The Grateful Dead
Our ‘lost issue’ kicks off with a fascinating insight into the colourful world of one of the world’s biggest cult bands.
Has anyone outside the band’s fan following – more a communion than anything – ever made sense of the Grateful Dead? To some they remain the ultimate arcane cult band, too hands-off for general consumption; the lost symbol of what rock music was like before the man, in the guise of corporate marketing, worked out how to fleece us all.
Perhaps they were too parochial. Even their latter-day publicist, Dennis McNally, admitted it was a struggle to explain the band to the uninitiated. “It was always a challenge because there’s so much distraction about them,” he said. “But if you ignore the rabid fans and the expected facts of American entertainment, there’s a richness that fills your soul. They explored freedom and gave us a phenomenal revaluation of American values.”
In Don Henley’s song The Boys Of Summer, Henley pictured their myth as a disappearing dot on the horizon. “I was driving down the San Diego Freeway,” he said, “and got passed by a $21,000 Cadillac Seville, the status symbol of the right-wing, upper-middle-class American bourgeoisie – all the guys with the blue blazers with the crests and the grey pants – and there was this Grateful Dead ‘Dead Head’ bumper sticker on it!”
Keith Richards didn’t get them. “The Grateful Dead is where everybody got it wrong. Just poodling about for hours. Jerry Garcia: boring shit man. Sorry, Jerry.”
Richards gave his opinion in the wake of the Dead’s Fare Thee Well shows at Chicago’s Soldier Field on the July 4 weekend of 2015, where they bid adieu and walked off with a cool $55 million gate, gross. Perhaps Keith, a pensioner with benefits if ever there was one, was merely miffed about that bottom line.
Of course, the Grateful Dead sold out like everyone else, but a fascinating new Amazon documentary called Long Strange Trip puts them back into focus. Neither damage limitation nor a rescue mission, Long Strange Trip provides a suitably fuzzy cultural framework and enough transcendentally euphoric music to delight the devotee and maybe sway the ‘don’t give a fuck’ anti-Dead brigade.
Directed by Amir Bar-Lev and executive produced by Martin Scorsese, Long Strange Trip spins the clock back to the beginning, when Jerry Garcia was a five-year-old kid watching Abbott And Costello Meet