He recalls seeing Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948, one year after his father had drowned. “I used to draw pictures of the Frankenstein monster over and over, endlessly, in different positions,” Garcia says near the start of Long Strange Trip, his voice playing over a montage of his sketches. Jerry Garcia was obsessed with Frankenstein.
The second half is more wayward and contemplative, with exploratory detours into the Deadhead experience and the tape-trading phenomenon, yet it builds inexorably to the band’s incandescent commercial peak before turning to Garcia’s harrowing decline.ġ. Much of the first half presents familiar themes in discrete episodes, served up at a measured pace: Garcia’s childhood the band’s unlikely coalescing psychedelic hijinks and rustic retreats and the tragic 1973 death of co-founder Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. In structure and pacing, Long Strange Trip, which opens in theaters Friday, and then comes to Amazon Prime Video June 2nd, resembles a classic Dead show. What the film chronicles, imaginatively and unflinchingly, is the flowering of an exuberant American counterculture – its triumph, its corruption and the toll exacted at either extreme – as viewed through the prism of a singular band of anarchists and their charismatic yet unwilling ringmaster, Jerry Garcia. It sounds like a punch line: “There’s a new Grateful Dead documentary – and it’s four hours long.” But Long Strange Trip, directed by Amir Bar-Lev ( The Tillman Story, Happy Valley) and executive-produced by Martin Scorsese, is no amiably noodling shuffle through a defunct band’s yellowed back pages.
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