BEFORE: Bob Weir carries over from "The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir" and I suspect many other people will as well. This one's not on Netflix yet, it came out just last year, but I'm borrowing an Academy screener from one of my bosses to cross it off the list. It's not on iTunes, but I guess it's also available on Amazon - I'd rent it there but I haven't been able to get the movie plug-in working with the browser on my Mac, so there's my excuse for watching this one as a borrowed freebie. Hey, I'm keeping with the spirit of the band, man - it's cool to tape or dub as long as you spread the word and trade tapes with another fan, right?
THE PLOT: A look at the 30-year career of The Grateful Dead.
AFTER: Well, I've got to credit them for picking the right title. "Strange" certainly applies to anything regarding the Dead's journey, but really the emphasis should be on "LONG" here - this film is nearly FOUR HOURS long. The last time I watched anything this long, it was another music doc, the one about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers titled "Runnin' Down a Dream". But that was years ago, when I was home sick on a weekday, and just needed something to occupy my time. Tonight I didn't fare as well, because I fell asleep in the recliner sometime during Hour 3. My wife said I should have split this one over two nights - and it was on two DVDs, so maybe that would have been the best strategy.
The question then becomes, did this film NEED to be four hours long? Chicago's career was just as long and extensive as the Grateful Dead's, and their documentary came in under two hours. It's almost ironic that the Dead's documentary would mirror a song performed in one of their concerts - way too long, mostly unstructured, and largely unnecessary. I refuse to believe that there wasn't a shorter, more coherent way of delivering all of this information, even when you factor in all of their personnel changes, personal histories, and the concert performances from over the years.
Look, I'm not a "deadhead", probably never will be, though I enjoy some of their songs - but I guess that puts me in the minority here, because people either REALLY LOVE the Dead, or they don't care at all, and you rarely meet someone like me who's square in the middle. Of course, I was one of those "Johnny-Come-Latelys" whose first Dead album was "In the Dark" because I liked that "Touch of Grey" song, their first hit after the advent of MTV. Eventually I went back and collected their greatest hits, plus the "American Beauty" and "Workingman's Dead" albums, and I never saw them perform live, so I guess that makes me a fair-weather fan.
Of course time must be spent paying homage to Jerry Garcia, interviews with his girlfriend/wife that he reconnected with shortly before he transcended this plane, or maybe returned to his home planet. You can't really cut that stuff. I remember back in summer 1995, things were getting a little rough between me and my first wife, and so we were out on a camping trip with some of our friends (including her future girlfriend, but that's neither here nor there...) and when we heard all the other campers in the park singing Grateful Dead songs, that's how we found out that Jerry had died. I didn't really get the importance of it, but I at least respected the other campers and their need to break into these sing-alongs.
But there's SO MUCH here that could be excised out, or trimmed down. For example, one band member is allegedly going through the archives, looking for filmed material, presumably to include in the doc (I find this a bit hard-to-believe, because who films all of the research for a doc, as opposed to just the results?) and they find this footage of Jerry Garcia that was thought lost, from the time their record company wanted the Dead to make a movie, and sent a bunch of filmmakers to follow them around. Now, the Dead ended up giving those filmmakers LSD to distract them and ruin their film, but once this "lost" footage is found, it ended up appearing in "Long Strange Trip" at least three times. But it's JUST Jerry looking in the camera making faces, and he's probably stoned - so it adds NOTHING to the narrative, why include it three times?
Similarly, did we really need a breakdown of all the types of fans that attended Grateful Dead concerts - the tapers are in THAT section, the deaf people are in THAT section, the spinners are out in the lobby - what possible difference could it make to show me a seating chart, at this point in time? Then it gets into the process where people exchanged tapes of different shows, intricately designing labels with the set lists (and they went by quickly, but I still noticed spelling errors in the names of the songs...) and it's like BIG DEAL, people tape all kinds of bands, people swap tapes, maybe a little more with the Dead than with other bands, but come on, really, who gives a crap?
Another thing that could easily be jettisoned is the recurring clips from the "Frankenstein" movies, especially the ones with Abbott & Costello - there doesn't seem to be any point to them at all, except then the connection is (sort of) explained near the end, but there's just no real payoff to them. So, out they should go.
Drugs and alcoholism, which I now realize has been a constant theme since starting the rock & roll chain. I know, I should have expected that, but I didn't realize that I'd be breaking all these bands down by their drugs of choice, which I supposed are somewhat dependent on each band's time and place - like the Beatles took speed in Hamburg, then switched to pot and LSD. Clapton took heroin, then booze to get off the heroin, then back to heroin to get off the booze. Jimi and Janis both overdosed, Jimi on barbiturates and Janis on heroin, and then even Chicago admitted to taking a lot of drugs up at the ranch, basically whatever they wanted from pot to coke to harder stuff was brought right to them. It's no shock that the Dead took acid, and Garcia's cause of death was officially a heart attack, but it happened while he was at rehab. Smoking, drug addiction, diabetes all combined with exhaustion, probably - it's just not a healthy lifestyle, this 1960's rock and roll thing.
Checking the music history for today, July 26, Brent Mydland from the Grateful Dead died on this day in 1990. Another overdose - it's getting to the point where I'll be pleasantly surprised if I find a rocker who died where drugs were NOT involved.
I can see how the film in general has some worth, even if you're not a hardcore fan, but it's GROSSLY in need of some more editing. But I held this one for the second of the two films about the Grateful Dead, because I was hoping for a particular cameo, which is in there (even if all the people appearing in archive footage are NOT listed in the IMDB...but I'll try to fix that). More on that tomorrow, but it's going to enable me to drop one film from my chain, one I think I might have seen already.
I don't know, maybe I should have made this film my 3,000th film, because making it through this ordeal of a film seems like more of an accomplishment - and Bob Weir estimated that the Dead played about 3,000 concerts. But I'm just not that big of a fan, and anyway, both Wikipedia and the Guinness Book of Records say that number is really more like 2,300. So let's let it stand. Anyway, tonight's film number is a palindrome, just like "Aoxomoxoa" was, so that's good, right?
Also starring Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, John Perry Barlow, Natascha Weir, Trixie Garcia (all carrying over from "The Other One"), Robert Hunter, Keith Godchaux, Donna Jean Godchaux, Sam Cutler, Dennis McNally, Barbara Meier, Steve Parish, Nick Paumgarten, Steve Silberman, Joe Smith, Alan Trist, Al Franken and archive footage of Jerry Garcia, Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, Brent Mydland, Ken Kesey, (all carrying over from "The Other One"), Tom Constanten, Vince Welnick, Mick Jagger (last seen in "Jimi Hendrix"), Keith Richards (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Charlie Watts (ditto), Hugh Hefner, Ronald Reagan, Nancy Reagan, Kurt Loder, Bud Abbott, Lou Costello.
RATING: 5 out of 10 recordings of "Althea" (check out the one from 5/16/80, man, recorded at the Nassau Coliseum show...)
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