Taking a break from the news, last night I attended the so-called Grateful Dead Meet-Up at the IMAX theater of the AMC multiplex in Edina last night. In honor of the 60th anniversary of the band, this year’s Meet-Up featured a showing of the Dead’s previously released Grateful Dead Movie. As in years past, the audience for the Meet-Up must have been the oldest and the happiest in the 16 AMC Edina theaters last night.
I actually saw the film on its initial release in 1977 at the old downtown Minneapolis Skyway Theatre. It closed in 1999. I am inclined to add, “but that was in another country,/And besides, the wench is dead.” I had won a complimentary ticket to the movie by calling in to one of the local rock stations. Woo hoo!
All I remember of the 1977 film is the long psychedelic cartoon with which it opens. Jerry Garcia spent a lot of the band’s money on it. Last night I found it to be a drag.
The film draws on the band’s five-night run in October 1974 run at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. Unlike the filmed concerts that have played at previous annual editions of the Meet-Up, the film chopped up the music with interviews inside and outside the Winterland. If you came for the music, the nonmusical interruptions were annoying.
Also unlike the filmed concerts shown at previous Meet-Ups since I started attending in 2017, too much of the camera’s attention focused on the audience. The Winterland shows were packed with whacked-out hippies. They too date the movie.
One enthusiastic reviewer described the audience more charitably: “The Deadheads who line up outside San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, smoking marijuana out of a beer can. There’s a guy freestyling poetry about Garcia’s guitar playing. 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.”
I saw what must have been this edition of the band live in July 1974 at Hartford’s Dillon Stadium. They performed one of their seemingly endless shows. I thought they were terrific.
The version of the band on display in the movie included the godawful Donna Godchaux on vocals and her husband Keith on piano. Donna looked good. Keith looked worse than bad. He looked terrible. In the film he looks like he might have been 60-something, but he was 26. The substances must have been exacting a toll. To borrow a phrase from John Lennon, “he blew his mind out in a car” at the age of 32. Donna survived him.
I thought one highlight of the film was the band’s rendition of “Eyes of the World.” You can also observe the band’s “pyrotechnician” — another annoyance — doing his thing during the song.
The Dead took a break from touring after the Winterland shows. They had been recording and touring nonstop for nearly 10 years at that point. They must have been exhausted. The film nevertheless displays the core of the group — Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh — in what seems to me something like a mind meld. The bonus footage last night began with “China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider.” You can see and hear the interplay among Garcia, Weir, and Lesh on display here. I think Lesh was an incredibly inventive bass player. He died this past October at the age of 84.
Garcia’s first musical love was traditional American folk and bluegrass music. You can hear it coming through on Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty. My appreciation of the Dead led me back in that direction. For that I am especially grateful.
