Phil Lesh Weighs In On New Grateful Dead Documentary
Grateful Dead fans are ecstatic about Long Strange Trip, the new four-hour documentary that tells the legendary band’s tale. It is showing in select theaters and now streaming on Amazon Prime. As in-depth as the film is, bassist Phil Lesh says it doesn’t cover the whole story.
“It’s only telling part of the story,” he told Rolling Stone. “The Grateful Dead is sort of a phenomenon that you cannot encapsulate in any one medium or any one event or any one film or recording. It’s great as far as it goes, but it’s not the whole story. It’s like a blind man feeling a leg and saying it’s a tree or touching a tail and saying it’s a rope.”
He went on to say that the producers – Martin Scorsese and Amir Bar-Lev – set out with a certain vision and accomplished their goal “as well as they possibly could.”
Check out the trailer:
Lesh, who helped to found the band 57 years ago, is currently gearing up to reunite with Dead guitarist Bob Weir at the Lockn’ Festival in August. The duo will be paying homage to the 1977 album Terrapin Station by playing it in its entirety. “[Terrapin Station] is one of those touchstone pieces of work that we’ve been performing ever since,” Lesh explains. “It just never loses its freshness for us, so it seemed like the right thing to do.”
