Since Jerry Garcia’s passing in 1995, bands and fans have paid tribute to the music icon on his Aug. 1st birthday, and with each passing year a growing number of events have celebrated the influential creative artist.
On Aug. 3, 2012 Bob Weir honored his former Grateful Dead bandmate’s 70th by performing as part of a musical collective made up of two generations at his technologically-advanced TRI Studios. The four-and-a-half hour livestreamed show was called “Move Me Brightly” after a line in “Terrapin Station.”
Among the nearly 20 musicians joining Weir were ex-Dead members Phil Lesh and Donna Jean Godchaux, Mike Gordon, Furthur’s Jeff Chimenti and Joe Russo, Jim Lauderdale, Neal Casal and Jonathan Graboff (The Cardinals), Jonathan Wilson, Cass McCombs, Adam MacDougall (The Black Crowes), Chris Tomson (Vampire Weekend), Craig Finn (The Hold Steady), Lukas Nelson, Harper Simon and Sam Cohen.
The set included unique interpretations of Garcia-led numbers including “Terrapin Station,” “Shakedown Street,” “Cumberland Blues,” “New Speedway Boogie,“ “Friend Of The Devil,” “Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,” “Mission in the Rain,” “He’s Gone,” “Eyes Of The World,” “Days Between,” “Franklin’s Tower” and “U.S. Blues.”
After directing that online event Justin Kreutzmann edited the concert footage along with interviews with Bill Kreutzmann, Mickey Hart and Godchaux along with Garcia family members, Carlos Santana, Mike Campbell, Perry Farrell and Stephen Perkins (Jane’s Addiction) and historical background into Move Me Brightly: A Documentary Concert Film Celebrating Jerry Garcia’s 70th Birthday that’s now available on DVD and Blu-ray.
As the son of Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann, Justin has always had a close association with the band. Following a different artistic path than his dad, he developed an obsession with filmmaking by his eighth birthday. This led to shooting Super 8 film, some of which occasionally makes it into Dead-related video projects. Previously, he’s produced The Making of Touch of Grey behind-the-scenes video as well as Backstage Pass.
He’s also worked on projects for the VH-1 network and with Pearl Jam, U2, Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon, completed a web documentary series with Mike Campbell (Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers) and directed multiple livestream events at TRI Studios featuring Weir and his collaborators including the National, Dave Schools and Keller Williams as well as concerts by Simon Townshend and Slightly Stoopid. As a major fan of The Who, some of his most gratifying moments have involved working with the band and Pete Townshend.
What made the following conversation such a pleasure is that Kreutzmann is very self-aware yet down to earth in regards to his upbringing and career. As we discuss Move Me Brightly – the event and the documentary – talk easily segues to how Jerry Garcia influenced his work, a Bob Weir documentary he’s working on now, and, with two fellow Who fans on the phone, a discussion of the British rockers.
JPG: Let’s start at the beginning. Move Me Brightly – the event itself, the birthday celebration, the musicians involved, the songs played – how did that come about and how did you get involved?
JK: I’m the Creative Director at TRI, so I was involved with the concept from day one. It started like a lot of things in Grateful Dead. It was this really simple idea. Every year around Jerry’s birthday there’s a lot of tributes, the SF Giants have Jerry Day at the stadium, fans around the country do really cool events, all varying levels of size and participation.
We were sitting around TRI and were like, “We should do something. This would be perfect. This is Bob’s studio. So, if we do something, it’s gotta be cool. It can’t just be, “Oh, that was neat.” With that humble idea we were like, “Why don’t we call some people…?” Well first, Bob was into it, so we’re great. Once we nailed him down to a date ‘cause if I remember Furthur had just been on the road right before then. We had to do a little juggling, which is why it didn’t actually fall on August 1st.
We called a few people and it wasn’t a hard sell. “Do you want to come to TRI and play Grateful Dead songs with Bob Weir?” The biggest [problem] we had was people’s schedules ‘cause this idea came about eight weeks before the show. This all happened, and it was very Grateful Dead, it fell into place and it could have been a complete trainwreck and been a disaster but somehow it magically worked and the music was really good. Everybody was there just because it was a cool trip. We got great people. The people who couldn’t make it I went out and filmed them. So, we got interviews from a lot of folks. The movie is very inclusive.
JPG: The people that were involved was one of the cool things about it. Nothing against Jerry’s peers such as Jorma Kaukonen and…
JK: …the obvious choices is what you’re trying to say.
