BEFORE: Since Bob Weir was interviewed in "Janis: Little Girl Blue" it makes sense to follow up with two films about the Grateful Dead. I have a hunch that two other band members will also carry over via archive footage, but we'll have to see - once again, the IMDB cast list for a film is terribly incomplete, I'm betting - because it only lists 8 people. Time for me to start keeping notes again...
THE PLOT: A documentary that explores Bob Weir's life, through his childhood, the Grateful Dead and Ratdog.
AFTER: Yep, I'll be making another submission to the IMDB later tonight, there are at least 20 people interviewed or seen in archive footage that are not listed in the official cast. The most glaring is Jerry Garcia, he's all over the place in the footage from the Dead concerts and interviews, how could anyone leave him off the IMDB list? This shall not stand...
I'm probably really late to the party on this one, because what I don't know about the Grateful Dead could probably fill a whole movie - but if you look at the footage of all the old 1960's concerts they gave, there's one guy who looks like a teenager. But that's only because he was a teenager - that's Bob Weir. I knew the name, of course, but only as an older man, but he co-founded the band at the age of 16 and was its youngest member. I guess he still is the young one, but of course he's 70 now, with a wife and two daughters.
These days a documentary really will go out of its way to avoid that old "talking head" format, but sometimes you just can't get around it. They need to talk to the people who know the subject matter, and for that you just can't beat the old one-camera interview. But at least there's a ton of concert footage to break it up, plus the camera follows Bob Weir back to visit his childhood home in California, only it turns out to be not there any more. (Yeah, that was time well spent...) But at least he can re-visit the back alley in Palo Alto behind what used to be the guitar shop, which is where he met Jerry Garcia one New Year's Eve. And then later he brings his wife and daughters to the house in San Francisco where the band used to live, because that probably wouldn't be awkward at all.
Weir became the yang to Garcia's yin, or perhaps the other way around, and Weir's got belief in a lot of things like telepathy and ESP that took place during acid trips - nah, he couldn't possibly have imagined that - but he also firmly believes that the LSD contributed greatly to the free-form nature of the majority of the Grateful Dead's long live jams, and freed them all up to be more experimental with their music. It seems like a long way to go to turn drug use into a positive thing, but that was the 1960's, I guess. Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign was still two decades in the future.
Weir has a unique take on the Deadhead culture that built up around the band, once they realized that there was a community of people who had dropped out of society to follow them around on the concert circuit, he couldn't really blame those people, because they were basically doing what he did so many years ago, dropping out of life to go on tour with the band. But then it also seems hard for him as a successful, hard-working musician to envision stepping away from the comforts of society to live in an RV or sleep in a tent outside a concert venue just to sell tie-dyed shirts to try to raise enough money for a ticket. I mean, follow your bliss, but also maybe get a real job.
Discounting all of the solo acts I've covered so far, if I just focus on the groups - Beatles, Chicago, the Grateful Dead - the details of their stories differ, but the basic story is the same. Some teens form a friendship and become the core members of the band, other members drop in later, but success comes from hard work and innovative songwriting, then drugs lead to wild creativity and even more innovative songwriting. Bob Weir was sort of the McCartney of the Dead (the cute one) but he was also a bit like the George Harrison (the young one). But he was the rhythm guitarist, and that was Lennon's role at first. OK, so the Beatles comparisons don't really work, the Dead were really their own thing, but I still don't know all the details about the band, but hey, that's what tomorrow's film is for.
Also starring Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, Trixie Garcia, Mike Gordon, Sammy Hagar, Bruce Hornsby, John Perry Barlow, Wendy Weir, Natascha Weir, Carolyn Garcia, Peter Coyote (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Blair Jackson, Jerry Harrison, Lee Ranaldo and archive footage of Jerry Garcia (carrying over from "Janis: Little Girl Blue"), Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (ditto), Brent Mydland, Chuck Berry (last seen in "Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars"), Paul McCartney (ditto), The Everly Brothers, Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, John Coltrane, Dan Rather, Tom Snyder.
RATING: 6 out of 10 side projects
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