Long strange trip

Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead is worth watching (streaming on Amazon Prime) even if you’re not a Deadhead. Not to spoil the show, but the best scene is Episode 5, 33 minutes in. The Dead’s lyricist, Robert Hunter is asked to explain the lyrics to Dark Star. He recites

Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes.
Reason tatters, the forces tear loose from the axis.
Searchlight casting for faults in the clouds of delusion.
Shall we go, you and I while we can

Through the transitive nightfall of diamonds?

then asks the interviewer “What is unclear about that? It says what it means.”

My only brush with the Dead was a concert at Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater in the summer of 1982. A group of us young computer nerds (including a bunch of women; the New York Times hadn’t yet explained to them that they would never succeed in the industry) were chaperoned by Julie Sussman, wife of Gerry Sussman (but not the professor himself; “Gerry melts,” explained Julie). It was a perfect blue-sky day and the people who were on drugs seemed to be having a great time.

Will there ever be another American band like the Dead? The documentary suggests that there won’t be. Inexpensive real estate enabled the entire band to live and practice in a big house in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Zillow shows the value of a similar house today to be $4 million. A group of musicians like the Dead would today have to exile themselves to a small town where hardly anyone would ever hear them perform or go instantly into the most commercial genre possible so as to pay the rent.

Perhaps also due to the low cost of living in a lot of hip places, the documentary shows slender joyful people who don’t seem to be in a great hurry to get back to work.

The amount of drugs, especially LSD, that people were able to consume and still function is impressive. Jerry Garcia’s level of guitar playing is compelling, even for a mostly-classical music listener like myself (Rolling Stone rates Garcia as the 46th greatest guitarist of all time), and his work ethic is impressive. He pushed himself as hard as any Silicon Valley startup founder and kept pushing until his death at age 53 (which kicked off $38 million in alimony and child support lawsuits from multiple women against the $6 million estate; the documentary doesn’t cover this post-death scramble for cash, but you can read about it in the nytimes).

Perhaps there was selective editing by the filmmakers, but it seems that there was a lot less bitterness over politics compared to today, even though the footage spans the administrations of multiple presidents (at least Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, King Bush I, and Clinton) and there is no way that all of those guys could have appealed to all of the Dead Heads. None of the Dead Heads seem to be knitting pussy hats, protesting a government policy, or expressing their outrage over working conditions for a subgroup of employees at a company.

Readers: If you do love the Grateful Dead, what bands are their legitimate heirs?