photo: Susana Millman

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On September 25, 1980, shortly after Len Dell’Amico woke up in Brooklyn, he was summoned to a meeting in San Francisco. The filmmaker flew across the country and made his way to the Warfield Theatre for a pre-show conversation with Jerry Garcia. The ensuing dialogue sparked a 15-year friendship and a new opportunity for Dell’Amico—directing concert films and music videos for Garcia and his bandmates. Dell’Amico looks back on this era in his heartfelt and humorous book Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead.

Friend of the Devil shares Dell’Amico’s perspective overseeing the band’s Halloween pay-per-view from Radio City Music Hall in 1980. From there, the author presents an account of his subsequent experiences with the group—working on additional concert broadcasts, collaborating with Garcia on the So Far home video project and directing the official music videos for “Hell in a Bucket” and “Throwing Stones.” Dell’Amico also provides anecdotes and insight from his years supplying visual accompaniment for the Dead’s stadium shows. Beyond all of these endeavors, the author muses on his personal connection with Garcia, including reflections from the period in which the musician recovered from a coma. 

“I’ve been working on the book for 30 years,” Dell’Amico explains. “I kept notes contemporaneously while working with the Dead because it was extremely interesting. Then after Jerry passed, I knew I would someday have to write this book because he had such an influence on me. I benefited so much from Jerry and the Dead that I knew I had an obligation to tell the world what I knew.”

He also addresses this subject in Friend of the Devil:

“Why have I felt an obligation for more than twenty-five years to tell this story? There is a two-part answer.

“First, because over the course of my education with the Grateful Dead and Garcia, I learned a great deal about the importance of their music in our cultural history, its sources in jug-band, old-timey, bluegrass, rural blues, country-and-western, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll music. Through experiencing up close and personal the symbiosis between the band and their fans, over and over via making sixty or so in-concert films, many of which I directed from the mixing and lighting structure in the middle of a stadium surrounded by 70,000 or so delirious fans, I came to understand the underlying dynamic of this phenomenon: The shows were fundamentally a spiritual experience, more like going to church than any other musical act I have ever worked with.

“The second reason I feel obligated to tell this story is because in the fifteen years I knew him, Garcia was the closest thing to a mentor I ever had. I used the lessons I learned from him to build my own career, and to seek the life I imagined, and to enjoy an amazingly big hunk of fulfillment and happiness, and to end up now, somewhat late in life, feeling like one of the most fortunate people I know, and feeling like I owe it to a large degree to the lessons learned from Garcia.”

As for the title of the book, he writes that it’s “a bit of a wry joke at the expense of my beloved friend, the subject of this memoir, whom I believe would appreciate the irony…Consider that my friend, who, as part of Grateful Dead, the band with that weird name, was once thought of as scary to many people, is now universally accepted as a spiritual ideal, an icon of openness, acceptance, love, wisdom, conviviality, and generosity. And I believe as time passes, the positive spiritual essence of Garcia and Hunter and the Dead’s vast project will become more and more widely known and understood.”

Looking back on his career which began in the mid-‘70s shooting video for John Scher at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, N.J., Dell’Amico states, “Going up the ranks from there with multi-cameras, remote trucks and a headset, was like being on a spaceship. When people ask me, ‘What’s your work? What’s your career?’ I say, ‘I’ve never worked.’ I define work as stuff you do for money that you don’t really like. Everything I’ve ever done was because I loved it, and that makes me the most fortunate person I know.”

You were hired shortly after that meeting with Jerry and begin digging in on the pay-per-view project almost immediately. What do you think accounted for that immediate response?

My theory is that Jerry had talked to Art Neville. In the summer of 1980, we went down to the Saenger and shot the Meters, and then another separate show that same evening by the Neville Brothers. I thought maybe he talked to Art because it went really well at the Saenger, and then Garcia was looking for somebody to walk the plank and broadcast a Dead show with untested technology and no script. Television directors work with a script. It’s all charted out—”How many bars before you start singing? When are the harmonies?” But the Dead didn’t do that because they didn’t know what they were going to play. And even if they did, if Jerry decided to play 16 bars instead of eight, that’s what they would do.

When I met him at the Warfield, I was aware that they were talking to other directors. One of them was a film director, a one shot at a time kind of guy, which I am as well, but it’s completely different. That doesn’t qualify you to do a broadcast.

I think Garcia grasped right away the problem that a director would face. He said, “If what you’re saying is true, we need to get Franken and Davis here, tomorrow.” Those guys were on Saturday Night Live at that time and they were hot but they loved the Dead. Jerry knew that all he had to do was snap his fingers and they would be there, which is what happened.