JPG: Yeah. I thought it was great that Move Me Brightly brought up the next generation of musicians, many I didn’t expect, who are fans or influenced by Jerry and the Grateful Dead. It showed how that spirit goes forward in a number of different ways.
JK: The idea was we wanted anybody that we thought would be appropriate we asked to participate, and that was people like Jorma and my dad, who had another gig, who were obvious choices. We wanted it to be a mixture. We wanted it to be peers, bandmates and people who only knew Jerry through his music and had never had been in a Grateful Dead cover band or never jammed, you know what I mean?
A lot of it was people that we knew. I knew Jane’s Addiction from them doing “Ripple” on Deadicated and [Jane’s drummer] Stephen Perkins had toured with the Rhythm Devils. We didn’t try to get people just to get some names in there. Everybody had some connection. The great thing was when I was interviewing the Jane’s Addiction guys I found this whole back story to Stephen Perkins’ brother and his growing up a Deadhead that I had no idea about.
So, all these great connections came up that just blew my mind. It was neat.
A lot of the musicians came from one our producers, Laurence Freedman, he’s one of Tom Petty’s managers. He’s very involved in the up-and-coming music scene, had a lot of connections to these people and knew some of these people such as Chris Tomson from Vampire Weekend; people that I had no connection personally but I would never connect the dots. That was a real treat.
Neal Casal and Jon Graboff I knew only because my wife is a massive Ryan Adams & the Cardinals fan. So, when their names got brought up I already knew so much of their music and I hear it every day at the house and I enjoy it. I was just like, “Yeah, cool. Those guy are consummate musicians and if they’re into doing it…” I think Jon was in town to play over with Phil. So, he was just around. So, we grabbed him and said, “Bring your instrument and sit in on some tunes.” And it was just like that. People wanted to participate.
When I asked people to play, “What’s a song you’ve always wanted to play? What do you want to play with Bob?” we got this great wish list. Since the Grateful Dead aren’t, shall we say, a hits band, there was no consideration of whether this would be commercial…whatever tunes were great. That’s why an hour-and-a-half show ballooned into a four-and-a-half-hour epic because, as you know, Grateful Dead songs aren’t always the shortest.
JPG: Oh yeah, I know. I’m a veteran but I was also running around to see all kinds of other bands as well, especially alternative rock.
JK: Oh, man. You wear the scars. That’s great, man. Isn’t that what music’s all about? Isn’t it about a little bit of everything and this and that? That’s the fun of it. Are you ever going to run into a blind alley with music and not be able to find some new trip to check out? You might not devote your life to it and follow it around in a VW van but music is an endless source of turn-ons, as they would probably say in Grateful Dead world.
JPG: Back to the concert, I remember watching the livestream that night and you just mentioned how it ended up becoming four-and-a-half hours. The version on the DVD is over two hours and…
JK: The full movie is about two-fifteen to two-twenty. I’ve lost track. And the DVD has a half hour of extra music, and the Blu-ray has an hour of extra music. Math not being my strong point but you get 75 per cent of the four-and-a-half hours.
JPG: After watching the livestream and then hearing that there would be a DVD release, I thought that it would probably be just the concert with bonus extras of interviews. Did you have a vision for the DVD that interspersed performances with background and interviews before the event took place or did it all come together afterwards when you had a chance to look at all that was available?
JK: Doing these live webcasts that we do from TRI when we have the time, and eight weeks is definitely not a lot of time to put a show like this together, some of the shows we do there, Bob invites somebody in on Wednesday and then next Tuesday…we just try to get the live music out as well as we can and don’t have a lot of time to piece together interviews and stuff around it.
Because it was a birthday celebration and a lot of people couldn’t be there in person, I knew that I wanted to start off the live broadcast with a half hour of interviews and Jerry history and family members. To me a live broadcast is at its best when you go behind the curtain, see some b-roll documentary element of how the show got together or the person that’s the focus of the show and then you see the music live. It’s like the best of both worlds. I went into it like that. In my mind I’m always making a movie. In my mind if we could have pulled it off I would have tried to make the live event like this, where you see some songs then you get some interviews. It was all coming together so fast there was no way that was going to happen. In my mind I was always anticipating making this. It just took a year to do it, but I always wanted to get in there. My perfectionist tendencies go in and fix that shot here…fix my own work and also just make it…
When I was a kid I loved The Grateful Dead Movie. I used to watch that thing over and over on our old Betamax. It probably drove my dad crazy. The great part was then when Jerry and I would be in an airport killing time – back when the band flew commercial and you’re sitting in an airport for hours and hours and hours – I would ask him about the movie with that little kid enthusiasm. “Why’d you do that? What was up with that?” He’d always explain that when they shot the Dead movie he had a choice, “I’m gonna make a concert film and it’s just gonna be the movie starts and the Grateful Dead comes on. Two hours later the Grateful Dead goes offstage or I’m gonna make a documentary.” And he’s like, “You know what? I’m gonna make a documentary. I want to throw in Deadheads. I want to see what’s going on here. I want to go back in the past. Have tons of music and all that stuff but give it something.”
