‘Long Strange Trip’ Is A Journey Worth Your Time, Regardless Of Your Thoughts On The Grateful Dead

Long Strange Trip, the much-discussed Grateful Dead-focused documentary dropping today, June 2, on Amazon Prime Video, has much in common with its subject.

It’s propelled forward by swirling, barely reined in forces of captivating personality and enchanting, technicolor imagery.

It is, like the great majority of the over 3000 concerts the Dead performed in their three decade existence, LONG when compared to the accepted standards of the medium. At around four hours, Long Strange Trip is considerably lengthy when compared to other films (documentary and other), though an acceptable length when compared to, say, the running time of a typical Dead show in 1973. And like many Dead shows it is, arguably, not long enough.

And like the Grateful Dead itself, Long Strange Trip is worthy of inspection by any arts-aware soul keen to peer into a unique window of 20th century American culture, one that gazes out across the fruited plains and purple mountain majesties of rock and roll, folk, blues, and jazz, not to mention beat literature and poetry.

Pretty far out, then. But is Long Strange Trip, you know, good?

Never trust a prankster, of course, but the answer is yes. Very much so. Long Strange Trip is funny and playful. It’s often heavy. It’s always mesmerizing.

Upon arrival, Long Strange Trip, in fact, takes a heady, tie-dyed, well-deserved place in the upper echelon of music documentaries.

Long Strange Trip, directed by Amir Bar-Lev, is nearly four hours long, but divided into six acts (Amazon has chosen to program it as a series with six episodes, as opposed to a 4 hour long movie). Ostensibly the story unfurls in chronological order, but via several clever, recurring motifs, the narrative proceeds, in a way, along two timelines.

The first is linear. One by one, the members of the future Grateful Dead come together in and around Palo Alto in the early 1960s. They sign a recording deal, but quickly upset their label. They dutifully ignore all duties the ‘industry’ assigns them, even so seemingly harmless and simple a task as taking a band press photo, yet their audience grows mightily. They flourish artistically, pioneer (nearly always by accident) new standards, fan policies, and technology. They achieve megastardom, but the success threatens to forever silence them. Ever afraid of authoritative messaging, and controlling their scene, it ultimately does.

The second timeline is more cyclical, an amorphous loop in line with leader Jerry Garcia’s thoughts on living in the moment and impermanence. The first minutes of Long Strange Trip are concerned with the Abbott And Costello Meet Frankenstein, the 1948 film that Garcia saw as a boy, a year after his father’s death. In the last interview he gave, in 1995, Garcia joyfully recalls how the movie revealed to him that there are things in the world that are weird, and that there are ‘people who are concerned’ with those things. Garcia wanted to be concerned with that, too. It seemed, to Garcia, fun.

‘Fun,’ to Garcia, is artistic inspiration and creativity at its most thrilling. ‘Fun’ becomes a word the others, particularly guitarist Bob Weir, use to describe worthy endeavors.

And ‘fun’ is what guides Garcia through life. Throughout Long Strange Trip we return to that and another 1990s interview. This narrative technique serves to remind us of Garcia’s primal inspiration as we move forward in time, but it also acts as a subtle reminder of the Grateful Dead’s primary function, which was to live in the moment, to eschew monument building, and to live selflessly within the ever-flowing river of time.

By the time we reach the final act, chronologically late in the band’s, and Garcia’s, life, the recurring words and images and clips (also including newly unearthed footage of Garcia peering into a film camera in the early 70s), deliver a brutal emotional blow. The Dead lived in the moment, sure, but time surely passes. It’s a hell of a heavy thing. The final segments, soundtracked stunningly by late era gem “Days Between” as well as gorgeous stalwart “Stella Blue,” provide the most impactful moments of Long Strange Trip.

It’s an inspired and effective take on mythmaking and especially the ‘hero’s journey,’ the concept of storytelling and adventure popularized by the American scholar Joseph Campbell (with whom the Dead were friendly, and influenced by).

By the end of the final act, all the years combine, and it’s where the two timelines, the linear and the cyclical, meet. And in the end there’s still that song, enduring through the vanished years of this life and dream.

Long Strange Trip, like the Grateful Dead, is ultimately a journey. And like the Grateful Dead, it’s a beautiful one.

Watch Long Strange Trip on Amazon Prime Video