The
Grateful Dead were an anomaly. They were hippies with work ethics. While the
band was intact, they played an estimated 2,350 live gigs—an officially
recognized Guinness World’s Record. Of course, that life on the road took a
toll. The surviving band members look back on the music and the entire madcap
phenomenon in Amir Bar-Lev’s four-hour documentary-palooza Long Strange Trip, which opens this Friday in New York.
The
Grateful Dead was one of the few bands whose members even casual listeners
could name—at least as far as lead guitarist Jerry Garcia, rhythm guitarist Bob
Weir, and maybe percussionist Mickey Hart. The true blues could also easily
rattle off the names of bassist Phil Lesh, drummer Bill Kreutmann, and the late
keyboarder player, Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. The Dead were unusual in many ways,
one being they considered their regular lyricists John Perry Barlow and Robert
Hunter to be members of the band. They processed a rich gumbo of styles,
including bluegrass from Garcia, jazz and avant-garde music from Lesh, and the
blues from McKernan, synthesizing it into the original rock & roll jam
band.
As
Joe Smith, the former president of Warner Bros. Records readily attests,
marketing the undisciplined Dead was a challenge in the early days. They racked
up an enormous debt to the label by using their initial recording sessions as
tutorials in studio production techniques. Of course, it is easy for him to
look back and laugh, given the money the label made on the more stripped-down,
Americana-influenced Workingman’s Dead and
American Beauty albums. In fact, it
is rather interesting to watch Long
Strange and PBS’s American Epic in
short succession.
Inevitably,
The Dead decided they were much more of a live band than a recording act.
Essentially, they subscribed to a jazz-like ethos that every set should be
different, with no predetermined set lists. Yet, the very unpredictability and
in-the-moment nature of Dead shows
gave rise to a culture of bootleg “Tapers,” who religiously documented every
set, eventually with the band’s officially blessing.
Initially,
Long Strange is a bit unfocused, but
the film locks in when the band really starts to establish its identity.
Frankly, the participating band alumni (including Barlow and back-up singer
Donna Jane Godchaux) are all quite forthcoming about the band’s excesses and
tragedies. Weir and his co-founding members admit they let McKernan feel too
isolated within the band. They tried not to make the same mistake with Garcia
in the mid-1990s, but it seems the iconic musician just didn’t want to be
helped. However, when it comes to from-the-hip reminiscing, nobody can top the
Dead’s former road manager, Sam Cutler. He was only with the band during the
years of 1970-1974, but what long, strange years they were.
In
fact, Bar-Lev consistently exposes the darkness lurking just below the
hippy-dippy Deadhead experience. Frankly, much of the film serves as a
cautionary warning against drug abuse and the increasingly intrusive idolatry
of fans. He also gets a rare glimpse of the notoriously interview-averse
Hunter, but no sound-bites.
At
four hours and two minutes, Long Strange runs
about half an hour longer than executive producer Martin Scorsese’s George Harrison: Living in the Material
World. Yet, jazz fans will be frustrated Bar-Lev never found time for
Ornette Coleman, Merl Saunders, and Bruce Hornsby, all of whom notably
collaborated with the band. It also seems strange he left out the Dead’s
involvement with The New Twilight Zone,
because it would have fit nicely with Garcia’s fascination with the Universal
Frankenstein movies, which Bar-Lev uses as a recurring motif.
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