Read Joan Didion’s Lost Interview with the Grateful Dead (1967)

With­out want­i­ng to make too broad a gen­er­al­iza­tion, it’s safe to say that Sat­ur­day Evening Post read­ers prob­a­bly did­n’t under­stand much about what was going on in San Fran­cis­co dur­ing the Sum­mer of Love. Or they did­n’t, at least, until the mag­a­zine ran “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem,” Joan Did­ion’s simul­ta­ne­ous report from and obit­u­ary for the drug-fueled seek­er scene that had formed around Haight-Ash­bury. Quite pos­si­bly her sin­gle most wide­ly known piece of writ­ing, the piece relates her encoun­ters both direct and indi­rect with par­tic­i­pants in the coun­ter­cul­ture both obscure and promi­nent.

That lat­ter group includes no less a San Fran­cis­co hip­pie insti­tu­tion than the Grate­ful Dead, Did­ion’s inter­view with whom did­n’t make it into the final piece. But over near­ly six decades since then, its type­script has remained among her papers, and it was recent­ly dis­cov­ered in Did­ion and John Gre­go­ry Dun­ne’s lit­er­ary archive at the New York Pub­lic Library by Did­ion biog­ra­ph­er Tim­o­thy Denevi. Just days ago, music jour­nal­ist Jeff Weiss post­ed the 1967 text online, describ­ing it “as a land­mark ear­ly inter­view with the band direct­ly after the release of their self-titled debut album, but before nation­al star­dom swept them on the Gold­en Road to unlim­it­ed devo­tion and drug con­sump­tion.”

In a sense, the mem­bers them­selves occu­pied the eye of the coun­ter­cul­tur­al storm. “I told the Dead I was try­ing to fig­ure out what was going on,” Did­ion writes, “and one of them said ‘When you find out, tell us.’ ” Top­ics of dis­cus­sion include the venues they dis­like (Los Ange­les’ Chee­tah, for instance, where “there was a com­put­er, every­thing was pro­grammed”), their resent­ment for the Coun­cil for a Sum­mer of Love’s attempts to orga­nize the bur­geon­ing scene, the ongo­ing dete­ri­o­ra­tion of that scene (“a small and pro­duc­tive cre­ative thing” whose ener­gy even­tu­al­ly attract­ed “all these peo­ple in some lame bag or anoth­er”), their loathing of the then-new radio hit “San Fran­cis­co (Be Sure to Wear Flow­ers in Your Hair),” and the regret­table tem­po­rary absence of Ron “Pig­pen” McK­er­nan (“eas­i­ly our most pho­to­genic mem­ber”).

It was around this same time that the Dead were also inter­viewed by CBS TV news for “The Hip­pie Temp­ta­tion,” pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, a seg­ment on the pop­u­lar­i­ty and dan­gers of LSD. Where­as they came off in that con­text as denizens of the bel­ly of the beast, if rea­son­ably artic­u­late ones, they seem pos­i­tive­ly straight (in the par­lance of the time) com­pared with most of the oth­er inter­vie­wees in “Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem”: the dis­ori­ent­ed groupies, the aggres­sive­ly enlight­ened bohemi­an blowhards, the infa­mous five-year-old on acid in “High Kinder­garten.” It’s no sur­prise that the Dead inspired one of the few last­ing move­ments to come out of that head­i­ly utopi­an era, thanks in part to its very peri­patet­ic form­less­ness and lack of a polit­i­cal pro­gram. As Jef­fer­son Air­plane’s Paul Kant­ner tend­ed to recall, for a few weeks there in 1966, every­thing was per­fect — but Joan Did­ion turned up in 1967. Read her lost inter­view with the Grate­ful Dead here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Every Grate­ful Dead Song Anno­tat­ed in Hyper­text: Web Project Reveals the Deep Lit­er­ary Foun­da­tions of the Dead’s Lyrics

Stream a Mas­sive Archive of Grate­ful Dead Con­certs from 1965–1995

“The Hip­pie Temp­ta­tion”: An Angst-Rid­den CBS TV Show Warns of the Risks of LSD (1967)

The Night When Miles Davis Opened for the Grate­ful Dead (1970)

Read 12 Mas­ter­ful Essays by Joan Did­ion for Free Online, Span­ning Her Career From 1965 to 2013

Joan Did­ion Cre­ates a Hand­writ­ten List of the 19 Books That Changed Her Life

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.