‘Magic Trip’ film: journey through the past

The Merry Pranksters ride again, in the acid-drenched documentary feature “Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place.”

The Pranksters, of course, were the pack of bohemian youth who gathered around the hipster novelist Kesey. With beat generation icon Neal Cassady behind the wheel of an old school bus, they traveled across the country, in search of the New York World’s Fair and … Whatever.

The bus, carrying the destination sign of “Furthur,” was painted wildly, in tune with the soon-to-come psychedelic aesthetic. One Prankster called it a “traveling pleasure palace.”

Many historians point to this happening as the big bang that unleashed the psychedelic era. Kesey (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) had taken part in government-sponsored LSD experiments five years earlier and was eager to spread the sparkly swirling vibes.

“We were too old to be beatniks and a little too young to be hippies,” one Prankster recalled.

And so, a half-century later, documentary filmmakers Alex Gibney (“Taxi to the Dark Side”) and Alison Ellwood found themselves with 40 hours of amateur home movies shot on the trip.

The resulting two-hour movie from Magnolia Pictures began its theatrical roll-out Aug. 5 in San Francisco (naturally) and New York. “Magic Trip” downloads also are available (iTunes link).

Reviews were mixed: The San Francisco Examiner reviewer found that while ” ‘Magic Trip’ failed “to adequately explore the significance of the journey involved, the film is a worthy document of the 1964 event and a loopily enjoyable visit to the inception of hippiedom.”

The New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote that “the unbridgeable distance between the stoned and the sober is the problem with Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood’s documentary.” As in, taking acid is a lot involving than watching some shave-tail kid freak out.

The footage couldn’t be synched up with what remained of the recorded sound, so most of the movie’s audio focuses on the participants’ memories. Audio interviews with various Pranksters were made in the 1970s. “None of the storytellers could be described as transfixing yarn spinners,” Holden wrote. “Any philosophical afterthoughts are resoundingly banal.”

The Hollywood Reporter, however, found the older Pranksters’ tales fascinating: “They provide a vivid portrait of the journey previously profiled in Tom Wolfe’s book ‘The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,’ ” reviewer Frank Scheck wrote.

He continued: “Much of the footage on display consists of the Pranksters behaving in generally silly, stoned, sloppy fashion, with the result that the proceedings come to resemble a rambling home movie that was clearly more fun to make than it is to watch.”

The band that would become the Grateful Dead, the Warlocks, make an appearance and, of course, “Truckin’” keys the soundtrack. The main Dead offshoot band is now called Furthur.

You can see for yourself via Magnolia’s on-demand (paid) distribution network, which includes iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, the DirecTV and Dish satellite systems and a swarm of cable providers.

Mickey Hart’s world of music, collected

Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart has teamed up with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings to release his expansive archive of world music recordings.

“The Mickey Hart Collection” is set for release Oct. 11, via on-demand CDs, downloads and audio streams.

Releases begin with 25 albums from Hart’s previous series “The World” (originally on Rykodisc). Six of those recordings comprise “The Endangered Music Project,” done with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress.

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, the national museum of the United States. Hart said he donated the recordings to the museum because “there will always be a Smithsonian (and) Folkways is the premier indigenous music label.”

Hart began his recordings as world musicians began to perform in San Francisco in the 1960s, but his interest dates back well before his Grateful Dead days.

As a young boy, Hart heard an album of field recordings of pygmies from the Ituri Rainforest “that made my world disappear. … I was entranced by the rhythms of West Africa, by way of Cuba and Haiti. … They were dance music, and I loved music that made you dance. …

“I treated each recording as if it would sell a million copies. So I always always recorded it at the highest resolution and had it mastered at the same place I was mastering the Grateful Dead material.

“It was very important that all this music was released first-rate so that people could understand the importance of it.” (text continues …)

Among the initial recordings are “The Music of Upper and Lower Egypt,” made during the Dead’s 1978 tour of the country. Nigerian artist Babatunde Olatunji is the focus of two albums, as is Brazilian percussionist Airto Moreira (Return to Forever). Other artists hail from American Indians, the rainforests of South America and the Caribbean, the Indonesian archipelago, Tibet and Cuba.

The Mickey Hart Collection includes his “Rhythm Devils: The Apocalypse Now Sessions” and the delivery-room album “Music to be Born By.” It also includes recordings made by other musicologists and producers.

