Make America Grateful Dead Tapes Again

Late in life, Jerry Garcia took up scuba diving. He was introduced to the sport by Vicki Jensen, a friend and sometime ranch hand of Garcia's bandmate, Mickey Hart. This was Hawaii, sometime in the late '80s. Garcia had recently come up out of a diabetic blackout and was and then fat that he had to carry extra weight to help achieve buoyancy, but he loved the water and the h2o asked aught in render.

The experience spawned a fixation. Garcia took classes, bought gear, outfitted his goggles with prescription lenses. Later he set up a record at the local scuba store, Jack'southward Diving Locker, by staying under for 109 minutes on one tank of air. "I can't exercise exercise," he told Rolling Stone in an interview from 1991. Compared with his music with the Grateful Dead, Garcia's interviews were refreshingly frank. "I can't jog," he went on. "I tin can't ride a bicycle. I tin can't do any of that shit. And at this stage of my life, I have to practice something that's kind of healthy" — "this stage," in other words, meaning the end.

The story — about Garcia falling in love with the sea, about the ocean as a place where Garcia could both reconnect with the earth and retreat from it — is told in nearly every business relationship of the Grateful Dead. Pecker Kreutzmann, one of the band's drummers, opens his memoir, Deal, with a scene of him and Garcia diving. Phil Lesh, the band's bassist, writes about how he and Garcia shared a special bond over their total uninterest in do — that is, until Garcia convinced him to swoop. You can see footage of the human being in the water in The Other One, a documentary near the band'south cofrontman Bob Weir. Garcia glides through the water like he belongs in that location. He paddles up to an eel cautiously emerging from a coral hut and strokes it under its chin like a housecat. It'southward remarkable to come across a fatty human being motility with such grace, non to mention a human being of so many prisons — addiction, success — move so freely in a place where nobody knew his name.

But the most telling instance of Garcia'due south diving history is from the September/October 1995 issue of People Magazine. Part of a tribute issue printed a month later Garcia died of a heart attack, the story catches upwards with Vicki Jensen and the staff at Jack's Diving Locker, recounting Garcia'due south early encounters with the h2o and his and the band's financial commitments to the restoration of coral reefs, invoking Garcia's rich sense of humour, and closing with the requisite speculation that diving might've made his short life just a little bit longer.

(Getty Images)

Substitute another name for Garcia'due south and you lot can meet how routine the story is: a lost star'south difficult try to repossess solid ground. Flip, then, to the magazine's cover, a flick of Garcia looking into the photographic camera with his sunglasses lowered, lit from behind so as to create a halo at the edges of his hair. To sympathize how big the Grateful Expressionless had become past the time of Garcia's death, how grossly saturated in the culture, wait here. Other People comprehend subjects that flavour included Courteney Cox, Princess Diana, and a double outcome chosen "The Yr of the Big Splits," promising "an inside written report on Hollywood's divorce epidemic." You come across why Garcia went nether in the first place.

The scuba story comes up once again in Long Strange Trip, a new documentary virtually the band directed by Amir Bar-Lev and due to exist released Friday past Amazon Studios. At iv hours, the movie is probably more exposure than many people take e'er had — or wanted — to the Grateful Dead. Information technology'south also a sad story, and a beautiful ane, told with the reverence y'all'd expect and some verse you might not. Split into six sections, it follows the band from the back of a pizza parlor in Menlo Park to stadiums so big they could no longer make out the faces of the people they were playing to. For all the journeying they did, the band always seemed to boomerang to Northern California, a identify once synonymous with the counterculture and now — through decades of development — with the entrepreneurial frontier of Silicon Valley.

Garcia grew upwards alongside the shell generation, taking special inspiration from Jack Kerouac's unbroken ream of typewritten pages — a predecessor to Garcia'due south own guitar solos, which, like Kerouac's writing, analogized a creativity and then expansive information technology threatened to break the page. (Or, in a more Freudian light, here were men who could go all night long.) The beats were famously interested in speed; the Dead were famously interested in LSD, a drug that at the band'southward inception was so off the cultural filigree that nobody had bothered to make it illegal.

The way Long Foreign Trip tells it, the impact of the drug on the band's creativity was seismic. At their well-nigh enlightened, Grateful Dead performances, like acid, suspension familiar shapes into protozoan states, squiggles of guitar filigree and synaptic splashes of drums that seem to predate known musical forms that the ring then bends — sometimes remarkably, sometimes with great injury to patience — dorsum into something you can tap your pes to. No wonder people come out of hearing things like the Cornell 1977 performance of "Scarlet Begonias" into "Burn down on the Mountain" thinking the ring are gods: The music dramatized evolution.

