Long Strange Trip: The Grateful Dead in Four Hours

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 (trailer here), 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.

Still, the film has a good handle on what made the Dead and their music so successful. It vividly evokes the tenor of their successive eras, without idealizing any of them. Bar-Lev really makes the case they were the quintessential American rock band of the Twentieth Century. Recommended for serious Deadheads and causal listeners curious enough to invest four hours, Long Strange Trip opens this Friday (5/26) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Tribeca ’14: The Other One

Bob Weir never had an ice cream named after him. He always played second banana to Jerry Garcia, but he got a disproportionate share of the perks that come to a rock band tour, if you get the drift. The dean of the jam band scene now gets his overdue ovation in Mike Fleiss’s The Other One: the Long, Strange Trip of Bob Weir, which screens during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.

Weir was adopted at birth by a well-to-do San Francisco couple who were not very San Francisco. He had the city in his blood anyway. An undiagnosed dyslexic, Weir underperformed academically, but found his niche in music. A fast-friendship with the somewhat older and more established Jerry Garcia led to the establishment of what was initially a jug band. After a detour with the Merry Pranksters, the Grateful Dead were on their way.

The cooperative Weir revisits all the major sites of The Dead creation story, even though most are now completely unrecognizable. He granted Fleiss extensive face time, including valuable interview segments explaining his surprising musical influences, such as the great jazz artist, McCoy Tyner. He also dispels any suspicion of a rivalry with Garcia once and for all. In fact, we get a picture of a genuinely touching friendship between the band members. Frankly, third parties suggest Garcia rather regretted his exalted position with Deadheads, whereas Weir was relieved to be spared their intense devotion.

Weir is about as laidback as fans would expect, but he has some thoughtful insights to offer viewers. However, Fleiss misses a conspicuous opportunity to push for some consistency on the subject of drug use. Weir might have fond (if hazy) memories of the drug-fueled early days, but Garcia’s sad drug-related end clearly still distresses him.

As a gentle exercise in Grateful Dead revisionism, Fleiss and his assembled talking heads argue Weir played a more active role as a songwriter and an architect of the group’s overall sound than many Garcia partisans realize. Without question, Fleiss and company are more concerned about giving Weir his just due than inviting messy soul searching—and so be it. Other One tells an interesting story, at a healthy pace, but it is not completely blinkered from reality. Recommended for all jam band listeners, The Other One screens again tomorrow (4/26) as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.