and their cohorts, following them into the stacks at Kepler's Books and through the countryside on road trips.
Also included is Hunter’s own 1982 assessment of his work, how he shared it with close confidants but then decided to leave it unpublished. Five years after Hunter’s death, the text has been found, so readers and fans of Hunter’s indelible poetry and song can explore the origin of his genius and his craft. Readers will witness impromptu jams, inspired intellectual pranks, and dialogue that is, by turns, amusing and brilliant and outrageous.