Jerry seemed ready to hire me on the spot and go ahead with the deal. Maybe that’s because he was an incredible judge—not necessarily of a person’s character—but of their ability to fit what he needed.

While you were a film student, you used Jerry’s solo from Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point in one of your projects. What led you to that?

In the spring of 1970 I was studying art history at NYU. I wasn’t even in film yet. My girlfriend and I went to see Zabriskie Point at the Coronet Theatre on the corner of third and 59^th and when I came out, I said, “I’m going to make films.” That movie changed me completely, instantaneously.

From that moment on to today is a straight line. My decision to go to film school and everything else unfolded in a series of connected steps. People give Scorsese, who I know from NYU, credit as the guy who brought contemporary music into films. It was Antonioni.

He did it in Blow-Up, and he did it in Zabriskie Point. You could get into a cab after watching that movie and hear the music from the movie in the cab. It was literally that tight in terms of time.

Unfortunately, if you see Zabriskie Point today you can’t see the original ending with credits by Pink Floyd. The studio took that out and put in Roy Orbison. I love Roy, but not there.

At that point I was studying to be an art history teacher. I was also a photographer spending a lot of time in the dark room and I liked movies. But seeing that movie inspired me to say, “I could do this.” Motion pictures are just photography moving.  Plus, Antonioni is incredibly visual. He didn’t come from writing or theater or any of that, and it shows.

Blow-Up ends with the guy watching a group of kids playing tennis without a ball. He’s a famous photographer, somebody’s been murdered and the evidence is gone. There’s the scene earlier when Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck are playing at a club. Then he’s been up all night and he runs into these hippies, who are mimes, on a tennis court, pretending to hit the ball. He’s watching and his head’s going back and forth. Then you start to hear the ball and you’re like, “Wait a minute…” One of the hippies does a big swing and they all turn to watch as the imaginary ball leaves the court. That’s when one of the mimes gestures at him—“Could you get the ball and throw it back?” So he goes over to the grass, picks up the imaginary ball, throws it back, and the movie ends. It’s like, what is real?

Antonioni is out of favor right now. But when I went to art history school, Klimt was out of favor and Kurt Vonnegut was thought of as silly. Now they’re both in the pantheon. So it comes and goes, and Antonioni will be back in the pantheon.

Anyhow, I finished my senior thesis film in 73, and my film won an award at the Chicago Film Festival in the student film category. It was quote-unquote about a young person’s experience in 1968, 69, 70, 71 when we were being drafted and sent halfway around the world to be killed and to kill people who did nothing to us. The film is a comedy that becomes very psychedelic, and after I finished it, one of my teachers said, “I think you should try to make a film about people instead of the crazy shit your first film was about. Why don’t you demonstrate something about a family.” So I made a film I called “Wharf Rat” that was inspired by the song. The guy was a Vietnam vet in the story. There’s a scene where he goes up to the top of a skyscraper and looks out over the city. I put “Wharf Rat” in there but then in the editing process, it became clear that it wasn’t going to work, so I used Garcia’s guitar solo from Zabriskie Point where there’s an orgy going on—a fantasy in the desert.

When I finally became close enough friends with Garcia, I said, “I have to tell you that I used your stuff from Zabriskie Point in my movie.” He was like, “Oh, okay.” I was such a nerd at that time that I thought, “Maybe he thinks I stole it.” So I said, “The movie never made any money,” and he kind of shrugged at that revelation. [Laughs.]

After NYU, how did you come to direct concert films?

I opened my email the other day a couple days ago, and it was from Al DeZon who was a stage manager at the Capitol Theater in New Jersey during in the 70s.

He and I had been hippie roommates in ‘71 in Brooklyn. We were both in college and then when we left that building, we went our separate ways, although I would see him occasionally. He became the stage manager at the Capitol Theatre while I was working as an assistant editor at the Brill Building.

Then one day in 1974 I’m sitting in my chair thinking dark thoughts and the phone rings. It’s Al and I’m like, “Oh, what are you doing?” He says, “I’m a stage manager at the Capitol Theatre.” He explains that it’s a rock concert place, then he asks me, “Do you have a degree in film and television?” I tell him I do and he goes, “We’ve got a camera here and some big screens. Could you shoot the band and put them on the screens?” I tell him, “Yeah.” Then he goes, “Can you be here in three hours?” So I was. [Laughs.]

I began shooting live rock-and-roll. What could possibly be more fun? I did that for a few years and then John Scher started a video production company. They sent me down to New Orleans to shoot the Meters and the Nevilles. I think that tape got to the Dead and John called me one day in 1980 and told me to go to the airport. That’s how I met Jerry.

