It would seem that even an archive as thoroughly curated as that of the late, legendary novelist-essayist-screenwriter Joan Didion still bears some surprises.
In 1967, the Saturday Evening Post assigned Didion to interview the Grateful Dead in their Bay Area rehearsal space at the height of the Summer of Love (with which the group was already disilluioned). She watched a rehearsal and then interviewed the band — then comprised of Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan and Bill Kreutzmann — minus Pigpen, who had mysteriously disappeared after the rehearsal.
Writer Joan Didion stands at the panhandle of Golden Gate Park with a group of hippies during the writing of her article “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” April 1967. (Photo by © Ted Streshinsky/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)
Corbis via Getty Images
A brief segment of the interview was published in Didion’s classic essay collection “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” but the full three-page draft was recently uncovered at the New York Public Library in the archive of Didion and husband John Gregory Dunne and published in full in music writer Geoff Weiss’ substack Passion of the Weiss.
