DOC ON GRATEFUL DEAD WAS A TOUGH SELL
Filmmaker had to prove that he was the right man before he could make Long Strange Trip
Whatever illusions filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev might have had about the Grateful Dead being an easygoing hippie band were dashed when he set out to make the documentary Long
Strange Trip about the rock icons. Surviving members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart may be psychedelically inclined gents, but they’re no pushovers. They weren’t going to let just anybody tell the official story of this classic American band, and neither was the estate of late singer/guitarist Jerry Garcia. A lot of people had tried and been turned down.
“I’m one in a long continuum of Deadheads who have come and said, ‘Here’s how I think I could help,’ ” says New York filmmaker Bar-Lev, 45, in an interview during the recent Hot Docs festival, where Long Strange Trip had its Canadian premiere
Ottawa-born David Lemieux, 46, had some say in the matter, since he’s the band’s audiovisual archivist and legacy manager, a gig he’s had since 1999.
He was the gatekeeper to the trove of music, studio and live performances sought by Bar-Lev, a documentary filmmaker best known for The Tillman
Story and My Kid Could Paint That. The band had talked for years about doing a career-spanning doc, but “nobody had the vision that our instincts said, ‘This is the right guy,’ ” Lemieux says, joining the interview.
“And then we met with Amir, and instantly, he had the vision. And what that vision was, we didn’t know. Specifically, he had no script. But he knew that this was a story that needed to be told. And we went out for coffee and we just talked for a couple hours and we became instant friends.”
Years later, Long Strange Trip made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, blowing minds with its assertion that the officially interred (for now) San Francisco ensemble was “the most American of all bands,” if also the most elusive. And what’s with the Frankenstein connection? We discuss.
I love how you work in Jerry’s early fondness for Frankenstein movies with the band’s hippie ethos and its “Steal Your Face” skull logo with lightning bolt. How’d you make the connection?
Bar-Lev: They all connect with each other through Jungian dream logic. The lightning bolt in our film is explained by (longtime band roadie) Steve Parish, who says . . . that it’s enlightenment. In the Frankenstein movie, it’s the animating force. It’s what takes this corpse and turns it into a seemingly living thing. What’s alive and what’s dead is also a huge way of understanding of what this story is about.
The film gives the impression that Jerry was a control freak, which seems to run counter to the popular image him as a laid-back guy.
Bar-Lev: I think Jerry was a control freak who had serious misgivings about that side of his personality. And that’s why we put it at the very beginning of the film, the anecdote in which he says he saw the Frankenstein movie as a kid and he was terrified, but he decided that he wanted to make a friend of that monster. In kind of a symbolic, psychological way, it’s him saying, “There’s something that’s other than me that compels me, and rather than going away from it, I’m going to try and bring it closer to me. Embrace the monster.”
Lemieux: Jerry’s words had weight, a lot of weight. And maybe he didn’t speak that much. Maybe he didn’t assert that very often. But when he did, it meant a lot. I don’t know if I’d call him a control freak, but I’d definitely say that his words had weight. When something was important, he let it be known. But I don’t think his veto was more important than any of the others.
Let’s talk about the music. Long Strange Trip isn’t a greatest hits catalogue of the Dead. You barely play “Truckin’,” for example. Why?
Bar-Lev: We had to play the music to serve the film, not the other way around. Ultimately, we wanted it to be a successful film. The fun thing about it is, when you’re editing, you’re kind of creating a hologram, where you’re aware of things that are going to happen in the film, but obviously the audience isn’t going to be, so you’re creating a symbolic architecture that is non-linear in a way.
Lemieux: The music selection was based on “What is the perfect music for this scene?” I never saw it as anything like, “Hey, let’s slip in some very rare music that nobody knows, or the deeper cuts, or for the deeper fans.”
But you couldn’t find space for “Box of Rain”?
Bar-Lev: The “Box of Rain” omission weighs on me. We just couldn’t find a home for it. And I tried to the bitter end to get “Unbroken Chain” in.
Lemieux: But I like that you didn’t wedge music in just because it needed to be in there.
Amir, I hear it took you years to meet the surviving Dead members.
Bar-Lev: I never wanted to meet the band . . . Somebody said, “You know that they don’t know you.” And I said, “They don’t need to know me. They’ve got plenty of friends. I’ve got plenty of friends. If they want to look at my films and hear my pitch, they should do that. But I don’t want to be yet another sycophant hanging out getting stoned with Bob Weir.”
Even with a four-hour running length, you end the film in 1995 with Jerry’s untimely passing. Why not continue with the band members’ various solo projects and reconfigurations?
Bar-Lev: The film wants to end that way; it wants to end with a baton being passed to you, the viewer, and that is really Jerry saying, “I hope this thing goes on in some ways.”
Lemieux: That was a conscious choice from day one, I’d say. We had a meeting, although there wasn’t a lot of discussion about it. We all just agreed. This movie ends at 1995. The story certainly doesn’t.
Could the show still go on? The band had its 50th anniversary “Fare Thee Well” concerts in 2015 that were supposed to be the final raising of the Dead.
Bar-Lev: It depends on what you define as “the Grateful Dead.”
Lemieux: Was “Fare Thee Well” the final time for those four guys to be onstage together? I think so, that’s what they said, but we’ve got Dead and Company, we’ve got “An Evening With Phil Weir,” and certainly with Grateful Dead tapes, CDs and movies, the music is never going to end. I listen to Grateful Dead music every day, so it’s still a huge part of my life, every single day. And I know it will be for the next 20 years.