We Watched the New Four Hour Long Grateful Dead Documentary

Here's what to expect at the one-time screening of Long Strange Trip at Cinema 21, Thursday, May 25.

(courtesy of Amazon Studios)
By Isabel Zacharias
Picture the music industry as a thicket, dense with trees, so expansive it becomes one green, tangled mass. Then, there’s a clearing. In the center, a cluster of wildflowers growing, alone in their universe.
“Jerry said, ‘That’s Grateful Dead music.’”
Sam Cutler, the Grateful Dead’s ’70s-era tour manager, looks into the camera, recalling when Jerry Garcia attempted to summarize the sound of his band, which had been nicknamed, “the band beyond description.”
Like so many would, Cutler reacts to Garcia’s pastoral analogy with, “Jesus, man. You know what I mean?” After a drag from a cigarette, he says,  “For fuck’s sake, you know what I mean?”
“But,” Cutler continues, shaking his head and turning back to the interviewer—“That’s how they are.”
Long Strange Trip, the new Grateful Dead documentary directed by Amir Bar-Lev (The Tillman Story) and co-produced by Martin Scorsese, is about as compact as a Grateful Dead jam break, clocking in at 239 minutes. Promoted as a Holy Grail of never-before-seen concert footage and rare bootleg recordings, its main target audience is clear: those tape-collecting devotees of the Dead’s effusive, psychedelic circus. This Thursday, the film will screen once at Nob Hill’s Cinema 21 before heading to Amazon Video on June 2.

For those clinging to an anachronistic obsession with '60s counterculture, Long Strange Trip delivers in droves upon cultish droves: a juicy interview with Garcia's first-ever girlfriend; footage of behemoth metal tour buses cruising through Haight-Ashbury to ogle the hippies, announcing, "This is the home of the Grateful Dead, a hard rock band!"; bassist Phil Lesh offering acid-dosed beer to the cameraman in a scene from a mid-'70s Dead movie that would never be finished. The whole crew had been dosed—the inclusion of their totally unusable camerawork is one of the film's best, strangest choices, hurling the viewer into a manic litany of close-ups and jump cuts, color and shake.

The film's interviewers, too, should be commended for eliciting several candid moments that transcend LSD spiritual oneness to reveal something pure and moving. In one particularly endearing interview, Minnesota senator and Deadhead Al Franken expounds passionately on the subtle guitar solo differences between live recordings of "Althea," insisting that the best is Nassau Coliseum, May 1980. Even if you hear the music as pseudo-rootsy peace 'n' love nonsense, watching Al Franken listen to it, seeing his face light up like a kid's, is enthralling.

In fact, as Long Strange Trip is unafraid to admit, what's interesting about the Grateful Dead isn't really the music, but the incomparable depth of the connection it forged with its fans. By touring for literally 30 years straight, they offered what seemed like an endless opportunity to get in a van and set out for an adventure in America at large. Predictably, it ends with most everyone burning out, becoming addicts and dying. But it has fun along the way, man.

SEE IT: Long Strange Trip screens at Cinema 21 on Thursday, May 25. 7 pm. It premieres on Amazon Video on Friday, June 2.

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