Bill Walton and the Grateful Dead team up for a psychedelic sports adventure

“I am the fortunate one who gets to set the stage and tone for Fire On The Mountain, an incredible 30-minute adventure though our emotional identity that is officially fueled by the Grateful Dead’s live catalogue. These young visionaries and champion athletes epitomize the melding of competitive greatness with purposeful creative genius.”

That’s Bill Walton talking about Chris Benchetler’s new film, Fire on the Mountain, which sets the extreme adventures of a skiing and surfing collective to the music of the Grateful Dead. Shot in the unforgiving environment of the North Pole and the blissed out blue water off the coast of Indonesia, it’s a gorgeous piece of work that strives to provide nothing less than a visual manifestation of the Dead’s musical transcendence.

Walton’s narration provides the voice to the film, lending an old-world authenticity to the new generation of seekers hooked on the Dead’s mystical aesthetic.

I wanted to ask Walton about the elusive X-factor in the Dead’s music that inspired a crew of outdoor enthusiasts who weren’t even alive when the band was at its creative peak to reach for those same metaphysical heights. Alas, he gave those quotes to Benchetler in anticipation of people like me who wanted to talk to him about the Dead.

I get it. Being America’s resident Deadhead is a full-time job. Besides, talking about the Dead is a tricky business. You can’t talk to non-Deadheads about the Dead because they think the whole thing is ridiculous. You don’t really want to talk to a Deadhead about the Dead unless you want to get into pedantic arguments about dead keyboardists. (I’m a Keith and Donna guy, for the record.)

At their righteous core, however, Deadheads are people who consciously engage in the practice of living in the present moment, with the band serving as the soundtrack. That’s what Fire on the Mountain is about.

What’s interesting about the Dead, and this film, is Walton and Benchetler understood this connection intuitively even though they had never met, don’t share the same interests, and are separated by generational divides. They were united only by the spirit of a band that has ceased to be an active concern for more than two decades.

“He thought we were the craziest people ever,” Benchetler says. “At the same time, he’s the most passionate, kind human I’ve ever met. He was so professional and so invested in the project even though he wasn’t charging me for his time.”

Walton is 67 years old. He literally grew up with the Dead, seeing them in concert when they were psychedelic warriors on the jingle bell rainbow. He traveled with them to Egypt to play before the pyramids and looked into a volcano that legend has it was caused by a particularly rapturous “Scarlet/Fire”.

When he played basketball, he did so with the Dead’s improvisational flair. You can see it for yourself in old clips, from the whirling outlet passes to the funky jump shot. At his peak, he was not only the best at what he did, he was the only one who played that way.

Benchetler is 33, too young to have seen the band when Jerry Garcia was alive, but old enough to absorb them into his psyche when a family friend took him to a Dead and Company show.

“That was when it fully clicked for me and I totally got it,” Benchetler says. “Even though it wasn’t the full iteration of the band, once you see them live it makes so much more sense. I fell hard after that first show. That was the point of the movie, that present moment. That’s how they play a show. It’s 100 percent off feel, which is exactly how we approach mountains and waves.”

If you are into skiing, you will like this film. My wife is not a Deadhead in any way, shape or form, which is probably for the best. Our kid already knows all the words to “Eyes of the World”, much to her chagrin. She is a snowboarder, however, and after watching the film she was so stoked she made plans for a late winter trip to Tahoe with her friends.

If you are into the Dead, you will really dig this film. The music selections, chosen by the Dead’s excellent archivist David Lemieux are perfect. Drawing heavily from Europe 72, which happens to be my favorite period, Lemieux picked “The Other One” from Bickershaw, the “Playin’” from the Strand Lyceum, and the gorgeous “Dark Star” from Wembley that is as close to a religious experience as music has ever taken me.

The key sequence, however, is drawn from a different period in the band’s life. It involves Benchetler and his crew cruising down Mammoth Mountain in California at night under a psychedelic light show wearing LED skeleton suits. (Bonus points to Benchetler for not making them look like dancing bears.)

It’s an incredible scene, set appropriately enough to the “Fire on the Mountain” from Cornell 77, arguably the sweetest and most productive period the Dead ever had. The sound the band makes in those days is that of a collection of friends playing music for their friends’ enjoyment, which is what Benchetler and his crew are doing in the snow.

Benchetler shot that sequence before all the musical rights were cleared because the setup was perfect and the moment was right. He did it on faith, and the power of manifestation, as he put it. A quintessential Deadhead moment if ever there was one.

Deadheads will also appreciate the subtle touches Benchetler sprinkles throughout the film from the animation that harkens back to Gary Gutierrez’s work in the Grateful Dead Movie to the campfire sing-along. Ultimately, Fire on the Mountain is a movie about friends living life on their own terms traveling the country in a hand-painted bus, which is about as Deadhead as you can get.

Walton’s narration is simply the cherry on top. Mixing band metaphors with lyrical references in his typically exuberant manner, he carries the story from beginning to end voiced in the Dead’s own peculiar lexicon. That can get admittedly confusing if you weren’t already familiar with rainbow spirals that tremble and explode.

Wife: “Where’s Fennario?”

Me: Pausing to think if it’s worth explaining the circumstances that led Robert Hunter to live with Jerry and Mountain Girl in Larkspur … “It’s wherever you want it to be.”

Wife: Long sigh and exaggerated eye roll.

Walton voiceover: “Or maybe, it’s Nevereverland.”

You can watch Fire on the Mountain in its entirety online.