I can’t imagine that anyone will walk away from “Long Strange Trip,” Amir Bar-Lev’s remarkable four-hour documentary about the Grateful Dead, without a newfound appreciation for the band’s music and its place in American popular culture. “He wouldn’t do it.”::It’s hard to put a finger on what makes the Grateful Dead so special, and so uniquely Californian. People say ‘Well, they were influenced by Miles Davis,’ but they went places that Miles never went.”Thirty-four years ago, to be close to the band, Silberman moved to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. At one point in the film, a reporter asks, “Has success spoiled the Grateful Dead?”“Yeah,” Garcia replies. Instead, he wants to create something “flowing and dynamic,” and “not so solid you can’t tear it down.”It’s another paradox of the Grateful Dead, really, which has stamped the culture indelibly, if psychedelically.

Source: Los Angeles Times April 16, 2017 10:02 UTC