For thirty years, the Grateful Dead were an unlikely success story, a band that defied genres and broke all the rules. There are many threads running through the six-act, four-hour tapestry of memory that Bar-Lev weaves in Long Strange Trip. Their name drawn from medieval stories about the dead returning to remind the living about karma, the Grateful Dead was never about the macabre. Even as they reached their commercial peak in the late 80s, the Grateful Dead succeeded by defying industry conventions. Long Strange Trip reminds us throughout that the Dead’s fight for freedom was often a matter of survival.

Source: Huffington Post May 24, 2017 19:05 UTC