So, that’s what I approached this with. I wanted to balance out this great music and these great stories, these firsthand accounts of Jerry, and keep you going through the whole thing so that maybe if a 20-minute “Terrapin Station” doesn’t quite hold your interest you know that there’s going to be something coming up that could be some cool documentary footage. It’s the kind of thing I enjoy watching from other bands.
*JPG: Compared to other TRI events I’ve watched, it looked as if it was really packed in the studio space during the Move Me Brightly event. How are you able to have cameramen and still photographers do what they need to do yet keep the crowd from moving up and getting in the way? Are there instructions to the audience to get them to behave? *
JK: Well, no one would listen to us if we asked them to do that. (slight laugh) The dolly track going in front of the stage with the big heavy camera going in front of them was a big deterrent. A lot of the time it’s a rugby game. I’ll have cameramen who are just elbowing people politely to find space because TRI is not set up for people. It’s set up to do broadcasts and record with a very small group of people. That show was big.
It’s a juggling act. But they’re all very nice. It’s not like people don’t move out of the way. They understand that they’re watching for better or worse a TV show being filmed. So, a lot of people get it. It gets crowded and it’s tough, and if it looks a little crowded on the visuals it was nowhere near…it looks better on TV than it actually was. It was a lot harder to maneuver in there than it usually is, but that show in particular there was a lot of people.
JPG: For an event like that did you set up a lot of stationary cameras or even use something like GoPro cameras?
JK: I think there’s a whole GoPro reality that should come to TRI. It’s just balancing it out with what we have because I love the human touch. My personal aesthetic is one cameraman is worth five locked-off shots. I want that human angle.
We’ve been talking to GoPro people and they love the space. We’re talking about doing some stuff. I’m interested in exploring it. I know GoPro from sports and it’s fantastic. We want to be taking that and applying it to our aesthetic and seeing what we come up with ‘cause a lot of the music we do at TRI isn’t breakneck tempos. So, maybe there’s a different way to incorporate that stuff into what we do. I’m really excited to explore GoPro. That sounds like an ad. (laughs) Well, they gave me a free camera, so I’m pretty stoked to check it out.
JPG: I’ve seen GoPro used in different situations besides sports. I’ve really noticed their use in the Jerry Seinfeld web series, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” He has what looks like one team in a van following him but for much of the car scenes it’s three or four GoPro cameras set up. It looks good on a computer. I don’t know how it would look on a TV screen or something bigger.
JK: I know one of the cameramen that work on that show. They use more than just GoPro. Some of those car shots you can’t get a human being to be sitting there and I can’t see the difference when they’re cutting from a bigger camera to the GoPro stuff. To me that’s a great testament to the future for those cameras.
JPG: Going back, you mentioned about talking with Jerry about The Grateful Dead Movie. Usually you see the offspring of musicians pick up the mantle. In Move Me Brightly there’s Harper Simon, son of Paul, and Lukas Nelson, son of Willie, playing. What brought you towards film rather than music?
JK: When I was a kid my dad used to leave drum sets in my room. I don’t know if that had an exact opposite effect. When I was a kid, everyone wanted to be a drummer. All the other Dead kids…well, not all of ‘em but a lot of the people in our circle wanted to be a drummer. I just got the film bug. They were doing Apocalypse Now and my dad and Mickey [Hart] were working on some of the percussion. I was seven or eight, and I would just watch Francis [Ford Coppola]..this was when Apocalypse Now was like six hours long. I would sit there and he would be talking to everybody and describing the film in terms of the sounds the jungle makes. It was fascinating!
And, he’s such a great guy and I loved his family. I just loved that world. There was nothing Hollywood about it. It was…Francis Coppola, just this cool northern California [vibe of] making films and film as art but they still have lots of explosions…it just got me. And right about that time Star Wars came out, too. So, between Francis and George Lucas I was in.
