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.