Some things just are. And, to hear Robert Hunter, writing in 1962, tell it, Jerry Garcia was always a leader; always an insatiable guitar player.

This is the unmistakable takeaway from “The Silver Snarling Trumpet: The Birth of the Grateful Dead – The Lost Manuscript of Robert Hunter,” a never-published tome Hunter revisited once, in the early 1980s, and deemed “the worst book ever written,” before putting the manuscript in storage, where it remained until 2024.

The author was hyperbolizing in his self-criticism. For while it’s true “The Silver Snarling Trumpet” likely has a limited audience and Hunter, all of 20 years old, was still developing the writing style that would one day define the Grateful Dead songbook, “Trumpet” is a fascinating read for all Dead Heads as Hunter, Garcia, future Grateful Dead manager Alan Trist, on a gap year in America from the U.K., Barb Meier, who would figure again in Garcia’s personal life in the 1990s, and others create a scene planted between the waning Beatniks and the yet-to-emerge hippies.

At “the focal point of an almost infinite number of radii” around which the ‘scene’ revolved” was Jerry – this is a first-names-only narrative – a guy who practiced his guitar “anywhere from 24 to 38 hours a day,” as Hunter tells it.

The scene has three main loci – “the room,” where many of the scenesters crashed and was overseen by “the Blind Prophet;” the coffeeshop, where they hung until getting the boot for not buying enough coffee to merit their presence; and the bookstore, where they waxed philosophical and dreamed about what would come next.

If they only knew.

Hunter interlaces the events with powerful writing that includes a fascinating dissertation on grey vs. orange days and colorful descriptions of vivid dreams about characters vomiting their souls on canvas; voracious trees seeking to eat the author; and a giant woman suckling a bunch of monstrous offspring before dissolving into the ground on which she stands.

Dead & Company guitarist John Mayer writes the forward, former Grateful Dead publicist Dennis McNally pens the introduction and Meier wraps it up with a lovely, nostalgic afterword that reminds every reader – generation is no matter – of the beauty of those young, formative relationships and the days shared in youth. Days that seemed like they’d last forever and often do – albeit only in memory and, in this case, on paper.