Then, my dad bought me a Super 8 camera and I started shooting films when I was eight. Fortunately, I’ve been able to have a life because of it.
JPG: You got the Super 8 camera after the Apocalypse Now sessions?
JK: Yeah. It was right in that whole time period. I remember this really distinctly, being at a show and my dad asking Bill Graham to ask George Lucas the best way to get me started into film. I don’t have this letter but Bill wrote George and George wrote back, “Get him a Super 8 camera and tell him to start. That’s the best way you do it.” And that’s exactly what I did.
JPG: Speaking of Super 8 footage, and other footage, you must have shot a lot backstage and onstage. Have you looked at it and is any of it worthwhile to put together as Backstage Pass 2 or used somewhere else?
JK: There is a lot of stuff, particularly the main period that I was shooting was ’86-’90 because we just bought a new video camera. I wasn’t working on anything for the Dead. I was working on different projects but I wasn’t shooting for any purposes because back then, it’s not like today, the video quality was such that it was unusable despite what people would think. So, there is a large stockpile of it but I don’t see it becoming its own thing.
For instance, I’m in Los Angeles right now and we’re doing a Bob Weir feature that’s going to come out next year. We’re sprinkling it with shots from my stuff because it’s the only perspective you see of those guys is from my perspective and stuff like that. Whenever it gets around to somebody doing the ultimate Grateful Dead movie…anything that involves telling the story of these guys I see this as a great little batch of stuff that you can sprinkle in even in its late ‘80s home video look. You don’t see the band in hotels and in the van or offstage candid moments but little touches here and there can be used really well.
JPG: I can’t remember right now but was any of your footage used in the Rocking the Cradle: Egypt 1978 DVD?
JK: I wasn’t on that trip. A guy named Richard Loren shot a lot of Super 8. He was the band’s manager back then. They called him Zippy. If you watch Backstage Pass I use a lot of Zippy’s footage when they’re walking around the Sphinx, the different pyramids and the different parts of Egypt whose names I definitely will butcher and probably get completely incorrectly. But, there is some good Super 8 from that. I didn’t go on that trip so none of it is mine.
JPG: You mentioned the Bob Weir feature, tell me more about that.
JK: It’s a Bob Weir documentary directed by Mike Fleiss who did the Ozzy film (“God Bless Ozzy Osbourne”) and is a big Deadhead and real sweet guy. He wanted to do this movie. He thought Bob was a great subject to tell Bob’s story and Bob had such an interesting life with the Grateful Dead and all the stuff that happens around Bob’s life before and after. We’re putting it together and it’s turning out really cool.
It’s interesting exploring somebody who you’ve known all your life but actually getting down into it. Before I came down to L.A. , I was sitting around Bob’s house with him and I was like, “Okay, Olompali, that was before the Haight or is that after…?” It’s all the stuff I’d always heard about but I never really…I wasn’t writing a thesis on it. So, I never really asked or put it together, and then you get all these stories and all this stuff that you may have kind of heard about it or not heard about at all. So, it’s interesting.
The film is really good and it’s gonna be really great by the time people get to see it. I’m really happy Bob will have this document so people can…and it’s a movie. It’s not gonna be a four-hour concert thing. People can get Bob’s story from Bob himself, his family and friends for 90 minutes and enjoy it.
JPG: Any idea when it will be released in theaters or will it be direct to DVD or…?
JK: That has yet to be determined. It’s going to come out next year. The idea is to do a small theatrical release but I can’t really speak to any of that because I’m not part of that end of it. I don’t know if anything is in place yet and I don’t wanna say the wrong thing in case something is…I don’t know. It’s gonna come out anywhere people wanna show it, that’s where it’ll be.
JPG: What is your position with the movie?
JK: I’m one of the producers.
JPG: I saw online that you’re listed as a co-producer on the Garcia documentary Jerry: The Movie .
JK: Anytime they do something Grateful Dead it seems like I get a phone call. It’s great job security but I’m not quite sure what’s going on with that film. That has been a very long looong process if you could only imagine knowing the history of what has happened in Jerry Garcia world. It’s on again. It’s off again. I’m caught up in Bob Weir world, so I don’t really know what’s going on with that. Another person who richly deserves their own movie.
JPG: Besides the Bob Weir film, what other projects are you working on right now?
JK: The Move Me Brightly idea has become…people like it. We’re talking about doing it as a series, maybe four Move Me Brightlys a year. Obviously, the concept would change depending on the people. For instance, a Bill Graham Move Me Brightly. That would be awesome. The same idea coming to it from our perspective — family and friends and people inspired and all the musicians in the world that Bill has touched. So, we’re going to take some meetings about that and see if we can get something going.
