April 15, 1978 review: The Grateful Dead movie

 


Pot, popcorn and the Grateful Dead 

April 15, 1978 review

Sound Problems Fatal to ‘Dead’ Film 

          “I can’t believe this is happening,” the kid in the back near the projection booth is saying. “I can come back, but I’m not gonna be able to come back the way I am now.” He grins wildly.

          The house lights have come up about an hour into “The Grateful Dead Movie” in the Century Theater Friday night. Instead of refunds, there are passes good for any of the other showings of the rock concert film tonight and tomorrow.

          “What if we drove 40 miles to get here tonight?” a disappointed young woman with blond hair asks theater manager Phil Rosen in the lobby.

          Rosen demurs.

          “There’s no way I can issue you a refund right now,” he says. “If you can’t make it back, send the green refund stub to my attention and I’ll see what I can do.”

          The problem, Rosen says when the furor subsides, has to do with the multi-channel sound. It could be the Century’s quadraphonic system. It could be the film. Or it could be that the film’s magnetic line doesn’t match up with the theater’s magnetic line. The technicians will have to sort it out.

          Before it sputtered out entirely, the soundtrack was highly eccentric. The musical sections were virtually inaudible. The spoken parts were so loud they distorted.

          Friday night’s first-show crowd of about 500 saw roughly half the film – to nearly the end of the first of two sequences taken live in San Francisco’s Winterland in October 1974, just before the Grateful Dead took a couple years off from being the patron saints of psychedelia.

          That much of the movie is a fan’s delight. The screen brings guitarist Jerry Garcia closer than he’ll ever get in real life. Keith Godchaux’s brow is caught furrowing at a sour note. And since it’s film, there’s no protracted tuning between songs.

          When the camera isn’t examining the band, it zooms in on the crowd. Deadheads are always entertaining and this Bay Area crowd includes painted faces, dancing dervishes and one proud pyromaniac whooshing flames in time to the music.

          Between the concert shots are pre-concert scenes – roadies wrestling with the Dead’s mammoth 1974 sound system, an uncommonly chummy Bill Graham, the line at the ticket window, guitarist Bob Weir playing with feedback in the sound check.

          To start it all off, there’s an award-winning animated sequence which uses the Dead’s skull and roses trademarks in kind of an intergalactic pinball game. It’s great fun. As one fan in the film notes soberly, there’s nothing in the world like a Grateful Dead concert. Even half a one.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Poster for the film. 

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: The movie’s Wikipedia page notes that it took three years for this movie to come out after it was filmed and by then the Dead had moved on significantly – personnel had changed, the massive sound system had been trimmed and the band had released two albums of new material. Fans would have to wait until 2004 for a high-quality version of the film to appear on a two-disc DVD. The Blu-ray edition that appeared in 2011 is longer and has better audio.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

July 6, 1974 Review: The first Summerfest concert at Rich Stadium -- Eric Clapton and The Band

Image
  This was the summer that rock ‘n roll came to the brand new Buffalo Bills stadium in Orchard Park . There was a lot of official nervousness about this kickoff event.   July 6, 1974   Hassle-Free Clapton Concert Scores a Pleasant Success             Rich Stadium got its baptism in rock ‘n roll Saturday evening and it all went off so well that the home of the Buffalo Bills football team should be bouncing to the big beat for many summer nights to come.           It was a star-studded event – stars above and stars on the stage. The Band, honed to near perfection as a live act, cranked out a happy, raucous set. And guitar idol Eric Clapton, who announced that he was drunk (indeed, he was very drunk), took a laid-back set that left many of his worshippers perplexed.           But the real heroes of this show – the first of four in the Summerfest ’74 series at the stadium – were promoter Jerry Nathan and his Festival East organization. * * * THEY TURNED the near-impossib
Read more

Feb. 2, 1974: The Blue Ox Band

Image
  One of the major local rock bands of the day and predecessor to some equally wonderful aggregations down the line.   Feb. 2, 1974 Blue Ox Wants Aggressive, Bitey Sound   AS BLUE OX themselves will tell you, a lot depends on the crowd.                    One night they’ll be sitting there in the Bona Vista on Hertel Avenue like good old boys and girls on the bayou, bobbing in their private dreams to the Grateful Dead’s “Truckin.’”           A few nights later, at an even more tender hour, the tiny dance floor is full of folks boogieing their heads off to the very same tune. * * * “IF YOU LISTEN for a whole night,” guitarist-organist Charlie O’Neill says, “we go through all kinds of styles. But sometimes the slower stuff is rough when you’ve got a bunch that wants to bounce around.”           Variety, for Blue Ox, has been a matter of trading and balancing between a club crowd’s boogie urge and the band’s own preference for subtler, more complex tunes, including a fe
Read more

August 9, 1976 review: Elton John at Rich Stadium, with Boz Scaggs and John Miles

Image
  Now that all the organizational issues for Rich Stadium concerts were ironed out, Mother Nature decided to throw a curve. August 9, 1976 Elton John Pours It On For Rain-Soaked Fans Elton John was amazed. “I thank you for standing out in the rain and sitting out in the rain,” he remarked as he strode out in a Stars & Stripes Uncle Sam outfit in Rich Stadium Saturday afternoon for the first of three encores. “You deserve a medal of honor.” Instead of medals, the drizzle-soaked, wind-chilled crowd of 52,560 got a whale of a concert from the supermost superstar of the ‘70s. In fact, such was the energy of that first encore – everybody shouting along to the chorus of “Saturday Night’s All Right for Fighting” – that the rain faltered and it seemed like the sun would awaken for a guest appearance. But it didn’t. It was miraculous enough that Superfest 10 beat the deluge. The promoters rushed to fit it all in, forestalling an epidemic of rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie-w
Read more