Correct. I feel like when you grow up and you have those little friend groups, they’re always kind of cultish, right? There is usually one person who is at the center, around whom the others revolve, who wants to be a role model for others, or who wants their attention.
There is a core. The most important thing about the Grateful Dead is that usually in a band you have two main members; [songwriters]and then there’s the ongoing question of what to do with another person – the classic example being George Harrison, or maybe [Rolling Stones bassist] Bill Wyman. However, in the Grateful Dead, Jerry specifically asked Will to write more songs because he thought the environment would be much better if there were multiple voices. Therefore, his leadership is more about leading by example rather than [about] Make a decision.
What does Hunter have to do with this book? You said he was happy to share it with you as a document of its time – but what do you think he thought of it as a book?
Well, you saw what he wrote about that in the early eighties. [In an author’s note from 1982, Hunter said, “I don’t plead the book as a piece of good writing…but as a singular curiosity whose value is wholly unintentional on the part of the writer.”]
Yes. But I wonder how much of that is just self-deprecation on his part.
This is the first draft of his work. Apparently, he then discovered that his true mode was lyrics and moved on. But no, it’s just part of his profile. He said in documents he wrote in the 1980s that the mistake with the book was that he wrote it and then he decided it wasn’t deep enough and he added some set pieces, which I doubt – although I can’t prove it, I never asked him -[were] Most of the dream sequences spice things up and complicate the plot. If there really is a plot. The whole thing is a portrait.
I write cultural history. Next year I will publish a book about the transition from beatniks to hippies, put it as simply and quickly as possible. and [Jerry and his friends] One of the basic examples of these people is that they were too young to be “Beat” per se, but to that extent they were late Beats influenced by Beat literature and the Beat lifestyle. One thing Hunter makes clear in the book is his disdain for materialism, which is absolutely profound. So as a historical document it is amazing. It’s kind of perfect. Even though Hunter is 20 years old, his observation skills have definitely declined, and he wrote an interesting book.
