It’s a bit of a free-for-all, and that’s before we head to the concession stand selling hot dogs for a mere 60 cents. There are dancers who somehow make their way to the stage (including some children?) plus a guy shooting fireballs from time to time. The swarms of shimmying, stinking hippies is just good cinema. They were in the peak of what I like to call their dirtbag psychedelia mode, when songs such as Truckin’ and loose affiliation with biker gangs lent them a nasty edge of outlaw Americana.Īnd even if you hate the music you can’t help but love this documentary footage. They had just finished recording From the Mars Hotel but had yet to explore the prog/funk of Blues for Allah. As luck would have it, The Grateful Dead movie captures the band during a particular zenith. There was the early acid-test years in Haight-Ashbury, the 77-78 “disco Dead” period (which I adore) and a spell of glassy, synthesiser-enhanced trips in the early 1990s. The Grateful Dead was a band of many eras. There are the women in flowing dresses swirling around to the beat, the shirtless dudes who sing along to each word and there are the many, many fans captured in ecstatic amber, some of them just being, man. There’s a guy freestyling poetry about Garcia’s guitar playing. There are the Deadheads who line up outside San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, smoking marijuana out of a beer can. As with Woodstock, the best moments are the snapshots of the fans. But as any freak’ll tell ya, much of the appeal of the Grateful Dead was the travelling circus. Shot in October 1974 and released in June 1977, most of The Grateful Dead movie’s running time is devoted to the music – a giddy Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad, a spaced-out Playing in the Band and a high-volume Casey Jones being some of the highlights. The film and commentary are included on a BD-50 disc and all of the additional special features are included on a DVD, which both come packaged together in a standard case inside a cardboard slipcase. But it came after Woodstock, and it’s to that film this documentary owes a lot. Shout Factory presents The Grateful Dead Movie in a two disc set. (Try to listen to Sugar Magnolia without shaking your hips a little bit – it’s very hard to do.)īefore The Last Waltz and Stop Making Sense came The Grateful Dead movie. I know I must have looked ridiculous, but I cheered, laughed, sang along and, yes, did what could generously be called interpretative dance right there in my living room. I’ve watched all 132 minutes of it twice this week, and to call it a balm is an understatement. I may still have a VHS dub of it somewhere, but an HD version lives on Amazon Prime in the US. Photograph: Paul Natkin/Getty ImagesĪt some point between getting lost in the candy-coloured haze of their 1968 Columbia University free concert, the furious rhythms of Fire on the Mountain from the 1978 gig at the Giza pyramids and Jerry Garcia’s absolutely gorgeous singing and guitar playing from the Philadelphia 89 Standing on the Moon, I was reminded of an old friend from my pre-internet younger days, The Grateful Dead movie. The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia performing in 1977. View image in fullscreen Crystalline solos.
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