Pop notes

Dead abides in album, film releases

Grateful Dead lead guitarist and vocalist Jerry Garcia performs at the Oakland, Calif., Coliseum in 1992.
Grateful Dead lead guitarist and vocalist Jerry Garcia performs at the Oakland, Calif., Coliseum in 1992.

Dismissing the Grateful Dead is easy for some people.

photo

Long Strange Trip -Grateful Dead

photo

Democrat-Gazette file photo

The Grateful Dead perform in concert on June 25, 1993, in Washington.

For them, merely mentioning the band's name conjures psychedelic-drug-fueled hippies, with their tie-dyed shirts, swirling around in circles and flashing peace signs while listening to 15-minute-long songs stuffed with 12-too-many minutes of guitar noodling.

Yes, the counterculture of the 1960s is finished. The Summer of Love is officially eligible for AARP. And the San Francisco Bay Area, where the Dead formed in 1965, doesn't have cheap rental space in today's tech-boom housing market for LSD-popping artists or hippies who lie around on the lawn all day smoking marijuana.

Detractors today see the "undifferentiated weirdness" of the Grateful Dead and repeat to Dead fans the words of The Big Lebowski from the film of the same name: "Your revolution is over. ... Condolences. The bums lost."

Yet, there's no killing the Grateful Dead as the band, which explored the light, shadow and shades of music better than most, survives, even almost 22 years after the death of lead guitarist, vocalist and unofficial leader Jerry Garcia.

New Grateful Dead fans come along all the time. I'm one, though I have a 20-plus-year history of digging Widespread Panic, a jamband son of the Grateful Dead. Still, in the past three or four years, I've grown from a casual fan (every music collection needs copies of the band's Workingman's Dead and American Beauty albums) to a more serious fan. Not quite a Deadhead, but I'm willing to learn.

So, 22 years on, the Dead continues, and these are heady times for getting into the Grateful Dead, with the May releases Cornell 5/8/77 (Grateful Dead Productions), a majestic live show that brings the heat; and Long Strange Trip, a nearly four-hour-long documentary about the Dead.

Cornell 5/8/77, recorded live at Barton Hall at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., is a recording of one of the best live performances by the Dead ever. (A copy of the recording was added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress in 2012.)

The live performance is a fan favorite but the 20 songs spread over two hours and 42 minutes on three CDs also are a good jumping off point for band neophytes, mainly because the Dead get right down to business with an electrifying "New Minglewood Blues." The band -- at this time Garcia, along with guitarist and vocalist Bob Weir, bassist Phil Lesh, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, keyboardist Keith Godchaux and vocalist Donna Jean Godchaux -- is tight and focused throughout, even on a 16-minute long "Dancing in the Street," while also coloring the tunes with that certain Dead weirdness.

The masterpiece of the recording -- and many Dead shows when it was played -- is "Scarlet Begonias" seamlessly segueing into "Fire on the Mountain," a one-two punch showcasing the poetic mastery of band lyricist Robert Hunter ("Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.") and the band's deft interplay of nimbleness with laxness.

And then there's the 14 minutes and 17 seconds of "Morning Dew," a mournful, post-apocalyptic meditation inspired by conversation of living in a nuclear war's aftermath that burns and raves at the close.

To the show's very last synapse firing, Cornell 5/8/77 is a live recording that sublimely captures the beauty of a jamband live show, showing a listener that there's no division between band and audience. There are no walls here. It's a community event.

Long Strange Trip, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is a deeper dive into the Grateful Dead, stretching out for 3 hours and 58 minutes -- but divided into distinct segments so it doesn't seem that long.

Really.

The 30-year odyssey of the Grateful Dead -- and the band's freewheeling, fiercely independent spirit -- is delivered over the course of those 238 minutes. Directed by Amir Bar-Lev, the enthralling ride includes candid interviews with the band, road crew (which are really eye-opening, especially talks with Sam Cutler and Steve Parish), family members and Deadheads, along with dynamic live performances, home movies and unguarded offstage moments.

Long Strange Trip's structure and pacing mirrors a Dead show's two distinct sets: there are episodic buildups for the first half of the documentary -- shorter bursts of facts and biographical details covering the band's background, formation, the psychedelic good times of the early years with Ken Kesey's Acid Tests and on up to the 1973 death of original keyboardist Ron "Pigpen" McKernan.

There's a shift in the middle of the documentary, though, covering the years around 1973-1974 with troubles surrounding the band's massive public address system, dubbed the Wall of Sound and created by audio engineer and LSD connoisseur Owsley "Bear" Stanley, and the introduction of cocaine and other drugs beyond psychedelics and marijuana into the band's orbit.

The last third of the documentary is more contemplative and also delves into the scene around the Dead, from merry Deadheads, including U.S. Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota, discussing his favorite version of "Althea," to the tapers. Here, the film captures the commercial peak of the Dead during the '80s, a personal favorite era of mine because Brent Mydland was the Dead's keyboardist.

The documentary's coda is heartbreaking, exploring the darker overtones of the excesses of the band's success, Garcia's struggles with the burden of fame, his decline and the end of the Dead.

Grateful Dead fan or not, the documentary works because Bar-Lev captures the bedraggled glory of the Dead, their music and the passionate loyalty of their fans.

If all you know of the Grateful Dead is negative, or "Touch of Grey," the band's lone "hit" from 1987, Cornell 5/8/77 and Long Strange Trip -- and its soundtrack on Rhino Records -- are perfect places for buying the ticket and taking the ride.

Through them both, the bums live on.

Style on 06/25/2017

Upcoming Events