Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 20, 2018

It’s kind of amazing in a way to look back over the “long, strange trip” of the Grateful Dead’s history and realize that for a band that had such an incredible impact on the rock scene for so long, they had precious few of what typically often “made” iconic bands, at least back in the sixties and seventies when the Dead were becoming legends: namely, hit singles. While the Grateful Dead managed to place several of its albums at least relatively high on the Billboard charts, they had an almost shocking lack of big singles promoting those albums, and in fact it looks like they only had one Top 10 hit in their entire career, 1987’s “Touch of Grey”, which of course came along well after the Dead had achieved much of their glory. Despite that dearth of one of the supposed “necessities” for a successful rock music career, Long, Strange Trip makes it abundantly clear that not only were the Dead incredibly successful (not much of a surprise, of course), they achieved that success largely on their own terms, shorn of many of the requirements that major labels used to impose on their artists.

Long Strange Trip bears the perhaps marketing oriented subtitle “The Untold Story of The Grateful Dead”, but for fans, the truth may actually be less in how much is previously untold (a debatable issue in any case), but how it’s told this time. This is a remarkably intimate “insider” accounting of the Dead, told via a lot of archival video and audio featuring Jerry Garcia, but also getting some really interesting insights from a bunch of other people, including Bob Weir and Phil Lesh.

There’s a ton of fantastic information presented here, but a lot of the allure here for longtime fans will be the glut of archival video, and in some cases, audio, going back to Jerry’s early days as a bluegrass player. The documentary moves fairly chronologically through the band’s history, getting into several nooks and crannies like the psychedelic aspects (something that’s more than obvious given the almost hilarious ubiquity of naked people — women and men — cavorting around the live performances obviously under the influence of something), but leaving some other elements by the wayside. It’s a fascinating piece even at around four hours in running time, perhaps a cinematic equivalent to the “extended jams” the band itself was famous for.

Note: The Dead's site is offering a two disc version of this release with some added concert footage.

Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Long Strange Trip is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Rhino Music with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer (largely) in 1.78:1. (Various archival videos are in a variety of aspect ratios.) Once again with regard to a documentary cobbled together from such a wide variety of sources, there's a rather large variance in quality with regard to many of the archival pieces. Though the presentation here is progressive, it's obvious that many source videos were interlaced, and there are occasional combing artifacts "baked in", along with other video based anomalies like ghosting and fringing. The contemporary interview segments all look very nice, if just a tad bland in terms of palette.

Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Long Strange Trip features Dolby TrueHD 5.1 and LPCM 2.0 tracks. One of the frustrations this piece will afford some Dead fans is courtesy of the fact that while music plays virtually nonstop throughout huge swaths of this enterprise, it's often masked with voiceover. In fact, "standalone" music moments are few and far between, and as such the surround mix may not actually add that much to the proceedings. That said, the surround track does provide a nice opening up of many of the live performance moments. Fidelity is fine on both tracks, with an understanding that some of the archival audio shows the vagaries of age related wear and tear.

Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary by Director Amir Bar-Lev and Editor John Walter can be found under the Audio Options menu.

Long Strange Trip: The Untold Story of the Grateful Dead Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

You don't necessarily need to be a Deadhead to enjoy Long Strange Trip. The guys in the band are such an enjoyable bunch of goofballs (this said lovingly) that it's hard not to be won over by them, and some of the other interview subjects, like Jerry's daughter, offer some really touching moments. This is a long piece that nonetheless may surprise some fans with some things left unmentioned, but Long Strange Trip manages to capture a bit of the fun and even lunacy that were part of the Dead's life. Technical merits are solid with an understanding that this documentary features a lot of archival material with understandably widely variant quality. Highly recommended.