Do you have a favorite comedy bit that Franken & Davis wrote for the band’s pay-per-views?

I’ve got to put Straight Arrow Cooking Show at the top of the list. I’ve seen grown men fall down and all but piss their pants when Jerry looks into the bag of white powder and sighs. That was in 1987 and I’ll talk about it in a moment.  

But first, back to 1980, I think of the Franken & Davis crawl backstage at Radio City where they go from room to room asking for help being introduced. The band members turn him down—”No, we’re busy. Get out of here.” Then Al drops Jerry’s guitar, they get thrown out, and Davis is like, “Great, we’re going to go out there in front of the Deadheads and no one will introduce us.” At which point Brent walks by and they grab him and they’re like, “Would you?” Then he goes, “Oh, alright.”

After he leaves, Davis is like, “Great, we’re going to be introduced by a guy who’s been with the band for five minutes.” Then Brent goes out there in front of 5,000 people and says, “I don’t know who these guys are, and I don’t think they’re very funny…but Frank and Dave.” At that point the audience starts booing. When Al and Tom pitched me on the script, I was like, “Oh, this is fantastic.”

So everyone’s booing and the two of them are like, “Okay, now we’re going to do an hour of comedy” and there’s another wave of boos. They played their parts perfectly and said to the audience, “If you don’t settle down, we’re going to have to leave and the band’s going to have to come out.” The audience roars, they introduce the band and we’re off to the races.

By the way, they also had this bit where they said, “Don’t take the brown acid.” It was riffing on Woodstock but Tom actually took acid and he didn’t tell me until afterwards. I don’t know what I would’ve done because he did something very dangerous. There was a little staircase on the wall that was a foot wide. It was where the technicians would go up to change the lights and the sconces on the wall. During the break he climbed up there, taking his shirt off and it was not rehearsed. That was not allowed. He could have fallen and killed himself.

For New Year’s 1987 we had Davis alone as the emcee.  That’s available on DVD as Ticket to New Year’s. But first I should mention New Year’s 1985, which we were taping but also was broadcast on the radio. I’d hired Father Guido Sarducci, then Ken Kesey kicked him off the mic and took over. I was in the truck going, “What happened to Sarducci who I hired? Who’s that guy?” I was told it was Kesey and I’m like, “He hasn’t signed anything. Get him out of there and get Sarducci back.” My stage manager was like, “Len, I’m surrounded by the crew. They like Kesey and he’s going to stay.”

We were live on FCC-controlled airwaves which meant we were one “fuck” away from being taken off the air and penalized, so I had my heart in my throat. He was drunk and on acid, so he could have said anything.

What happened is these big mannequins came out that Bill Graham would make. They were Mardi Gras-style, paper mâché 10 foot heads of the band. But Kesey didn’t know that. He was like, “Who is it? It’s FDR.” He thought one of them looked like FDR. Then he was like, “Who is that guy? It’s Rasputin.” The people listening on the radio, they couldn’t tell, so them must have thought, “Oh, Rasputin is in the house.” It was crazy.

Thinking back on the comedy, there should be an anthology of all the best stuff because everyone was so game to do it. They never said no to anything we came up with. Do you think I could go to Gregg Allman and ask him to do some skits? Gregg would be like, “I don’t think so, man. I just play organ.”

For New Year’s 87, it was Davis alone that I hired to do the emcee. So he comes to me with his bits and says, “Okay, listen to this Len—Straight Arrow Cooking Show. Jerry’s in a cooking set. He’s got the hat on, he’s got the burners going, he’s got a fridge, he’s got homemade punch, he’s got some Bundt cakes. Then I interview him and he tells the kids, ‘You don’t have to drink or get high to have fun.'” I immediately started chuckling. This is six months after the coma, which everybody thought was a drug overdose, which it wasn’t. It was also a year and a half since he had gotten himself clean, which was on everybody’s mind. Then Tom tells me, “At the end he’s going to say, ‘I just have to sprinkle some of this powdered sugar on the Bundt cakes,’ and the camera holds on the bag of the white powder while Jerry sighs.”

At this point I said, “I don’t know, Tom. I don’t know if Jerry is going to want to do this. It seems too close.” But Tom was full steam ahead—”He’s going to love it. We’re going to go see him right now. Let’s go.” We find out he’s at Front Street and go over there. It’s just the three of us. Of course Jerry lights a cigarette and Tom pitches him on the bit, ending with the bag. Then Garcia, who’s seated, lets out a Pall Mall exhale and says, “I don’t know, Tom. It seems like you’re laughing at me and not with me.”

