Deadheads split themselves into a number of different tribes. And the coffee pot got dosed, and the whole thing turned from an artificial party into an authentic party.”Ĩ. “It’s laid out like an apartment, but it’s a Hollywood soundstage, and there’s Hugh Hefner and all these melons. “All the people who are at the party are extras, you know – they’re from central casting, and they’re sitting there with glasses of ginger ale,” Garcia relates in an archival interview. Such was the case when in 1969 the band was booked to perform on Playboy After Dark, a syndicated television show hosted by Hugh Hefner. During an early TV appearance, the Dead dosed a cast of extras with LSD.Ĭonfronted with unfamiliar, potentially awkward situations as their fame began to rise, the Grateful Dead weren’t above employing “LSD as self-defense,” as then-tour manager Sam Cutler put it. And why don’t we put more energy into the vocals, and making the vocals sound as good as they can, and not getting hung up on the instrumental surroundings?”Ĥ. “Or California country & western, like Bakersfield. “When it came time to do Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty – that’s really kind of really one long record – I talked to the guys, said, ‘Why don’t we approach this one as though it were, like, a country & western record?'” Garcia explains in an archival interview. The Dead achieved commercial success by going country.ĭriven out of San Francisco by curiosity seekers intent on spotting hippies, the Dead sought refuge in the countryside, and their music soon grew to reflect the new setting: a shift seen in rare footage of Garcia, Bob Weir and Phil Lesh working out vocal harmonies for “Candyman” while strumming acoustic guitars. “Bluegrass is conversational music – the instruments kind of talk to each other,” Garcia adds, citing a credo that he carried over into what would become the Grateful Dead.ģ. I fell in love with the sound, and I thought, ‘That’s something I have to be able to do.'” Color film footage of an impossibly young Garcia showing his pluck reveals that he was a quick study. “But the first time I decided that it was something I wanted to do was when I heard … Earl Scruggs play five-string banjo. “My mother was an amateur musician, my father was a professional musician, so I grew up in a musical household,” Garcia relates in another archival interview. Garcia’s formative influence was bluegrass banjo legend Earl Scruggs. Frankenstein’s monster is, after all, a drive to reanimate, or to produce life, and it hit me in that archetypal center.”Ģ. “It might have been the thing of a dead thing brought to life. “It touched something, I don’t know what, something very strong,” Garcia says. The interview, taped for a television program called The Movie That Changed My Life, returns at the end of the documentary, providing closure. Images and film clips from Frankenstein films recur throughout the documentary. He recalls seeing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948, one year after his father had drowned. “I used to draw pictures of the Frankenstein monster over and over, endlessly, in different positions,” Garcia says near the start of Long Strange Trip, his voice playing over a montage of his sketches. Jerry Garcia was obsessed with Frankenstein. The second half is more wayward and contemplative, with exploratory detours into the Deadhead experience and the tape-trading phenomenon, yet it builds inexorably to the band’s incandescent commercial peak before turning to Garcia’s harrowing decline.ġ. Much of the first half presents familiar themes in discrete episodes, served up at a measured pace: Garcia’s childhood the band’s unlikely coalescing psychedelic hijinks and rustic retreats and the tragic 1973 death of co-founder Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. In structure and pacing, Long Strange Trip, which opens in theaters Friday, and then comes to Amazon Prime Video June 2nd, resembles a classic Dead show. What the film chronicles, imaginatively and unflinchingly, is the flowering of an exuberant American counterculture – its triumph, its corruption and the toll exacted at either extreme – as viewed through the prism of a singular band of anarchists and their charismatic yet unwilling ringmaster, Jerry Garcia. It sounds like a punch line: “There’s a new Grateful Dead documentary – and it’s four hours long.” But Long Strange Trip, directed by Amir Bar-Lev ( The Tillman Story, Happy Valley) and executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, is no amiably noodling shuffle through a defunct band’s yellowed back pages.
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