The Interview with Ken Kesey
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A serendipitous meeting on the streets of New York
So then we did this on tour and then at the end of the 3½ or 4 weeks or whatever it was, I moved back home to NYC and I was an intern at ABC. A couple weeks later I was walking home and I was standing at the corner of 62nd St. and Madison Avenue and Bob Weir walks up. So I introduced myself and said, “Hey Bobby, I’m making a documentary on the road…” And he actually gave me a phone number of someone to call and wrote me a note that would help.
Timothy Leary
In September ‘93 we flew out west for the 1993 Video Music Awards and tried to make something happen. We were like “We’ll go to the VMAs” and we snuck in and we got the Chris Barron interview. That was when the Spin Doctors were at their peak. Chris Barron was cool and I’ve since become friendly with him.
But what else happened was before we went there we went to the video store to pick up tape. We were standing in line talking about the project and a dude was like “You’re working on a Dead thing? You want to interview Timothy Leary?” And I told him that we’d been trying to get to him. So he said, “I’m having a party tonight after the VMA’s. Leary’s going to be there.” Well we went to the VMA’s, and then we went to this party and Leary wasn’t there but his girlfriend was and told us to come to the house the next day at 5 pm. So we drove up to Leary’s house the next day and he’s got this 26-year-old girlfriend and we did this crazy interview.
Ken Kesey
The way the Kesey thing happened was you could just get his phone number [it was listed in the phone book]. So I called and he said, “Nah, pass.” Then I waited a while, called back and said, “I’m going to be in Oregon and I was wondering if I could stop by because I’ll be up there anyways.” And he was like, “Well if you’re gonna be in the neighborhood then give us a ring when you’re nearby.” So I got an interview that was more confirmed, I don’t even know how I got it, but I went to Oregon on my 21st birthday. We drove from LA up to Oregon and we interviewed [former Grateful Dead manager] Rock Scully in San Francisco, which was on the way. Then we called Kesey when we were on the way and he said, “Come over.” So we drove over to Kesey’s house and he said, “We’ll talk a bit about your project but I don’t really want to do an interview.” I said, “No problem” and explained what we were doing.
So we’re sitting on the porch talking at 6:00 pm on a summer day having a smoke and he’s like, “Okay, go get your camera.” So we ran and got the camera and he said, “I’ll talk a bit but I don’t want to talk about the old days, I just want to talk about the kids today, I think it’s important.” And I was like, “Great, thanks so much, this is perfect.” And then he just starts talking about the early days. It just happened and he gave a memorable interview.
John Barlow
We were introduced by a mutual friend. Just from doing a thing like this you leverage everybody you know who knows someone and so I had someone introduce me to John. I remember going to meet him at his apartment. All these interviews were done in random places and we formed a friendship out of it.
Tie-Died
And Miles To Go was a student film. I showed it. Then, I don’t even remember how people heard about it, but these guys who were making the movie Tie-Died [a documentary about Deadheads] contacted me and asked me to play a producer role. I was associate producer but my job was basically the same—I went and got all the kids, the interviews. I was pretty heavily involved in Tie-Died. Then Garcia passed away and [the Tie-Died producers] were like, “We can’t have you do anything with your film, so we’ll make you a deal where we’ll take your great Kesey interview and cut it into a short film and we’ll run it in front of Tie-Died in movie theaters and your name will be on the poster and we’ll give you your money back that you spent on your personal documentary.” And I said, “Deal.” I was 21, 22 and if you remember the Tie-Died poster, they had it on there.
A moment in time
Phish is a melting pot with a lot of young kids coming together looking to have fun but with The Dead you had all these different generations. You just had so many different elements there, all looking towards the same thing. With Phish tour you have one or two elements there and that’s what was so unique and missed. There is nothing else like it, I don’t see anything like it coming back. Maybe the occasional event, but that scene really ended when Jerry Garcia passed away. Right then, right there. Even with the Dead tours and Furthur, and it ended. It had to, it was getting out of control.
The Pivot
I was at that [Rosemont ‘93] show and I went electric for the first time. When I walked outside afterwards, it was snowing and I wandered into a drum circle. I was in the lot for probably an hour and a half and I was like, “Holy shit, this is crazy.” I 100% believe that if I hadn’t been at that show I never would have owned Wetlands and everything that came afterwards. No way. I was not on that path and that night I made a pivot towards that path. It was a fork in the road and I then made And Miles To Go and then Tie-Died and I just had the confidence that I could take an idea and follow through with it.
Tie-Died went to Sundance, so when I graduated college there was enough going on and I was like, “I’m going to make the ‘American Road’ thing” [his short film, a travelogue set to Phish’s “You Enjoy Myself,” which also screened at Sundance]. Then I graduated and got an internship at New Line because I had done the Dead thing.
Well all that directly leads to Wetlands. I wouldn’t have been interested in Wetlands if I hadn’t spent all that time on tour and I don’t think I would have gotten it if I hadn’t had all that time with Kesey where he gave me his personal portrait. So when Larry Bloch was looking for someone to take over Wetlands, I had the right pedigree. I showed Larry my interview with Kesey and it was just part of the whole thing. And it all followed from there…
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