The Grateful Dead championed the psychedelic movement and still to this day are seen as one of the most important bands to come out of the 60's.
Having formed in the San Francisco Bay Area, lead singer and guitarist Jerry Garcia and fellow band members Bob Weir, Phil Lesh Ron McKernan and Bill Kreutzmann wanted to create music unlike anything else around at that time. At the time their music was genreless; they touched on so many different musical styles that they really did fulfil their desire to be part of a band that was continually dynamic. The jam band was born and The Grateful Dead didn't only immerse themselves in their music, they also became heavily involved in the acid scene. Drugs - particularly acid - played a huge role within the band. Though Jerry Garcia was always seen as the 'lead' member, their way of working and writing was actually very communal and that's one of the reasons why their legions of fans stuck with the band, they felt that they were all equal - the fans and onlookers in a crowd watching the band were just as important to the overall experience as it was for one of the band on stage playing.
That mentality was at the forefront of their legendary live shows which just kept on growing in popularity. By the time 1974 came around, the band had turned their originally small jamming sessions into something that even modern day super groups would find hard to rival. To capture their sound in the best possible way the band (and their sound engineers) built a 'wall of sound', essentially six different sound systems combined that ran different instruments (down to individual elements) through different channels and different speakers in a bid to create a distortion free sound.
Having released 13 studio albums between the 1960's and 00's, their studio recordings became as respected as their live shows and many of the albums reached platinum status.
Compiling interviews with many of the band members as well as their crew and notable fans and mixing that with unseen footage (both on and off stage), director Amir Bar-Lev and producer Martin Scorsese's Long Strange Trip is a true look into the history of one of the world's most influential bands.
When director Amir Bar-Lev was asked what he learnt and what he hopes audiences would take away after watching the film, Bar-Lev commented: "I always try not to evade reducing my films to a message. But since in some ways the film is about the message the dead always have for the living, and since times seem to be calling for us all to be a little more forceful in our attempts to persuade, I'll say: When I hear Jerry say that what he loved about the acid tests was that people weren't there to see the Dead, I can't help being struck that a celebrity could say he loved it that he wasn't the centre of attention. And when I hear Wiz tell the story of how it was okay that he came away from the recording truck during Europe '72, or Sam Cutler explain why film crews were encouraged to put the present ahead of the future, I can't help lamenting the sea of raised iPhone cameras that disrupt every concert I go to these days.
So often when we talk about the counterculture or the 1960s, we veer into nostalgia or worse, snark. Yet, I feel the Dead's story is more vital now than ever. What the Dead and the Deadheads did; we could do today. To paraphrase Jerry Garcia, when he talks about slipping acid into coffee at the Playboy Channel show, it would 'turn an artificial party into an authentic one.'"
Starring: Grateful Dead, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart, Dennis Leonard