(Amazon Video)

For 20 years, they were primarily an cloak-and-dagger business. They put out records that — with the exception of the folksy, atypically simple American Beauty and Workingman's Dead — nigh people didn't buy, and instead focused on live shows, seeding an audience that by the late 1970s and early on 1980s had become and so circuitous and multifaceted equally to warrant anthropological study. (As Neurotribes author Steve Silberman puts it in Long Strange Trip, Dead shows were like a mandala — a Hindu or Buddhist diagram of the creation — with the ring at the center.)

Like all good stories about art — or virtually entrepreneurs, for that matter — Long Strange Trip becomes a parable about people who succeed in role past doing it wrong. Non recorded but live. Non scripted but improvised. Non concision but sprawl. Not entertainment but journey. Even when the band adapted to the times — the hillbilly jazz of the early '70s, the disco Dead of a few years subsequently — they seemed happily out of step, a talisman against business, mode, and other methods of control.

The film ends with Garcia's death, while the other surviving members accept soldiered on in various — and oft multiple — Dead-centric reparatory groups, including the Other Ones, Furthur, Dead & Company, and Phil Lesh and Friends. Afterwards an improvident 2015 tour publicized as the final time the band's surviving original members would play together, a group of them are about to become out again. Whether you run across the temporal telescopic of the movie as implicit criticism or merely acquiescence to logistics probably depends on what you think of the idea of John Mayer singing with the Grateful Dead, which begins this weekend and will be happening throughout the summertime and probable for some summers to come. For his part, Garcia famously said the band had been trying to sell out for years merely nobody was buying. If a French leave is leaving without saying cheerio, the Grateful Expressionless have found its opposite.

50ong Strange Trip follows sure conventions of the rock documentary. In that location'south the moment when the ring becomes too big for its members to handle and the moment when the drugs stop existence fun. There's the suggestion that the ring transcended the confines of reality and were eventually grounded for ignoring them. It makes its subjects expect like decent people, or at least people chastened by the passage of time.

The portrait is as selective as any. For all the ideals surrounding the band's music, the twenty-four hour period-to-day culture seemed macho and banal. In his biography of the band (called, incidentally, A Long Foreign Trip), longtime publicist Dennis McNally quotes Bob Weir every bit saying that the ring'south early benefactor (and LSD manufacturer) Owsley Stanley could "corruption a waitress like no one else in the world." Bill Kreutzmann's memoir, Deal, contains a story wherein Kreutzmann has sexual activity with thirteen women in a row and another in which he blows cocaine while suspended upside downward in an Alfa Romeo he had crashed seconds before. (Y'all don't have to snort the coke if yous're already upside down.) 1 of the almost salient images in Long Foreign Trip isn't of the ring but their coiffure, a fraternity of bruisers who spent all nighttime fucked up across cognizance, setting upward and breaking down the band's 75-ton sound organization before trucking information technology to the side by side show. How whatsoever of them drove goes unexplained. "If y'all're looking for comfort," Garcia said in 1991, "bring together a guild or something. The Grateful Dead is non where you're going to detect comfort. In fact, if annihilation, y'all'll catch a lot of shit. And if you don't catch it from the band, y'all'll get information technology from the roadies. They're merciless. They'll but gnaw you like a dog." Initially, the back cover of the 1970 album American Dazzler was supposed to be a photograph of the band, heavily armed.

(Getty Images)

The ring presented as socialists but the core of their philosophy was libertarian. Garcia, for case, was outspoken about drugs beingness a matter of personal choice, a convenient position for a heroin addict. Three months after a member of the Hells Angels stabbed a concertgoer to death at the Altamont Speedway, Garcia told an interviewer that the Hells Angels "happened considering of freedom. They're gratuitous to happen, you know, and they're a manifestation of what freedom is" — the idea being that liberty isn't good or bad, simply free, while rules remain the currency of parents and cops.

Toward the end of Garcia's life, the band'due south shows got so chaotically overattended that the members issued an open letter. 1 request was that people without a ticket stay home. The second was that people don't evidence up just to sell stuff, because that attracts people without tickets. The third — broadly applicable — was that the truthful Expressionless Heads help go on the phonies in line.

"Want to terminate the touring life of the Grateful Dead?" 1 line reads. "Allow the bottle-throwing gate crashers to keep on thinking they're cool anarchists instead of the creeps they are." One fan in Long Foreign Trip protests that they're only doing what the Expressionless taught them. I enquire Eric Eisner, the motion-picture show's pb producer, what he thinks about this. "I get it," he says. "Information technology's an ethos. It's like utopia: It doesn't work in reality, but on paper it looks keen." His start Grateful Dead testify was on December ix, 1988, at the Long Beach Arena — the concluding time the band played there on business relationship of (in Eisner's recollection) as well many people camping outside. In a perverted, Shakespearean manner, this is how things had to go down.