Hart was a member of the Grateful Dead from 1967-1971 and 1974-1995. He continues to play with other Dead members, principally fellow drummer Bill Kreutzmann (as the Rhythm Devils).

Mickey Hart
recorded numerous albums of his own work and led several bands.

Check out the Folkways Recordings amazing record catalog and listen to a stream of its world music.

The Dead: One more movie night

“The Grateful Dead Movie” gets a second revival on Thursday, May 5, following up on its successful “one night only” screenings of April 20.

Now it’s “one final night,” with screenings at 7:30 p.m. local time on the 5th. The distributor/promoters are Fathom and Rhino Entertainment. The Dead movie is being redistributed to cinemas via Fathom Entertainment’s digital cinema network.

Of the 540 screens used in April, 108 are back in action.

Check out the lineup of “Grateful Dead Movie” cinemas. Organizers say that not all ticket arrangements have been finalized, so check back if they’re not available for your local bijou.

Other than the April 20 screening, “The Grateful Dead Movie” has not seen in mainstream cinemas since 1977.

The film offers a mix of performance, documentary footage and animation. It was filmed at Winterland Arena in 1974, during what was to be the Dead’s farewell appearances. The two screenings in 2010 advertised “exclusive” interviews with Jerry Garcia as well.

Owsley Stanley dies: the Dead’s ‘Bear’

Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the hippie LSD purveyor who bankrolled the early Grateful Dead and revolutionized its psychedelic sound, has died. He was 75.

Stanley died in a car crash in his adopted home of Queensland, Australia, on March 13.

Although chiefly known for his exploits in manufacturing and marketing the LSD that fueled the San Francisco cultural revolution of the 1960s, Owsley played a major role in the Dead’s development. He created the band’s legendary “Wall of Sound” concert audio system and co-designed the human skull-lightning bolt logo for the psychedelic music band.

Another iconic Grateful Dead image, the dancing Bear, was inspired by Stanley’s brief stint as a ballet dancer. (Bear was a family nickname for Stanley.)

Stanley’s contributions to the counterculture were rewarded in song, with numbers such as Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” Jefferson Airplane’s “Bear Melt” and “Mexico,” the Grateful Dead’s “Alice D. Millionaire” and Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne” hailing his exploits. The band Blue Cheer (“louder than God”) took its name from some Owsley acid.

He is credited with making the first public address system dedicated to rock concerts (the Wall of Sound) with its innovative system of onstage vocal monitors.

“We’d never thought about high-quality PAs,” the Dead’s Bob Weir told the San Francisco Examiner in 2007. “There was no such thing until Bear started making one.”

Stanley said he played a key role in the founding of goundbreaking guitar maker Alembic and the concert sound equipment manufacturer Meyer Sound.

The LSD guru was the dead’s first soundman and soon took to recording all of the band’s performances — “sonic journals” he called them. More than a dozen albums have been made from his tapes, most notably the first, 1973′s “Bear’s Choice” (Warner Bros.).

“I always recorded all the bands and all the sets I mixed on all my shows like some people keep a diary, at least so long as I had enough money to buy reels of blank tape,” Stanley wrote on his Bear web site.

The early recordings spawned the decades of amateur audience tapes done at Dead Shows, with the band’s blessings. But, Stanley wrote, “From the feedback I have had, and the tapes I have listened to, I estimate 30% or more of both audience and ‘board’ tapes/CDs are either mislabeled or faked.

“There are many tapes in circulation which claim to be of “rare” shows. The reason these shows are “rare” is usually because they never happened.”

Dead guitarist-singer Weir said after Stanley’s death: “I met Owsley at the age of 18. I had just left home, having run off with a rock & roll band. Bear, as we knew him, was one of my all-time biggest influences. Always, when I think of him, I think of the endless stuff he taught me or somehow made me realize; all stuff that I’ve been able to use to the benefit of countless people.”

Weir’s symphonic concert looks dead

Bob Weir’s intriguing “First Fusion” collaboration with the Marin Symphony is fading away.

The concert, which would have brought Grateful Dead classics to the other long-hair music, has been “reluctantly” postponed because of poor ticket sales.

Weir had been working with Italian composer and arranger Giancarlo Aquilanti for the psychedelic-symphonic concert, planned for Oct. 22.

