[McMURTRY, Larry (1936-2021), his copy]. KESEY, Ken (1935-2001). Sailor Song. [New York:] Viking, [1992].
Large 8vo. Original white cloth-backed boards; original unclipped dust jacket. Provenance: Larry McMurtry (his bookplate, which he designed, features the horseshoe-shaped brand his father and grandfather used on the McMurtry cattle), from his personal library at his home in Archer City.
FIRST EDITION, PRESENTATION COPY INSCRIBED BY KESEY TO LARRY McMURTRY: “For ol’ Larry: Finally! Ken”. [With:] a 3-pp. typed letter signed to McMurtry from Kesey, on Field Trip Productions letterhead with original envelope simply addressed “Larry”, dated 26 August 1992, describing his time touring with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead on one of his famous Field Trips out west with the band including auditions for who was going to be the warm-up act before the Grateful Dead. “Our end consisted of auditioning about 125 acts to perform before and after the Dead… we had to build our own stage, you see; the Dead don’t like nobody else to plug into their equipment, that’s the way electronic aids gets passed around”. Kesey wrote a tale, The Sea Lion, based on the mythology of the Northwest Coast Native Americans, originally intending it to be a three-part rock ballet scored by the Grateful Dead. The ambitious project was never realized, but Kesey writes in his letter that he still performed it, and Gus Van Sant filmed it: “We may have weaned ourselves from the Great Dead Tit”. He later confesses in his letter that he was recently diagnosed with diabetes heightened by stress from the mixed reviews, which he stopped reading, for his book Sailor Song as he claims that “the good ones don’t help and the bad ones just hurt”.