JPG: That reminds me. I really loved the TRI session Bob did with the members of The National.
JK: That was a good one. I think we should do more stuff with those guys. He loves those guys.
JPG: That could possibly be an interesting documentary. Besides the Dead you’ve done a few projects for another legendary band, The Who. I was reading your blog posts from 2005 and there was one about seeing them play for the first time and then at Rockpalast. How did you get involved with Pete Townshend and make the In the Attic DVD and then work with The Who?
JK: I have been a Who fan since Rockpalast, March 28, 1981. And yeah, I do remember the date. I am that kind of a geeky fan. I saw them in ’76 at Day On the Green and it had a big impact on me but I don’t think nothing was as important to me as The Beatles then. I wasn’t ready to take on The Who. It was big. It was massive. I was probably a little frightened at the power of their sound.
Then, at Rockpalast I was 12 and it was lasers and jumping around and “Who Are You” and “Pinball Wizard,” and I’m like, “This is the greatest frickin’ band I ever heard in my life.” It just rocked. Not that the Dead aren’t rock stars but these guys just were rock stars and they were just cool. And I’ve always loved Sixties English rock. When you watch them play “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” is there anything better in the rock world? So, it just hit me.
Because I’m fortunate enough to be able to do this, I started writing Pete letters and he would always write back. I started sending Pete every little film that I did. We were like pen pals and every four or five years we’d happen to run into each other or I’d make a point of trying to meet him at an event or if The Who were coming through town. He was the ultimate guy to have be your rock star hero. He wasn’t on this pedestal like The Beatles that you knew you were never gonna interact with. He was in our world so to speak but he was still larger than life.
When “In the Attic” was starting and his partner Rachel [Fuller] had seen some of my work, they invited me to come film. The six-week gig in the summer of 2006 turned into a two-year job working for Pete and Rachel. Part of that, The Who were on tour and they needed somebody to do the backstage videos and Pete was like, “Justin’s here doing this, why doesn’t he do The Who stuff?” Dreams do come true right there.
The first time I picked up the camera and looked through the lens and Pete was just practicing a tune I had that moment of, “This is the coolest moment of my life.” I did a thing for his book tour last year.
We still keep in touch. I send him family photos. He’s the man.
What I always say to Deadheads is, “He’s my Jerry.” He’s that guy for me. Jerry’s like my uncle but Pete’s like…he’s a good guy and I love him to death. He got to meet my daughter and my new wife when The Who played Oakland earlier this year. And…it’s all good.
JPG: I probably got deeply into The Who around the same age as you did. First, it’s the power of the music and then it’s Pete’s lyrics. Like you, I got wrapped into it around my pre-teen years.
JK: It grabs you, man. It’s the perfect music to go through puberty to. The great thing, between them and the Dead, not to be all namedropping but I was talking to [Rolling Stone writer] David Fricke and it’s great because two worlds where if you’re into it you’re really…I don’t know too many passive Who fans. I don’t know people who kinda like the Dead, [and feel] they’re okay. You’re either in or you’re out.
Again, not be namedropping but Eddie Vedder and I and the handful of times we’ve run into each other we talk about The Who. He’s not the lead singer from Pearl Jam. He’s a fellow Who fan. So, you just feel that cool bond, which Deadhead must feel with each other. I know they do. That cool…I’m not there to ask him questions about Pearl Jam, “Let’s talk about Pete.” “Yeah!” Then, we both get excited about it.
He’s a sweet guy. He’s one of those guys. He ran into my dad in Hawaii and they ended up hanging out. I don’t even know that my dad really knows who Pearl Jam is necessarily but he’s like, “Yeah, this guy Eddie. A really cool guy.” “Yeah, he’s kinda famous dad, but that’s cool.”
It’s funny because my dad meets all these people as people. “Oh, you’re a musician. Cool. You’re in the club. Awesome.” You can sell 10 records or 10 million. That’s not the point.
JPG: You work as a director, cinematographer and producer, is any role more satisfying than the other, and are you most happy working within the music world or is there a desire to direct an indie film or Star Wars VIII ?
JK: I want to do it all! Mixing music and visuals is something I really feel it in me to do and I also love to tell a good story. Be it documentary or Star Wars VIII, I want to keep working and improving and learning the craft. The dream is, and has also been, just to make movies in every size, shape, destination or category.