I look at Tom as if to say, “I told you so,” and Tom says, “Len, tell him this is funny.” So Jerry turns to me, “Is this funny Len?” While I might have been a little reluctant to say it, I acknowledge, “Yeah…They’re going to be laughing their asses off.” So Jerry says, “Alright.”

Again, who else would do that? I think their experiences with Kesey and the Pranksters were a part of it. Everyone was game, including the crew.

There’s a great one from Radio City that didn’t have the band. Al was talking to people at the Jerry’s Kids set, which was a take on Jerry Lewis [from his Muscular Dystrophy Association Labor Day Telethon]. Meanwhile Tom was roving around the house. Now, we had pre-filmed all that material at the Warfield and rolled it in at Radio City because the Warfield was a dead ringer for Radio City. You couldn’t tell. I cut back and forth and it worked perfectly.

So Tom is in his tuxedo upstairs and he goes, “It’s rumored that some of these fans use drugs. I’ve heard that some of this behavior goes on in the men’s room. Should we go and look?” The camera nods, and he says, “Come on…” The camera follows him to the restroom and while he’s still in the corridor a fan is on his way out. It’s Healy [the band’s audio engineer], and Tom asks him, “Are there drugs going on in there?” Healy’s like, “I dunno,” then he barfs all over. We used vegetable soup and you cannot tell that it’s not barf. It was all over his tux. So later on, for continuity—remember this was shot weeks before Radio City—we had to do it again and there had to be the right amount of barf on his tuxedo.

Healy was game. It was a tribe. Like with the “Hell In A Bucket” video in which pretty much everyone there was part of the scene. The only exceptions were the juggler guy, who was a professional juggler, the animals, who were professional animals and the model, who was my friend Allison. The drummers were playing the devils in the front seat and they were excellent. They needed very little direction. And the duck, of course, was a great drunk. [Laughs.]

You share an entertaining story in the book of the band members pitching ideas to you. For folks who haven’t seen it, the video itself is kind of bonkers, particularly within the context of that time.

I think it’s hysterical. I said in the book that it was the most fun I’d ever had. I enjoyed being with these people who were so liberated and committed to having a good time with it.  For two days work—and all the writing was one day in Boulder—I think it holds up pretty good. I imagine that a lot of people these days don’t know about Miami Vice but if you do, it’s even funnier. Bobby nailed it.

You include a publicity still from the shoot in Friend of the Devil. Just as you describe in the book, you look uncomfortable sitting there with the tiger.

As much fun as I can have, I could not approach the level of being present that Bob does. Those people were experts at it.

Garcia would come off the stage, “Well, that sucked. It’ll be better tomorrow. Fail better!” There was this lack of fear of failure.

I also remember being in the crowd with my girlfriend and we’re crying from a “Brokedown Palace.” Then the band left and as we head backstage, Jerry’s coming down the stairs. Someone hands him a drink and he’s laughing. He just maintained that same spirit.

In terms of crew involvement, you share the story of everyone kicking around ideas in an all-hands meeting making opening act suggestions for the summer ’87 stadium tour, which is how they ended up with Dylan. That’s not how things are typically done in 2025.

Or in 1987, either. [Laughs.]  It was awesome because it was unique. At times I was in two worlds. The Stones didn’t bring everyone in and ask, “Anybody have any ideas?” They very much had a class structure, English style, which was fine but that’s not how the Dead did things.

I felt like David Attenborough, the nature documentary guy—“Notice the leafcutter ants, how they do this.”  As I was writing the book, I kept trying to explain to readers what it was like to be in both worlds and to watch how they did things.

So when it came to that tour they invited everyone in, including me, and asked for ideas.

There are so many memorable stories in the book but one that sticks with me is your description of being in the hospital with Jerry, his brother Tiff and Mountain Girl, after Jerry has come out of his coma. MG hands him a guitar and you suggest that he doesn’t quite understand his relationship with the instrument. Then 12 weeks later you bring him out to see a Los Lobos show at a local club and he spontaneously sits in with the band.

Quite frankly, it’s not believable, and I have existed on the knife’s edge of not believable for my whole life since I started taking psychedelics at 17. But he came back and he also climbed higher. But if you had said to me after that day at the hospital, “Well, he’s going to be with us, but he’s probably not going to ever play again,” that would have seemed reasonable.

That entire moment from the time Mountain Girl came in, handed him the guitar, got it back and left was 40 seconds. When she gave it to him, I was worried at first. I thought, “Give him some time.” But she was like him. She moved forward without worrying or second thinking. She’s a formidable force. I can see why they ended up together.