The saddest story in Long Foreign Trip is about Garcia's belatedly-in-life reconnection with Barbara Meier, a girlfriend Garcia had not seen since before the Grateful Dead were fifty-fifty called the Warlocks. It was Meier, a beautiful teenager making a pre-inflation-$100-a-day modeling for catalogs, who bought Garcia his first guitar. The human relationship — in the telling, at least — is one of irreconcilable innocence, the betoken from which our best selves spring and to which we can never safely return. (In a Victorian flourish, Dennis McNally writes that Garcia remained "remorseful" for taking Meier'due south virginity even 20 years later — considering what are women if not angels or whores?)

According to Meier, she and Garcia reconnected after McNally pressed her to interview Garcia for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. He made her laugh. He invited her scuba diving. She went. He proposed. She accepted. He was such a cute diver. At the fourth dimension, Garcia was make clean. He started using heroin once more before long thereafter. When Meier approaches Garcia about his relapse (something she finds out from his doctor), Garcia severs the human relationship. Her parting shot is of him continuing in a doorway maxim, "I recall you should become now." An aficionado until the end, Garcia seemed to have a knack for making neglect look like a favor to the neglected. What the motion picture doesn't encompass is that Garcia was married to another adult female, Deborah Koons, inside a yr, or that, as McNally writes, he told Barbara Meier and all four of his wives that they were the loves of his life. And it certainly doesn't talk about the bitter disputes surrounding Garcia's estate. Nobody wants to be the dominate.

As for that music. The sharpest criticism of the Grateful Expressionless I've ever read was in the online comic strip Achewood. In information technology, a bear named Téodor sits in front of his computer listening to "Bear upon of Grey" on echo. "Grayness," which came out in 1987, was the band'due south simply quantifiable hit, a slick, feel-good song about — what else — keepin' on. An alcoholic tiger named Lyle storms into the room and demands Téodor plow the song off. Téodor refuses. "Dude," he says. "I think I'yard becoming a Dead Caput." Lyle recommends he listen to a few more of the ring's songs on YouTube.

(Chris Onstad)

What follows is the visual articulation of what I imagine is a common response to the ring's music. Spotlights in every direction. A string of musical notes, some smile, one vomiting. A lute with a idea bubble coming out of it reading "Exit me alone!" Téodor struggling with a musical note wrapped around his neck, either choking himself or being high-strung. Hovering near the middle, slightly tilted, a parenthetical that reads "(the sound of eight confused men getting paid, and so…)."

The shape and book of the space is unclear — it literally has no form. The parentheses, the ellipses, the give-and-take "then" — all of it nauseatingly inconclusive, signs that nobody really knows what's going on but any it is, it's going to keep forever. Kreutzmann said the ring sometimes stretched the music out and so far that he had to be reminded what vocal they were playing.

The Grateful Dead always had a dark side that I loved. The skulls split by lightning bolts. The laughing gas. The homeless kids camped out in vans babbling most angels. The fashion everything tilted toward chaos. When I recall of the Grateful Expressionless I think of the human being continuing behind the phase at the Veneta, Oregon, show in August 1972, naked and sunburned, shaking his caput as though trying to get a ameliorate signal. I don't laugh at the man, I worry almost him. If this is freedom, keep me caged, but let me lookout.

It's hard to find this vector in the band'south music. Even the darkest passages of the Grateful Dead sound like the shallow side of the deep end. These were people who shared good times with dangerous men. To appointment, five of their members have died. If they ever felt aroused, or trapped, or like throwing a brick through a window, you'd never know it from their music. Maybe this is why the punks hated them so much: They pretended violence didn't exist.

My favorite Grateful Dead vocal is "Black Peter," from Workingman's Dead. The song tells the story of a guy lying in bed with a fever. He's pretty certain he'due south going to die, merely he doesn't. Mayhap he'll die tomorrow. Either way, he feels a petty out of it. Everything seems of import ("Run across here how everything lead up to this day") and then not ("and it'due south just like whatsoever other mean solar day that's ever been"). "Take a look at poor Peter, he's lying in pain," Garcia sings toward the end. "Now, let'south go run and come across." It'southward an eerie moment, the blink from behind a dark door. He repeats the line — "run and run across" — and the music dilates, then fades abroad.

According to The SetList Programme, a searchable database of Grateful Dead shows covering 1965 to Garcia's death in 1995, the band played "Black Peter" alive 343 times, among the top xx in their repertoire. It usually came toward the stop of the night, though information technology was never the last song — too ominous, as well inconclusive. Headyversion, a community site ranking fans' favorite live versions of Grateful Dead songs, currently puts a performance from October 29, 1977, at the top. It'due south all right just doesn't seem to understand why it exists. My favorite — March 25, 1990 — comes a lilliputian farther downwardly the list, at no. 6. Garcia coughs and wails. The band plays like they've been chained to the wall of the aforementioned sports bar for 200 years. The sum is a report from the void: haggard, luminous, undead.