Tickets were going for up to $350. They’ll be refunded. The show was a benefit for the symphony and its educational programs.

Perhaps there’s hope for “Dark Star” in symphonic form, though. Technically, it’s a postponement. Noralee Monestere, the symphony’s executive director, told the Marin Independent Journal that “the postponement was realistic and in the best interest of both parties.”

Ticketmaster lists the concert as “canceled.”

The plan was for a two-part evening. First the entire symphony was to dress up a handful of Dead classics. After that, Weir and Quartet San Francisco (backed by some symphony players) were to perform music that was “improvised, imaginative, impassioned.”

Live Jefferson Airplane CDs sound familiar

CDs of the Jefferson Airplane’s live performances have been pretty limited over the years, but that’s about to change.

The Collectors’ Choice Music Live series plans a quartet of live albums from 1966-68, including one that captures Grace Slick’s debut as the band’s vocalist. The CDs are due Oct. 26.

Knowledgeable fans won’t get too worked up. These four recordings already are well-traveled on the Internet, most prominently on the authorized online music service Wolfgang’s Vault.

Meanwhile, on the Grateful Dead beat, Warner and Rhino get back to vinyl with "The Warner Studio Albums,"
a five-LP boxed set. It marks the 40th anniversaries of “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty.” List price for the Dead LP set is $135; shipping starts Sept. 21.

MP3 downloads of the same four Jefferson Airplane concerts (and many more) are for sale on Wolfgang’s Vault for $4 to $10 a shot. Audio ranges from just OK to surprisingly good.

Some of these recordings came to Wolfgang’s as part of a music and memorabilia deal with the Airplane, Starship and Hot Tuna that was announced a month ago.

Band guitarist Jorma Kaukonen said at the time: “These recordings are like a window into a time long gone and vaguely remembered. I hear them and I find myself saying, ‘We were pretty good!’ I’m glad somebody saved them for posterity.”

The CDs set for fall release are “Live at the Fillmore Auditorium 10/15/66 Late Show”; “Signe’s Farewell, Live at the Fillmore Auditorium 10/16/66″; “Early & Late Shows — Grace’s Debut, Live at the Fillmore Auditorium 11/25/66 & 11/27/66″ — “We Have Ignition, and Return to the Matrix 2/1/68.” We’re guessing these are working titles.

Packaged with the CDs digipacks are notes by Craig Trent ("Take Me to a Circus Tent: The Jefferson Airplane Flight Manual") and “rare photos.”

Collector’s Choice’s Music Live label took flight this year with releases by Johnny Winter, Hot Tuna and Poco.

Sony’s Legacy series released a live double-CD Airplane album last year as part of its well-received “Woodstock Experience” series.

The Grateful Dead vinyl set’s albums are “The Grateful Dead” (1967), the psychedelic duo “Anthem of the Sun” (1968, original mix) and “Aoxomoxoa” (1969, original mix), “Workingman’s Dead” (1970) and “American Beauty” (1970). The Dead box set comes with a 1967 single version of “Dark Star” (b/w “Born Cross-Eyed”) if you make buy via dead.net

The Dead albums come on 180-gram vinyl at RTI using lacquers cut from the original analog masters by Chris Bellman at Bernie Grundman Mastering.

Jerry Garcia biopic brewing in Hollywood

Captain Trips is going Hollywood as the story of Jerry Garcia’s early years appears headed for the big screen.

Expected to be titled “Dark Star,” the movie “will be psychedelic in the best sense,” one writer says.

The independent film’s director is Amir Bar-Lev, who made the excellent 2007 documentary “My Kids Could Paint That” as well as 2010′s “Tillman.” While a stream of documentaries have covered Garcia and the Grateful Dead over the years, this is a feature film.

The source material is Robert Greenfield’s book “Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia”. (The guitarist died in 1995.) Greenfield told Rolling Stone’s web site that the biopic would use period music, but since the film ends when the Grateful Dead begins, it’s unlikely the jam band’s songs would be heard.

