Back in 1993 during the summer between his sophomore and junior years of college, Northwestern film student Peter Shapiro decided to spend a month on tour with the Grateful Dead. But rather than just take in the shows, Shapiro had another goal in mind as well. He traveled with cameraman Philip Bruell and the pair documented the ever-swelling Dead tour scene. Shapiro later supplemented this footage through a variety of interviews with such notables as Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, Al Franken, John Barlow, Rock Scully and Wavy Gravy to create the hour-long documentary And Miles To Go Before I Sleep: On Tour with the Grateful Dead Summer 1993. This, in turn, led to his involvement with the Tie-Died documentary, which screened at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival. Shapiro returned to Sundance in 1997 to premiere “American Road,” a travelogue which he cut to the music of Phish’s “You Enjoy Myself.”
During this time period he also succeeded Larry Bloch as the owner of Wetlands Preserve, even as he maintained an interest in film, eventually producing such movies as All Access and U2 3D. In 2009 he opened Brooklyn Bowl and that year he also became the publisher of Relix.
The following interview focuses on And Miles To Go which can now be seen in its entirety on a special Screening Room page of Relix.com.
The origins of And Miles To Go
I went to a Rosemont Horizon, March ’93 show and when I was leaving, I ended up in the parking lot for an extended period of time. It was my second Dead show and I ran into some Deadhead kids in the lot. It was snowing and I was like, “Wow these kids are 20 years old, like me.” They were going back to school and it looked like they were having a good time and there was a real, legitimate, sense of community going on. It was a scene I had never seen before or even anything close to it before.
So the next morning I was standing outside the Northwestern University library, waiting for the doors to open. It was the only time in my 4 years there that that ever happened (laughs) and I went in and started doing some research on Deadhead Culture. Back then I wasn’t Googling it, I was using the card catalog, microfiche. Then I found Rebecca Adams, a sociology professor in North Carolina who had written about Deadheads and I found some other things—there was a Deadhead book of photos, for instance. I was just trying to figure out what was going on and I don’t think there had been a good examination of the contemporary, early 90s Deadheads. The scene was pretty big then but different than the 70s or 80s because it was, broadening out into 20 year-old kids from upper middle class, suburban, urban environments, on the road, traveling with the band.
Video technology was at a good point and I had a friend, Philip Bruell, with access to a high quality camera. He had never seen a Dead show, he didn’t know anything about it, but that summer we spent four weeks in a van traveling and trying to capture this scene on Hi8 video, thinking that we’ll make a documentary [Bruell would go on to co-found Northern Lights Post before he died of kidney disease in 2002 at age 29]. We were both video students and I just convinced myself that this was the right thing to do and I put my mind to it and we did it.
I never contemplated making an hour-long film of any sort prior to this but it all just struck me…So I ended up being a college student who produced a 60-minute documentary. That was unheard of and partly it was because Phil had an early video editing system in his dorm room. So we edited this and we did it linear. Now everyone does it digital but we edited it linear and it was one of the last things I ever did linear.
The White Van
So we left Chicago and set off on summer tour in June 93. I rented a white van, an all white van (laughs). It had no windows and we looked like we were part of the DEA. We’d park far away and then walk in. We learned that lesson pretty quick. Can you imagine driving in with all those cars and we’re in this white van? But then we’d just park it, hop out and interview people. It evolved from there.
Filming a gate crash
That was in Buffalo. It was a major riot and all over the news. We shot it over time and we saw it develop. At first it seemed random. We were standing there around 1 pm, 2 pm, when that guy first told the security guards, “I’m going, I’m going!” The guards were like, “Yeah, right…” The actual gate crashing was at like 7:30. We were there and that was the dude who started the riot.
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