It'south in these late groupings of "run and run into" — the way the song gathers into a wave just never breaks, the way Brent Mydland's organ melts from solid into liquid and solidifies again — that I glimpse what I always imagined this band was: the good time that isn't, the night y'all get and then far out y'all're non certain if you're yet at that place. Garcia once told an interviewer he never bothered going into the woods to take acrid considering it only showed him how pretty things were. His favorite trip was the one that peaked with him continuously dying. In 1986, he barbarous into a diabetic coma for about five days. By and then, he took psychedelics only one time in awhile to, in his words, "blow out the tubes." He preferred heroin. In 1970, "Black Peter" was a dream; in 1990 it was a diary.

My own introduction to the band was through a guy I grew upwardly with. Permit's call him Marking. Mark and I met on the tennis squad, where we were briefly doubles partners. He was a sinister kid, spoiled and mixed up, said awful things about girls and talked constantly nearly how much he hated his "old human." Mark didn't laugh, he cackled. We used to speed around the backroads of southern Connecticut in his BMW convertible drinking beer and listening to tapes of the Grateful Expressionless live. The music fabricated no sense to me. It had no urgency, no imperative. I felt similar Téodor the bear, drowning in a sea of broken notes. Marker said I was a pussy and that the Dead were the fucking all-time.

This was my first clan with the band: not the curious, openhearted hippies of the late 1960s but emotionally damaged kids who drove sports cars. Marker, I learned, was non unique. I met dozens of guys like him in college: preppy, conservative, intelligent but incurious, zigzagging across the lawn to "Franklin's Tower." Even the ones non apparently racked with darkness would say things that made me realize they thought poor people were trash or gay people were ill.

What people whose lives had been defined by the exclusionary levers of privilege got out of music so inclusive was beyond me. If they were anything similar Mark, their privilege didn't exercise much to make them feel at home in the world. Not that any of this was the ring's fault, of class. Simply to say that I showed upwardly in 1998 and found the dream in tatters. Mayhap their open letter had been right. I larn now that Marker is serving a half dozen-to-8-year judgement for getting boozer and crashing his Porsche Boxster, killing a 25-year-erstwhile in the rider seat. You lot who choose to lead must follow, but if you fall, you fall alone.

The manner Long Strange Trip tells information technology, two encounters haunted Garcia for nigh of his life. One was with the Watts Towers, a cluster of sculptures in South Los Angeles built by a local using bit metal and rebar. Garcia first saw the towers around dawn afterward the Watts Acid Exam. He couldn't figure out why anyone would want to brand anything then permanent. It was still on his mind virtually 10 years later. "The County of Los Angeles couldn't pull the towers down," he told an interviewer. "So they fabricated them a park. They wanted to destroy them."

His other hound was the picture Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. He first saw it when he was 6, about a year after his father had died from drowning. It scared him and so badly he could barely look at the screen. (Dennis McNally writes that Garcia spent so much time looking at the seat in front of him he could still call back the blueprint of the fabric.)

(Amazon Video)

Long Strange Trip turns the Frankenstein fixation into a motif, cutting footage from the moving-picture show into the narrative at moments of synchronistic resonance, the thought being that the monster was on Garcia'south listen fifty-fifty when it wasn't. Like Charles Foster Kane and Rosebud, the proposition here is that we spend our machismo turning our hearts into fortresses just can't e'er protect ourselves from the aftershocks of youth. One-half watching Frankenstein behind the seat in front of him, Garcia formed a concept of fearfulness not as something to avoid but as the point of seduction, the gantlet between you and the unknown.

Talking about his acrid/death epiphany, Garcia said, "It started to get more and more than in kind of a feedback loop, this thing where I was suddenly in the concluding frames of my life. And then information technology was like, 'Here'southward that moment where I die.' I stitch the stairs and there'south this demon with a spear who gets me right between the eyes. I run upwards the stairs there'southward a woman with a knife who stabs me in the back. I sew the stairs and there's this business partner who shoots me." Dice that oftentimes and it's no wonder you feel weird about permanence.

And nevertheless here stands a iv-hour-long documentary made from film and magnetic tape telling the story of a band whose reluctant leader claimed no goal other than to ride the transience of a beautiful moment merely kept returning to Frankenstein, to the idea of the Watts Towers, to the ocean. Garcia'southward lapse in agreement here was a mortal one: Yous don't build monuments outside time; time builds them inside you.

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Source: https://www.theringer.com/2017/5/25/16077610/grateful-dead-documentary-long-strange-trip-4418e6772b8d

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