Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Long Strange Trip maker a Deadhead
“Every film I do owes a debt to the Grateful Dead,” says documentary director Amir Bar-Lev.
This statement sounds surprising coming from the man who’s best known for his Emmy-winning The Tillman
Story, about the cover-up surrounding the death of former NFL player and Green Beret Pat Tillman; My Kid Could
Paint That, a look at a child prodigy who may not be that prodigious; and Happy Valley, about the fallout of the child abuse scandal at Penn State.
Nonetheless, during a tea break between screenings of his new four-hour film on the band, Long Strange Trip, at the True/False Film Festival at Columbia, Mo., in March, Bar-Lev explains: “The Grateful Dead at a young age taught me to confound expectations, and (singer-guitarist) Jerry Garcia said, maybe not in the film, ‘Every time I figure out how to play a song correctly, that’s the last time I play it that way.’”
The band formed in San Francisco in 1965 and featured Garcia with singer-guitarist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart and keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, among others. For 30 years, the band stayed active despite having few songs that could be considered hits. The only top 10 album, In the Dark, yielded the only top 40 single, “Touch of Grey,” which peaked at No. 9.
Good luck waiting for your favorite Dead song to pop up on the radio. The Dead didn’t go out of their way for commercial success. They changed genres constantly, juggling bluegrass, psychedelia and jazz. If someone boasts of owning a set list for one of their shows, it’s not true because the band never used one.
While other ’60s bands performed tunes with veiled references to drugs, “Casey Jones” begins with “Driving that train/High on cocaine.” It’s also hard to imagine a curious consumer buying an album boasting the title,
Aoxomoxoa. In Long Strange Trip, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime, even Hart can’t explain what it means. They even allowed fans to record their shows.
For Bar-Lev and other fans, these are the reasons they love The Dead.
“The problem is that there has been a dearth of good music since my parents’ generation,” says Bar-Lev, who was born in 1972. “Even when I was younger, in the ’80s when I discovered the Grateful Dead, the Grateful Dead represented an alternative to the marriage of rock ’n’ roll with commerce. The Grateful Dead were more about a marriage of rock ’n’ roll with religion, with values. I fell in love with their music, but I also fell in love with what they seemed to me to be about, which was a sense of integrity. Even as a 13-year-old in the mid-’80s, the Grateful Dead presented themselves as an island in a sea of transactional music, or music that was closer to a circus.”
So what sort of values or religion did The Dead embody? Bar-Lev frames Long
Strange Trip around Garcia’s lifelong obsession with Frankenstein.
“The Grateful Dead is an experiment in eternal life,” says Bar-Lev. “The Grateful Dead is the idea of a guy (Garcia) whose dad died when he was a kid. He says that seeing Frankenstein as a kid was a life-changing moment for him. My hunch, having never met Jerry, is that
Frankenstein is an experiment in reanimation. Frankenstein is an experiment in creating life out of death. To Jerry, in my estimation, it’s a failed experiment. That’s not how you create something that’s going to live forever. You don’t electrocute a corpse, right?
“Nor do you create a pyramid or a tower in the same way that he was struck by the Watts Tower. He’s a guy who asks himself, ‘How do I make something that lasts forever?’ And the answer he comes up with has something to do with not defining things, with being open-ended, with letting a thing evolve.”
That may explain why The Dead have appealed to lawbreakers like the Hell’s Angels and lawmakers like Minnesota Sen. Al Franken. In addition, the line between the band, their road crew and their audience was blurred. Bar-Lev says that lyricist Robert Hunter was a vital part of The Dead, even if he didn’t play with them. It’s the opposite of the experience that bassist-lyricist Roger Waters documented with the Pink Floyd album, The Wall, where he wrestled with his own separation from his listeners.
“Literally, anyone who was in the Grateful Dead every time the Grateful Dead played was part of the Grateful Dead. And so was the guy selling the T-shirts and the guy cleaning up afterward. The Grateful Dead isn’t a band. The Grateful Dead is an idea,” Bar-Lev says.
“Roger Waters was right; when you start to create a cult of adulation of the guys onstage, you’re missing the whole point of rock ’n’ roll, as far as I understand rock ’n’ roll. It’s a collective experience. If your whole thing is a slavish affection for the guys making the music, you’re forgetting your whole role and responsibility in the thing.”
Fame still took its toll on Garcia, who died of a heart attack in 1995 after struggling with addiction and a series of health problems. Whereas Weir or Lesh could go out in public and not be disturbed, Garcia ironically became isolated by being the face of the Dead.
“It was totally at odds with who Jerry Garcia really was. What a horrible place to be. He was a guy who really valued interactions with people,” Bar-Lev says.
While Bar-Lev is as gushy a Deadhead as they come, his complicated portrait of Garcia is far from hagiography.
“The filmmakers I admire are the filmmakers who ask their audience to hold seemingly disparate emotions in their mind. The idea of my movies is to take somebody off a pedestal to put them on a higher pedestal. I did that with Tillman, and I’m hoping to do that with Jerry. I think the cartoon version of Jerry kind of does a disservice to him,” he says.
“Marie Tillman (Pat’s widow) said this, ‘Putting people on a pedestal is letting yourself off the hook.’ If you don’t want to do what Pat Tillman did, if you don’t want to make changes in your life based on what you see as an urgency in the same way he did, then you turn him into a superhero. Then you can say, ‘I’m not Pat Tillman, and I’m not a superhero. Pat Tillman was a superhero.’ And if you don’t want to be Jerry Garcia and give your music away for free and try to do a different show for your audience every night, then you turn Jerry Garcia into a type of hippie king, and then you can carry on …”
Bar-Lev says the process of assembling Long Strange Trip took about 14 years and that the wait oddly embodies why he and others love The Dead.
“The Grateful Dead as an entity is a collective. The Grateful Dead is a lot like what a democracy should be. When a democracy is truly acting in a pluralistic way, it moves incredibly slowly. It’s never been top down. You’re dealing with a bunch of different people, not just the band, not just Jerry’s (Garcia) estate. Those people all respect each other’s opinions and aren’t really driven by a profit motive and don’t really” care about publicity.