(Update 8/4: Unlikely seems an understatement. Grateful Dead Productions and Jerry Garcia Family LLC made a point of announcing that the “supposed upcoming” biopic won’t be allowed to use recordings by the Grateful Dead or from Jerry Garcia’s solo work. Access to Garcia family members will be denied as well, the Dead organizations said.) /update

Greenfield compared the project with the acclaimed Beatles movie “Backbeat,” which told the story of the Fab Four (or Five) before they became famous. “(Garcia) did things on electric guitar that weren’t done before not because he had taken LSD but because of all the influences he absorbed throughout his life.”

The Garcia project’s screenwriter is Topper Lilien, whose previous movies “Where the Money Is” and “Dungeons & Dragons” were released in 2000. “Topper Lilien’s daring script does justice to Garcia and steadfastly resists cliche,” Bar-Lev told Variety, which broke the story.

Producing are Eric Eisner (“Hamlet 2″) and the indie team of Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa (“Little Miss Sunshine”).

Hollywood trades often float early-in-development projects in exchange for exclusivity. The Garcia biopic has no star or distributor, apparently, so there’s no guarantee it’ll come out soon — or at all.

The news comes days after Amy Adams (“Enchanted”) was announced as the star of a Janis Joplin biopic called “Get It While You Can.” “City of God’s” Fernando Meirelles directs and “Twilight’s” Wyck Godfrey produces.

“Nowhere Boy,” a U.K. import about John Lennon’s childhood, is making the festival circuit before its October release in the States.

More Grateful Dead content:

• Grateful Dead’s history a Society affair
• Furthur adventures of the Grateful Dead family
• Furthur live on satellite radio; concert cancelled

Furthur live on Sirius; town halts show

Reason to be grateful: Sirius XM is doing a live broadcast of Furthur’s tour stop in tiny Jim Thorpe, Pa.

Reason to be bummed: The July 5 show at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont was abruptly canceled because of fears of damage to the facility. One angry fan called it “Grateful Dead paranoia at its best.”

The Tuesday, June 29, concert on satellite radio comes from Penn’s Peak, a 1,600-seat club, making it the most intimate performance of Furthur’s current tour. (The concert, of course, is rock solid sold out.) The live broadcast begins at 7 p.m. ET on the 3-year-old Dead Channel.

Satellite radio fans will hear the Furthur concert on XM channel 57 and Sirius 32. The co-host of the Grateful Dead Channel’s “Tales from the Golden Road” talk show, Gary Lambert, will take calls from Deadheads during the break.

Bob Weir and Phil Lesh’s project is one of the many descendants of the Grateful Dead. It debuted about a year ago and has been on the road most of 2010.

Of the canceled Vermont show, the band said it was “regrettably unable to find a suitable alternate venue in Vermont,” and switched that date to the Sherman Theatre in Stroudsburg, Pa. Tickets from the Vermont show will be refunded, but not honored at the Sherman gig, which sold out in eight minutes.

The Vermont promoter complained on the Furthur web site: “For these concerns to materialize in the 11th hour and our solutions to be deemed ‘inadequate’ is short-sighted.” The show would have been part of the Ben & Jerry’s Concerts on the Green series.

The town’s fears of Furthur, apparently, were of problems with Dead heads showing up on the museum grounds without tickets.

“This is Grateful Dead paranoia at its best,” one local fan told the Burlington Free Press. “This show was no threat to the museum or anyone else.”

Paranoia about concerns certainly runs deep in the Northeast this month after a near riot in Manhattan at a free show by rapper Drake. An expected crowd of 10,000 fans turned into 25,000 and the show was canceled without the performer taking the stage.

The (latest and second) lineup of Furthur consists of Weir (guitar, vocals), Lesh (bass), Jeff Chimenti (keyboards), John Kadlecik (guitar), Joe Russo (drums), and Sunshine Becker and Jeff Pherson (vocals). The musicians have ties to the family of Grateful Dead-related acts such as Dark Star Orchestra and RatDog.

The ever-changing set list looks familiar to Deadheads, of course: “Touch of Grey,” “Looks Like Rain,” “Eyes of the World,” “Here Comes Sunshine,” “Brokedown Palace,” “Ship of Fools,” “Truckin’” and “Turn on Your Lovelight.”

Furthur is named for the 1939 school bus owned by Ken Kesey and used in the ’60s as psychedelic transport for the trippy writer and his extended family, the Merry Pranksters.

More Grateful Dead content:

• Jerry Garcia biopic brewing in Hollywood
• Grateful Dead’s history a Society affair
  

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