Grateful Dead fans, prepare for a flashback.
Documentary filmmaker Amir Bar-Lev, whose prior subjects include Holocaust survivors, 4-year-old painters and Pat Tillman, wants to introduce you to his favorite band.
“1977, 1981, that’s my era, I got into them with those tapes,” he tells amNewYork in a TriBeCa hotel bar, celebrating the release of his passion project, “Long Strange Trip.”
As explained in this thorough (four hours!) movie, most Deadheads had someone guide them into loving the group. It wasn’t just listening to their tunes . “But you’ve got to be careful about a slavish devotion to a personality cult,” he warns.
“Long Strange Trip” will be in theaters starting May 26 and available for streaming June 2 on Amazon. (There will be nationwide simulcast May 25.)
For a sensation that sprang from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, the Grateful Dead had some of their most memorable shows in New York. When fans roll up their sleeves to argue, the Feb. 14, 1970, Fillmore East show and the Sept. 18, 1987, Madison Square Garden show always rank high. (Though a good case could be made for the Sept. 3, 1977, show at Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey.)
“Jerry Garcia loved New York,” Bar-Lev explains, quoting an audio interview he tried to include in the film. “He felt that New Yorkers figure out minute-to-minute how to coexist,” Bar-Lev adds. “That was Jerry in a nutshell.”
The new documentary, which boasts Martin Scorsese as an executive producer, uses old interviews with Garcia as a spine, and essentially ends with his death in 1995. But some may not see it that way.
“There is an energy that courses through time that didn’t start with the Grateful Dead and won’t end with the Grateful Dead,” Bar-Lev says, “but the Grateful Dead were a very good conduit for it.”
That may sound a little far-out, but watch all four hours and see how you feel then. As Garcia sang, that path is for your steps alone.
