Filming the Grateful Dead’s MTV-era music video for “Hell in a Bucket” was one long, strange trip.
Len Dell’Amico, the band’s “film and video guy,” has written a new memoir, “Friend of the Devil: My Wild Ride with Jerry Garcia and Grateful Dead.” He detailed what it was like witnessing “love, happy chaos and pot – lots of pot” from 1980 until frontman Garcia died in 1995.
The filmmaker directed the 1987 music video. He claimed to Fox News Digital that the duck featured in the video wearing a leather collar had gotten drunk on champagne during filming.
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“I think [founding member] Bob Weir was responsible,” Dell’Amico chuckled. “He had just come out of vacation. . . . He knew we were making a video. He knew how important it was. I remember Mountain Girl, Garcia’s wife [at the time], saw him and said, ‘Bobby, he’s a god now.’ He was so good-looking, in such great shape and playing great.”
“We all knew that we were shooting in a bar,” Dell’Amico shared. “When you do a shoot in a bar, you hire somebody who comes in and puts in fake bottles. You don’t want free alcohol on a set. And I had spread the word – no booze. We were going to have fake champagne. It never came up.”
“But then I saw in real time that the duck was drinking,” he noted. “I said, ‘Oh, that is fantastic! It looks like we had a trained duck.’ And then I saw how he progressively became out of it. I just thought he got tired, but it looked like he got plastered. And that’s funny.”
According to Dell’Amico’s book, it was Weir who came up with the idea of having the duck in the video, to everyone’s delight. He also requested a tiger. A nine-foot-long, 400-lb. Bengal tiger was brought in.
Dell’Amico described that during filming, the duck had become curious about what was in Weir’s glass. He said it kept going back and forth for sips. Eventually, it put its entire bill in and had “a nice pull on it.” At one point, the duck was “slumped over, out of it.” For Dell’Amico it was “incredibly good fortune” to get a believable performance.
But then the next day, he got an “irate” phone call from the duck’s trainer.
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“He was very upset,” Dell’Amico recalled to Fox News Digital. “He kept saying, ‘He got drunk!’ He was very emotional. He wasn’t mad at me. He was emotional because trainers love their animals. I just kept saying, ‘No, that can’t be.’”
“I made some phone calls,” said Dell’Amico. “I found out that Weir had given somebody 50 bucks to get him real champagne. I remember I had a bottle of champagne in my hand on set. I thought it was a prop! So, I had to apologize to the trainer profusely. How could I make this right? The trainer explained that the animal was trained on white grapes. That’s why it went crazy for champagne.”
“Well, the duck recovered,” said Dell’Amico. “And the trainer said he was going to train her on other things for a while. So, it had a happy ending.”
According to Dell’Amico’s book, the duck became repelled by white grapes.
“We discover that the duck-in-the-car subplot, where Bob and [a] dominatrix drive around while the duck samples Bob’s glass, ending in the duck slumped over passed out, is subtle, but works spectacularly, hilariously, once you notice it,” he wrote.
Fox News Digital reached out to a spokesperson for Weir, 77, for comment.
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Dell’Amico admitted that he had a less stressful time befriending Garcia. He described him as soft-spoken and comical. His surprisingly modest home was “like a college dorm room” with a handful of flannel shirts and pants in his closet and overflowing ashtrays nearby. Garcia would often remark, “I’d rather do things than have things.”
“I was surprised by the depth of his humility and insistence on being treated like a regular person,” said Dell’Amico.
“You might think that’s easy, but it’s not when you’re that famous. This is someone who couldn’t hide. Mick Jagger could wear his hat with the brim down and move around the public without being recognized too much. But he was a performer. In a way, he was still performing even on the sidewalk. But poor Garcia, that face, unless he shaved his head and wore a toupee . . . he wasn’t going to do that.”
“We would go out to dinner and the manager at the restaurant would come over and say, ‘The meal’s on us,’” he shared. “Garcia would always say, ‘No, thanks. We can pay for this. We have money. Why don’t you give a free meal to people who don’t have money?’ The manager would be taken aback by this, but Garcia was serious. . . . He wasn’t the type who wanted to talk about how great he was. He would get fed up with that. He wanted to talk about spirituality, religion, philosophy – he wasn’t interested in celebrity.”
Dell’Amico pointed out that “nobody could be on bad terms with Garcia.”
“You couldn’t help but love the guy despite his flaws,” he explained. “And he had a lot of flaws. He was a traveling musician trying to maintain a family. That’s not easy.”
“I remember I came across the phrase ‘charm machine,'” Dell’Amico reflected. “That was Garcia. To meet him was to know him. And to know him was to love him. . . . He was the most well-read, intelligent and empathic person I’ve ever met. Many celebrities are self-involved and narcissistic. That was never Garcia.”
Dell’Amico said he last spoke to Garcia a few weeks before his death. They reminisced about the past, and the good times. Looking back, Dell’Amico wondered whether Garcia knew he wouldn’t be around for much longer.
“He knew he had heart disease,” Dell’Amico explained. “I don’t know for how long, because he never talked about it. Why? Because he didn’t complain about anything, ever. His philosophy was, ‘Complainers are jerks. Be glad about what you have now, whatever it is, how little or big it is. Because you’re here.’
“This is someone who used to live in a car. He had hit the jackpot in his life. It was the fame and attention that brought potential unhappiness. He just wanted to be himself. . . . His philosophy was that animals aren’t afraid of dying, so why should we? What good is fear, ever? And he was the most fearless person I’ve ever known.”
“I remember us sitting there, reminiscing for an hour and a half about his early days,” Dell’Amico said quietly. “It was hysterical. We laughed until we cried. But later I thought, ‘Why was he talking about his early life on that particular day?’ I was in denial. He was getting stuff out that he wanted us to know about. He wanted to laugh with his good friends, because I don’t think he thought he had much time left.”
Garcia died in his sleep at a residential drug treatment center in California, The New York Times reported. He was 53. A spokesperson for the band said the cause was a heart attack. According to the outlet, Garcia had tried to stop smoking and to lose weight.
Dell’Amico stressed that despite Garcia’s brief life, the artist wasn’t a tragic figure.
“Calling him broken would be crazy,” he said. “He did more than most people do in 53 years. Yes, he faced constant pressure. He had to make tough choices. He had substance problems, definitely. But I can tell you from all my time in show business, that was not uncommon. And yet, he handled it well, in my view. . . . A lot of people concluded that he died of an overdose, which is not true at all. He died from heart disease.”
“We shared a common belief that there’s life after life – nature is something that goes on forever,” he reflected. “Humans are the only creatures who worry about dying . . . he wasn’t. Even in those final days, he was the same old happy self that he always was. And I think that’s how we should remember him.”