As I recall, his hands did not go to the right place where you would to pick it up. So that’s why I would say I’m not sure he even knew what a guitar was.

He had been out of the coma for less than a day. At that point Tiff was saying, “Remember that time with pop when we went and did this?” Jerry was going, “I don’t know…”

It was sort of methodically trying to reconnect, but I think most people would immediately go into panic mode—”Oh my God, I can’t remember. This is my brother and I don’t remember any of this.”

But Jerry had no panic. That wasn’t part of him. So he was sort of the ideal person to bring back.

Then Merl [Saunders], the two of them were bosom buddies before they were stars. When I entered the room where Merl was working with him [to relearn guitar], I had to keep my distance because I wasn’t sure what my emotions would be. But Merl walked into that situation and didn’t succumb to the fear. His approach was, “Well, the situation is that there’s two of us. We have a piano and a guitar, and we’ll see what happens. This is a C chord right here…” [Laughs.]

You characterize 1989 and 90 as peak years of the band, which you attribute in part to the flourishing musical relationship between Jerry and Brent. Can you talk a bit about that from your perspective working on video at some of those shows?

The best interaction on the stage was Brent and Jerry. So I had cameras pointing at both of them cross-shooting, so that when you went back and forth, their eyes would be looking in the right direction. It’s called line of sight and when you’re filming you have to be aware of that, otherwise they’ll both be looking in the same direction and people won’t realize they’re looking at each other. When we’d capture that I’d get really excited in the truck. They might be doing it for 16 bars but I’d say, “Cameras, stay where you are.” Then I’d go back and forth, and when that went out on the big screens, the crowd went apeshit. It got so loud.

I define peak Dead as 87 to 90 but I key on 89 because I had more cameras on that shoot and we had 48-track audio that can be remixed in any way. What I want people to understand when they see something on YouTube is that they’re probably not seeing an edited, mixed show. They’re seeing a live mixdown that I made in real time. That’s all it is, so there’s infinite room for improvement. I want people to know that. This will get better over time as more people get their hands on the source material.

We were taught in school and all the way through the 90s that nothing can be better than the master tape. A copy of something cannot be better than the original. We were literally taught that it’s physics. Well now it’s not true anymore. Now we have computers that can import your preferences and fill in things that aren’t there. They may not be physically better, but they sure as shit look better. So what’s the difference?

I’ll give you can example. There’s this guy Christopher Hazard who did some work on my 1978 show of Springsteen at the Capitol Theatre in New Jersey. In those days it was analog video. A frame was a 30th of a second, and each frame was two fields. It scans down every other line and then it scans up every other line and that’s one frame. Two fields, one frame, and that comes out as a 30th of a second. It’s called interlacing and what Chris does is he de-interlaces. So now the 30th of a second is just one frame and it looks much better. He did that with my ‘78 Springsteen show and Rolling Stone declared that the video of “Prove It All Night” is the best live version of that song ever.

I was laughing when I saw it. That tape made my career about 40 years earlier. I knew that Springsteen was coming to the Capitol. I’d seen him at the Bottom Line in ‘75, and I said, “I’ve got to bust a move here.” So I sold the band on a four camera shoot that they paid for, and I took it to Al DeMarino who was the A&R man at Epic. I went to him when I was 26 and said, “Look what I can do.” I showed him Springsteen, then I said, “Coming to the Capitol you have Robert Palmer, Stanley Clarke, The Outlaws and opening for The Outlaws is Molly Hatchet. I can shoot it all for you in color.” I can’t remember what I told him it cost, somewhere around $10,000. [Laughs.] He goes, “Okay, let’s do it.” So now I was off to the races because I had enough for a whole demo. I knew it wasn’t my work that sold him on it. It was Springsteen because that live show was just irresistible.

When the Dead were touring through the Capitol in Passaic, I got to shoot them in black and white for the screens. Those cameras today would be 1/10th as good as your doorbell camera. That’s how crappy they were and yet people are still looking at it on YouTube. The lesson is that it’s the content, not the technology.

Bringing this back to Jerry, there’s a poignant moment in the book where he somewhat reluctantly admits to you that he’d invited a wayward fan into his house so that he could understand and alleviate the guy’s “weird awe” of him.

I’m going to choke up just thinking about it. I’ve worked with a lot of people and I’ve never seen anything like that. I tried to capture my response in the moment where I felt something in my heart like, “Holy shit, Len, believe it or not, you’re cynical.” I never thought that I was. But then I met Jerry, who was so open, so curious and so kind. He was the real thing.